Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History 3 volumes : An Encyclopedia

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History An Encyclopedia Volume 1

Steven L. Danver, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Revolts, protests, demonstrations, and rebellions in American history : an encyclopedia / Steven L. Danver, editor. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59884-221-0 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-59884-222-7 (ebook) 1. Protest movements—United States—History. 2. Revolutions—United States—History. 3. Protest movements—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Revolutions—United States— Encyclopedias. I. Danver, Steven Laurence. HN57.R48 2011 303.48’40973—dc22 2010038363 ISBN: 978-1-59884-221-0 EISBN: 978-1-59884-222-7 15 14 13 12 11

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

xix xxi

VOLUME 1 BACON’S REBELLION (1675–1676) Bacon, Nathaniel (1647–1676)

1 9

Berkeley, Sir William (1605–1677)

11

House of Burgesses

13

Indentured Servants

15

Susquehannock Indians

17

Tobacco

19

Nathaniel Bacon’s Manifesto (1676)

21

Nathaniel Bacon’s “Declaration of the People of Virginia” (1676)

24

PUEBLO REVOLT (1680)

27

Franciscans (1209–Present)

37

On˜ate, Juan de (c. 1552–1626)

39

Otermin, Antonio de (dates unknown)

41

Pope´ (dates unknown)

43

Pueblo Religions

45

Santa Fe´

47

Declaration of Pedro Naranjo, December 19, 1681 LEISLER’S REBELLION (1689–1691) Calvinism Dominion of New England (1686–1689) Leisler, Jacob (c. 1640–1691) Religious Conflict in 17th-Century New York Jacob Leisler’s Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety at Boston, June 4, 1689 Jacob Leisler: “A Modest and Impartial Narrative” (1690)

v

49 53 57 58 60 61 62 63

vi

Contents

STONO REBELLION (1739)

69

Slave Codes

73

South Carolina

75

Description of the Rebellion by Georgia Governor James Oglethorpe (1739) NEW YORK SLAVE INSURRECTION (1741)

76 79

Fires

83

Manhattan Island

84

Investigation into a New York Slave Conspiracy (1741) PHILADELPHIA ELECTION RIOT (1742)

85 91

Anglicanism

95

Quakers

96

PIMA REVOLT (1751)

99

Jesuits

103

Oacpicagigua, Luis (d. 1755)

104

Parrilla, Diego Ortiz (c. 1715–c. 1775)

105

Tohono O’odham

106

PONTIAC’S REBELLION (1763)

109

Amherst, Jeffrey (1717–1797)

117

French and Indian War (1754–1763)

118

Neolin (dates unknown)

119

Ohio River Valley

121

Pontiac (d. 1769)

122

Smallpox

124

STAMP ACT PROTESTS (1765)

127

Adams, Samuel (1722–1803)

139

Declaratory Act (1766)

140

Salutary Neglect

142

Stamp Act Congress (1765)

144

Taxation without Representation

145

Stamp Act Resolutions of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1765)

147

An Account of the Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston (1765)

148

Contents

BOSTON MASSACRE (1770)

151

Adams, John (1735–1826)

157

Attucks, Crispus (c. 1723–1770)

158

Broadsides

159

Preston, Thomas (1722–1798)

161

Revere, Paul (1734–1818)

162

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

164

Richard Palmes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

166

REGULATOR MOVEMENT (1771)

169

Battle of Alamance (1771)

177

Dobbs, Arthur (1689–1765)

178

Husband, Herman (1724–1795)

179

Tryon, William (1729–1788)

181

PINE TREE RIOT (1772)

183

Royal Authority

187

Shipbuilding

188

BOSTON TEA PARTY (1773)

191

Coercive Acts (1774)

199

First Continental Congress (1774)

200

Sons of Liberty

202

Townshend Acts (1767)

203

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Tea Party (1773)

204

SHAYS’ REBELLION (1787)

207

Bowdoin, James (1726–1790)

217

Massachusetts General Court

218

Shays, Daniel (1747–1825)

220

Taxes

222

An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion (1786)

223

A Letter to the Hampshire Herald Listing the Grievances of the Rebels (1786)

224

WHISKEY REBELLION (1794) Federal Supremacy

227 237

vii

viii

Contents

Hamilton, Alexander (1755–1804)

239

Martial Law

241

Tom the Tinker

243

President George Washington’s Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

245

President George Washington’s Second Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

248

ANTEBELLUM SUPPRESSED SLAVE REVOLTS (1800s–1850s)

251

Boxley, George (c. 1779–1865)

261

Deslondes, Charles (d. 1811)

262

Gabriel (d. 1800)

263

Vesey, Denmark (c. 1767–1822)

265

Description of Denmark Vesey (1822)

266

NAT TURNER’S REBELLION (1831)

269

Abolitionists

279

Confessions of Nat Turner

280

Moses Story

282

Slave Preachers

283

Turner, Nat (1800–1831)

285

A Contemporary Account of Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831) TEXAS REVOLT (1835–1836)

286 289

Battle of the Alamo (1836)

303

Austin, Stephen F. (1793–1836)

305

Houston, Samuel (1793–1863)

307

Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de (1794–1876)

308

DORR REBELLION (1841–1842)

311

Charterites

315

Dorr, Thomas Wilson (1805–1854)

316

Universal White Male Suffrage

318

Luther v. Borden: The Judicial Aftermath of Rhode Island’s Dorr Rebellion (1849)

319

Contents

PHILADELPHIA NATIVIST RIOTS (1844)

ix

325

Catholicism

329

German Americans

330

Index

I-1

VOLUME 2 BEAR FLAG REVOLT (1846)

333

Bear Flaggers

339

Fre´mont, John Charles (1813–1890)

341

Sonoma

343

William B. Ide’s Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic (1846) BLEEDING KANSAS (1854–1858)

345 347

Guerilla Warfare in Kansas and Missouri

353

Jayhawkers

354

Missouri Compromise (1820–1821)

356

Popular Sovereignty

358

Pottawatomie Massacre (1856)

359

Topeka Constitution (1855)

361

PORTLAND RUM RIOT (1855)

365

Immigrants

369

Temperance

370

KNOW-NOTHING RIOTS (1855–1856)

373

Bloody Monday (1855)

377

Nativism

378

Plug Uglies

379

Rip Raps

380

Vigilance Committees

381

UTAH WAR (1857–1858)

383

Buchanan, James (1791–1868)

389

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

390

Nauvoo Legion

391

Polygamy

392

x

Contents

State of Deseret

394

Young, Brigham (1801–1877)

395

Major J. H. Carleton’s Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1859) HARPERS FERRY RAID (1859)

396 415

Brown, John (1800–1859)

423

Causes of the Civil War

425

Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870)

427

“Secret Six”

429

John Brown’s Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution (1859)

430

Southern Editorial Responses to John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1859)

432

NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS (1863)

435

Civil War (1861–1865)

441

Conscription

442

Copperheads

443

Racism

444

Excerpts from a New York Times Account of the New York City Draft Riots (1863)

446

A Rioter’s Letter to the New York Times and the Newspaper’s Response (1863)

447

NEW ORLEANS RIOT (1866)

449

Carpetbaggers

453

Reconstruction (1863–1877)

454

Voting Rights

456

MOLLY MAGUIRES (1870S)

459

Irish Americans

463

Pennsylvania

464

Unionism

465

Excerpts from an Article Describing James McPartland’s Infiltration of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s (1894)

467

Contents

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT (1870S)

473

American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)

483

Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906)

484

Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887)

486

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

487

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

489

Congressional Debate on Women’s Suffrage (1866)

491

Sojourner Truth Urges Women to Continue the Fight for Equal Rights for All Women, White and Black (1867)

493

Address of Victoria C. Woodhull to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives (1871)

494

The Comstock Law, Enacted to End the Circulation of Obscene and Immoral Literature (1873)

496

U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony: The Sentencing of Anthony for Voting Illegally (1873)

497

Bradwell v. Illinois: The Rights and Privileges of a Citizen (1873)

499

Excerpts from Susan B. Anthony’s “Social Purity” Speech (1875)

501

Declaration of Rights for Women (1876)

504

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1881)

508

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self” Address (1892)

510

Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (1895)

512

Muller v. Oregon: The Weakness of Women (1908)

515

Excerpts from History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910)

516

Excerpts from Emma Goldman’s The Traffic in Women and Marriage and Love (1910)

522

Excerpts from Anna Garlin Spencer’s Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1912)

529

Margaret Sanger on Sex Education and Contraception (1913)

533

COLFAX MASSACRE (1873)

537

Freedmen

541

Klanism

542

xi

xii

Contents

BROOKS-BAXTER WAR (1874)

545

Baxter, Elisha (1827–1899)

549

Brooks, Joseph (1821–1877)

550

Republican Party

551

FLIGHT OF THE NEZ PERCE´ (1877)

553

Indian Reservations

557

Joseph, Chief (1840–1904)

558

Relocation

560

Surrender Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´, October 5, 1877 GREAT RAILROAD STRIKES (1877)

561 563

Pittsburgh

569

Railroad Workers

570

Robber Barons

571

Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS)

572

HAYMARKET RIOT (1886)

575

Anarchism

585

Bombings

586

Eight-Hour Workday

587

May Day

589

McCormick Harvesting Machine Company

590

The Circular of Anarchist August Spies (1886)

591

Excerpts from the Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887)

592

SEATTLE RIOT (1886)

593

Chinese Immigrants

597

Knights of Labor

598

WOUNDED KNEE I (1890)

601

Dakota Uprising (1862)

611

Sioux

613

Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890)

614

Excerpts from Philip Wells’s Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)

616

Contents

HOMESTEAD STRIKE (1892–1893)

619

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA)

629

Carnegie Steel

630

Lockouts

631

Pinkerton National Detective Agency

632

Yellow-Dog Contracts

633

Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards (1892)

634

Account of the Course of the Strike (1892)

637

Two Examples of Yellow-Dog Contracts (1904 and 1917)

640

PULLMAN STRIKE (1894)

643

American Railway Union (ARU)

651

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926)

652

Pullman Palace Car Company

654

Wage Cuts

656

Two Excerpts from U.S. Strike Commission Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894

657

LATTIMER MASSACRE (1897)

661

Eastern European Immigrants

665

Miners

666

Strikers’ Resolutions and Editorials Appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger Following the Deaths of Striking Coal Miners at the Lattimer Mine, Hazleton, Pennsylvania (1897) NEW ORLEANS RACE RIOT (1900)

668 671

Charles, Robert (c.1866–1900)

675

Jim Crow Laws

676

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

678

ATLANTA RACE RIOT (1906)

681

Economic Competition

685

White Supremacy

686

SPRINGFIELD RACE RIOT (1908)

689

Jewish Americans

693

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

694

xiii

xiv

Contents

BLACK PATCH WAR (1909)

697

American Tobacco Company (ATC)

701

Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA)

702

Statement of Charles H. Fort, President of the Tobacco Growers’ Association of the United States, February 4, 1904 LUDLOW MASSACRE (1914)

703 707

Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I)

713

Industrial Violence

714

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)

716

Excerpt from Godfrey Irwin’s Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado (1914)

718

Walter Fink’s Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp (1914)

719

Index

I-1

VOLUME 3 PLAN DE SAN DIEGO (1915–1916)

727

Mexico

733

Tejanos

735

Texas Rangers

736

GREEN CORN REBELLION (1917)

739

Conscription Act (World War I, 1917)

743

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

744

Socialism

746

HOUSTON RIOT (1917)

749

Black Soldiers

753

Discrimination

754

BOSTON POLICE STRIKE (1919)

757

Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933)

761

Unionization

762

RED SUMMER (1919)

765

Great Migration

773

Lynching

775

Race Riots

777

Contents

Excerpt from the Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riots (1920)

778

Excerpts from the “Anti-Lynching” Hearings Held before the House Judiciary Committee (1920)

782

Excerpts of Testimony from Laney v. United States Describing Events during the Washington, D.C., Riot of July 1919 (1923)

789

BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN (1921)

793

Coal Mining

797

Hatfield, Sid (1893–1921)

798

Matewan Massacre (1920)

799

TULSA RACE RIOT (1921)

801

Ku Klux Klan

805

Segregation

806

Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot (1921)

808

Excerpts from the Preliminary and Final Reports of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2000 and 2001)

809

BONUS ARMY (1932)

829

Battle of Anacostia Flats (1932)

835

Great Depression (1930s)

836

Hooverville

837

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964)

840

Veterans’ Rights

841

Waters, Walter W. (1898–1959)

843

Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia: Excerpts of President Herbert Hoover’s Letter to the District Commissioner and from His Press Conference (1932) TOLEDO AUTO-LITE STRIKE (1934)

844 847

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

851

Battle of Toledo (1934)

852

National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)

854

WEST COAST LONGSHOREMEN’S STRIKE (1934)

857

Bloody Thursday (1934)

861

Bridges, Harry (1901–1990)

862

xv

xvi

Contents

Communism

864

International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)

865

San Francisco

866

ZOOT SUIT RIOTS (1942)

869

Mexican Americans

877

Police Brutality

878

Servicemen

880

BATTLE OF ATHENS (1946)

883

Mansfield, Pat (dates unknown)

887

Political Corruption

888

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (1953–1968)

891

Carmichael, Stokely/Kwame Ture (1941–1998)

903

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1929–1968)

904

Malcolm X (1925–1965)

907

March on Washington (1963)

908

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

910

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

912

President John F. Kennedy’s Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi (1962)

913

Excerpts from the Civil Rights Act of 1964

915

ANTIWAR MOVEMENT (1960S–1970S)

925

Counterculture

937

Kent State (1970)

938

The Moratorium (1969)

941

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

943

Speech Delivered by Paul Potter, President of Students for a Democratic Society, at the Washington Monument (1965)

945

Students for a Democratic Society Leaflet Distributed at the Antiwar March on Washington (1965)

950

Statements of the Fort Hood Three (1966)

951

Excerpts from United States v. Spock: Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Others Accused of Conspiring to Aid and Abet Draft Evasion (1969)

957

A Father’s Disgust with Antiwar Demonstrations (1970)

960

Contents

Displaying the Flag on the Seat of His Pants: Excerpts from Smith v. Goguen (1974) WATTS RIOT (1965)

961 965

Arson

973

Looting

974

Excerpt from the Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California (1965) DETROIT RIOTS (1967)

976 987

Excessive Force

993

Housing

994

Kerner Commission (1967–1968)

995

Excerpts from Cyrus R. Vance’s Report on the Riots in Detroit (1967) CHICAGO RIOTS (1968)

997 1009

Chicago Seven

1019

Daley, Richard J. (1902–1976)

1021

Democratic National Convention (1968)

1022

Hayden, Tom (1939–)

1024

Hoffman, Abbie (1936–1989)

1025

National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe)

1027

ALCATRAZ ISLAND OCCUPATION (1969–1971)

1031

Indians of All Tribes

1035

Oakes, Richard (1942–1972)

1036

Termination

1038

Trudell, John (1946–)

1039

The Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father and His People, November 1969 FEMINIST MOVEMENT (1970S–1980S)

1040 1043

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

1053

Roe v. Wade (1973)

1055

Steinem, Gloria (1934–)

1056

ATTICA PRISON RIOT (1971)

1059

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

1063

Rockefeller, Nelson A. (1908–1979)

1064

xvii

xviii

Contents

TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES (1972)

1067

American Indian Movement (AIM)

1071

Indian Treaties

1072

Red Power

1073

WOUNDED KNEE II (1973)

1075

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

1079

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

1080

Pine Ridge Reservation

1081

Wilson, Dick (1934–1990)

1082

SAGEBRUSH REBELLION (1979–1981)

1085

Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976

1089

Public Lands

1090

Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004)

1091

Watt, James G. (1938–)

1093

LOS ANGELES UPRISING (1992)

1095

Denny, Reginald (1953–)

1101

King, Rodney (1965–)

1102

Los Angeles Police Department

1103

Williams, Damian Monroe (1973–)

1105

Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery (1992) WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS (1999)

1106 1121

Direct Action Network

1125

Economic Justice

1126

Globalization

1127

DAY WITHOUT AN IMMIGRANT (2006)

1129

Undocumented Immigrants

1133

List of Contributors Index About the Editor

1137 I-1

Acknowledgments

This work represents not only my efforts over the past two years, but those of 44 other scholars with whom I have had the privilege to work. Their investigations of the instances of collective civil unrest in American society have taught me much about what has worked in our nation’s history, and which areas we still need to address. The project would not have been possible without their considerable analytical prowess. Additionally, I would like to thank the editorial and production staff at ABC-CLIO, including James Sherman, with whom I conceived this project; Barbara Patterson, who administered the considerable paperwork involved; Alex Mikaberdze and John Wagner, who went through the manuscript submissions with a fine-toothed comb; and Donald Schmidt and his team, who oversaw the production work to turn the manuscript into a book. Finally, I would like to thank and acknowledge the dedication of my life partner and business partner, Lauren Danver, for her constant support in ways related both directly to the outcome of the book and generally to my state of mind! —Steven L. Danver San Marcos, California

xix

Introduction

In one of the most misused quotations in American history, Thomas Jefferson famously said that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure” (Jefferson 1955). This phrase has been used to justify many violent actions throughout the nation’s history, many of which would be actions that might cause Jefferson, as president, many nights of troubled thought. Its consistent use, however, reflects a simple truth about people in general and Americans in particular. When a situation is perceived as unacceptable, people take action. Although some pursue change on an individual basis, when it comes to large social issues, Americans have tended to form groups of like-minded people to achieve the desired ends. Americans, throughout their history, have addressed the circumstances of their lives by taking collective action. It is not the intent of the essays collected in the volumes of Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History to argue whether such actions were justified. Obviously, in any such situation, there are two sides that usually see things quite differently. Sometimes, basic morality dictates that one side is “right” and the other is “wrong.” But determining such things is not our task. Rather, it is more instructive for historians to look at the situations that brought about such actions. What were the circumstances that caused people to decide that collective action was necessary? Who was involved? Why did people respond the way they did? What were the events that were the turning points in such actions? By finding the answers to all these questions, we can take some important steps toward understanding how these revolts, protests, and other collective actions function within American society. To do so, it might be instructive to look at the different types of events and movements that qualified for inclusion in this work. Among the most basic forms of revolt (not to mention the earliest) are the reactions that American Indian peoples had when their rights, their land, or their cultures were being taken from them. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, was one of the earliest large-scale uprisings against the encroaching European presence on the continent. It had many elements: land loss, cultural repression, religious suppression, and forced labor. Similarly, the Pima Revolt in 1751, Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, the Flight of the Nez Perce´ in 1877, the Sioux resistance that culminated in the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, though all different in their expression, shared the common feature of a group or groups of American Indians taking action, sometimes against

xxi

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Introduction

hopeless odds, to defend different aspects of their way of life. Similarly, a revitalized “Red Power” movement during the 1960s and 1970s saw a revival of resistance in the Alcatraz Island Occupation of 1969–1970, the Trail of Broken Treaties protest in 1972, and the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. Of course, the United States was founded as a result of a collective action that was, at times, called a revolt or a rebellion. Going back as far as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, those who came over to North America showed a propensity for taking action against the government when they felt that it was not serving their interests. With the onset of the 1760s and the growing debate over taxation in the American colonies, the pace of revolt quickened. In 1765, the Stamp Act Protests gave the colonists a common cause. The Boston Massacre in 1770 galvanized the colonists through the effective use of propaganda. The Regulator Movement in 1771 gave those theoretical movements some meaning, with the addition of violent action. The Pine Tree Riot in 1772 again protested the rising royal authority over the colonies’ economic lives. The move toward revolution became almost inevitable after the Boston Tea Party in 1773 led to greater repression by the British government, which led to greater resistance by the colonies. The onset of the American Revolution was, largely, the culmination of this particular set of revolts and protests over the prior 12 years. But even after the American Revolution ended, the colonists-turned-Americans were not averse to protesting against the government they had just installed if they felt that their needs were not being met. Only three years after the end of the Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion demonstrated that the newly elected leaders could not afford to rest on their laurels at the expense of the common farmers. The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the Dorr Rebellion in 1841, the actions of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s, the Brooks-Baxter War in 1874, the Black Patch War in 1909, the Bonus Army protests in 1932, the Battle of Athens in 1946, the Sagebrush Rebellion in 1979, and the World Trade Organization protests in 1999 all had to do with the discontent different groups of Americans felt over political and economic conditions, and that the governing authorities were to blame. But one of the most common ways that Americans collectively protested against economic injustice was through organized labor action. As America’s population grew with the arrival of many immigrants during the late 19th century, labor activism began to take over as one of the most common forms of revolt. The Great Railroad Strikes of 1877, the Haymarket Square Riot in 1886, the Homestead Strike in 1892, the Pullman Strike in 1894, the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the Boston Police Strike in 1919, the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike in 1934, and the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike the same year all featured organized labor as one of the moving forces in American

Introduction

life, allowing ordinary people to take an active role in advocating for better treatment in society. American Indians, of course, were not the only ethnic group to take action to defend their cultural heritage and to fight for the rights they should have been rightfully accorded in American society. Slave rebellions were also among the earliest collective actions against the imposition of racial power. Africans and African Americans naturally found slave life intolerable, and resisted their situations in many ways. Some acted as individuals, slowing their work or breaking the machines used in their labor. Occasionally, armed insurrection was a more attractive, more immediate alternative. Sometimes, it was all the people had left. Many examples can be cited: the Stono Rebellion in 1739, the New York Slave Insurrection in 1741, Gabriel Prosser’s Virginia Uprising in 1799, Charles Deslondes’s German Coast Uprising in 1811, the abortive effort of white abolitionist George Boxley to spark an insurrection in 1815, and Denmark Vesey’s uprising in 1822. All these actions caused Americans, especially southerners, to be extremely vigilant and watchful over their slaves’ actions. But none of these incidents had the society-wide impact of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. In its aftermath, vigilance committees roamed the South, looking out for possible insurrections. Largely because of this, John Brown’s takeover of the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 with the goal of sparking a large-scale slave insurrection scared white southerners to such a degree as to make it one of the factors that contributed to the onset of the Civil War two years later. Even after slavery ended in 1865, African Americans and Americans of many other minority groups had to take action to have their constitutional and other social rights recognized by mainstream American society. Women began to advocate for voting rights in the 1830s, with their movement really gaining momentum by the 1870s. Hispanic Americans included African Americans and members of other marginalized groups in the Plan de San Diego in 1915. The Zoot Suit Riot in 1942 showed that even though Mexican Americans were serving in the military during World War II, they still were not viewed as equal partners in American society. Of course, the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s– 1960s is one of the most notable examples of the creation of a large-scale movement to achieve some significant changes. It became the model for many other later movements, such as the Red Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the Feminist Movement. But even though the Civil Rights Movement achieved important things in terms of expanding the constitutional rights of all Americans, it did not address all the issues, such as the economic and social aspects of life that many people saw as important. As such, the Civil Rights Movement spawned other protests, such as the Watts Riots in 1965, the Detroit Riots in

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1967, the Attica Prison Riot in 1971, the Los Angeles Uprising in 1992, and the “Day without an Immigrant” protests in 2006. The dark side of protest by ethnic groups in the United States, however, was always present as a counterpoint. Frequently taking the form of race riots, Americans protested and sometimes resorted to violence when they felt their lifestyle was being threatened by minority ethnic groups. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844 saw many people protest the increasing presence of German Americans, most of whom were Catholic. A decade later, Bleeding Kansas, although technically over states’ rights, had a significant racial component, as Jayhawkers did not want slavery in their free-soil territory. The list that follows is almost too long to believe. A selective recounting would include the Portland Rum Riot in 1855, the Know-Nothing Riots in 1855–1856, the New York Draft Riots in 1863, the New Orleans Riot of 1866, the Colfax Massacre in 1873, the Seattle Riot in 1886, the Lattimer Massacre in 1897, the New Orleans Race Riot in 1900, the Atlanta Race Riot in 1906, the Springfield Race Riot in 1908, the Houston Riot in 1917, the Red Summer of 1919, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. These are but a few of the reasons that groups of Americans, over the course of their histories, have chosen to rise up against what they saw as the powers of repression in their lives. There are many other reasons why revolts have broken out. Religion (Leisler’s Rebellion in 1689, the Philadelphia Election Riot in 1742, and the Utah War in 1857), independence movements (the Texas Revolt in 1835, the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846), and antiwar activism (the Green Corn Rebellion in 1917 and the Chicago Riots in 1968) have all been powerful motives causing Americans to turn to collective action. If this history shows us anything, it must be obvious that collective rebellion and revolt is a constant theme in American life. The reasons have changed through the years, but the fact that Americans take action to feed the “tree of liberty” with regularity has not. A look at the news in early 2010 shows that a new movement known as the Tea Party, whose history is still being written, is taking collective action against what they see as troubling signs of leftist leanings in their government. Although violence has not yet broken out, there has been enough violent rhetoric—with gun-owning Tea Partiers congregating on the banks of the Potomac, across from Washington, DC— to cause concern. Whether or not one agrees with the Tea Partiers’ agenda, it is obvious that they are more than willing to stage another revolt, rebellion, or even a revolution, if it means a restoration of their vision of America. Intended for high school and undergraduate students and for the interested general public, Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History is divided into 71 topic sections, which each section containing from three to seven essays. An introductory essay describes the causes, course, and consequences of the particular rebellion, revolt, riot, or uprising, with subsequent essays

Introduction

providing more detailed information on specific persons, organizations, concepts, battles, or groups related to the event. Each essay concludes with a Further Reading bibliography, and many sections conclude with relevant primary documents, which open with brief introductions describing the document and discussing its importance. “See also” cross-references at the ends of the introductory essays in each section direct the reader to related sections. Finally, a detailed subject index provides additional access to the sections and to the essays within them. —Steven L. Danver San Marcos, California

Further Reading Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 12 (1955), 356.

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Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) A 1676 uprising in the colony of Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion takes its name from Nathaniel Bacon, the man who served as the primary leader of the movement. Bacon’s Rebellion is generally considered a rebellion of nonelite (former indentured servants, some slaves, as well as small and middling planters) western Virginians against the powerful tobacco elite of the eastern portions of the colony. Early historical treatments tended to focus on whether or not it constituted a prequel to the American Revolution 100 years before the fact. Over the past 30 years, that interpretation faded in light of work that focuses on the rebellion’s role in hastening race-based African slavery and ending indentured servitude. In addition to the relationship between colonists and their colonial governments and the development of slavery in North America, the rebellion also provides significant insight into colonial attitudes toward Native Americans (see Wertenbaker 1940; Washburn 1957; Morgan 1975). Bacon’s Rebellion began with an attempt by a group of Maryland Indians to obtain redress from a Virginia colonist. In July 1675, a group of Doegs and Susquehannocks crossed the river and took some hogs from one Thomas Mathew, a trader whom they said had defrauded them. Mathew and a group of men then gave chase, caught up with some of the raiding party, and beat several of them to death. The Indians who made it back to the Maryland side of the Potomac soon recrossed the river and killed two men in Mathew’s service as well as his son. This incident, combined with the general Indian fear spawned by the outbreak of King Philip’s War in New England, provided an opportunity for those Virginians already predisposed toward violence against Indians to continue that animosity. Despite an earlier conviction for a plot to frame one of the leaders of the Patawomeck Indians for murder, George Mason was dispatched with a force of 30 men to punish the Indians for the killings at Mathew’s plantation. When the fleeing Indians crossed to what they thought was the inviolable safety of Maryland soil, the Virginians refused to stop and instead crossed the Potomac themselves. When they caught up to the Indians at their village, Mason and Brent killed the group’s leader and 10 other Indians. According to one account, the killing occurred after the Indians emerged from their meetinghouse in response to Brent’s

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Frustrated by the colonial government's moderate stance in the face of Indian raids on settlers and the settlers' demand for Indian land, Nathaniel Bacon leads Virginians in an attack on Native Americans in 1676. Known as Bacon's Rebellion, the civil revolt was the first serious test of British authority in the New World. (Library of Congress)

request for a parley. Additionally, the group reportedly killed nearly 15 peaceful Susquehannocks from nearby houses who had come out to investigate the noise caused by Brent’s attack on the meetinghouse (Washburn 1957, 21; Andrews 1915, 105–106; Morgan 1975, 251). Brent and Mason’s actions then touched off many acts of revenge on the part of Indians and whites. Sir William Berkeley, the royal governor of Virginia, then ordered out 1,000 militia to deal with the escalating conflict on the VirginiaMaryland border. On September 26, the militia under the command of Colonel John Washington and Major Isaac Allerton besieged a party of approximately 100 Susquehannocks on their way back from retaliatory raids into Virginia in response to Mason and Brent’s actions the previous summer. When the Susquehannocks sent a party of men to parley, the Virginians killed them all. Eventually, the remaining Susquehannocks escaped and began to raid the frontier settlements of the upper Rappahannock in Virginia. In combination with the news of King Philip’s War in New England, the attacks by these Maryland Indians caused landowning westerners like Nathaniel Bacon to consider all Indians as dangerous, and fit for destruction (Andrews 1915, 18–19; Morgan 1975, 250–253).

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

Governor Berkeley at first appeared to accede to these demands. In January 1676, he ordered a punitive expedition against the Susquehannocks. As the expedition was about to set out, Berkeley abruptly recalled the troops and cancelled the entire expedition, preferring instead to take a defensive rather than an offensive approach to the crisis. This caused the residents of the western counties that bordered the tributary remnants of the Powhatan chiefdom to take matters into their own hands with Bacon as their leader (Washburn 1957, 24–25). Many of them interpreted Berkeley’s plan as nothing more than an attempt to profit from the crisis on the part of Virginia’s wealthy leadership. They focused their ire on provisions of Berkeley’s plan that called for the building of a string of defensive forts. These westerners, Bacon among them, objected to the plan for several reasons. First, Berkeley planned to build the forts on lands held by members of his inner circle. He then proposed to pay the outsiders with whom he planned to man the forts more than the typical westerner earned in a year. He planned to raise the funds to pay for the forts by taxing those very same western landowners. Frontier residents resented this fact considerably. Secondly, recent explorations beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains had revealed to many enterprising westerners the potential profits to be gained from trade with the native groups of that region. The tributary (peaceful) Indian groups of Virginia, located as they were between these colonists and the groups on the other side of the Blue Ridge, constituted a significant barrier to the development of this trade. Therefore, many western planters were eager to use the incursions of the Maryland Susquehannocks as a pretext for eliminating the tributary Indian barrier to the western trade. Therefore, Berkeley’s announced intentions to head off further Indian conflict by forbidding the general public from engaging in trade with all Indians angered these western Virginians even further (Morgan 1975, 253; Andrews 1915, 51; see also Briceland, 1987). For the landless poor who made up the majority of the rebellion’s foot soldiers, the inequitable tax structure, the abrogation of their political and legal rights, and the government’s refusal to acknowledge their perceived right to take native land at will combined with their perception of Berkeley’s unwillingness to protect them from Indian attack to push them violence in 1676. In many ways, the true nature of Nathaniel Bacon remains somewhat of an enigma. He had not been in Virginia long by the time of the rebellion, and he was still somewhat young, just 29 years old, even by the standards of a death trap like 17th-century Virginia. A relative to a prominent Virginia official of the same name, he quickly exploited that connection as well as his wife’s friendship with Lady Berkeley to gain for himself a seat on the Governor’s Council. By the fall of 1675, he had fallen out of favor with the governor for arresting a group of Indians whom he accused of theft. The fact that Berkeley dared to criticize his actions

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seems to have ingrained in Bacon both a recalcitrant attitude toward the governor and a deep hatred of Indians. In addition, Bacon expressed a marked disdain for Patrician Virginians in general. He also suffered the loss of the overseer of one of his two Henrico County plantations at the hands of the Susquehannocks who had escaped Washington and Allerton’s forces, and therefore Bacon had a personal score to settle in pushing for punitive raids against the Indians. Finally, his closest associates among the county’s planters, most of them newcomers like Bacon, all shared his attitudes toward both Indians and the Patricians who dominated the east (Washburn 1957, 18, 181; Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1907–1908). In April 1676, after much drinking, Bacon and several of his like-minded fellow western planters decided to cross the James River and meet with the landless freemen and small planters who had been encouraged to gather there by a man named Giles Bland in preparation for a campaign against the Indians. Bland recently had been punished by Governor Berkeley for his insubordinate attitude toward Virginia’s Patrician leadership. Bland also shared Bacon’s attitude toward Indians. When Bacon and his neighbors arrived at Bland’s encampment (with a plentiful supply of liquor to dole out to the small planters and freemen gathered there), they were received as heroes of people who would lead them to victory. After several speeches, the group began to beg Bacon to lead them in a campaign to destroy all Indians in Virginia. For his part, Bacon accepted and immediately dispatched a message to Berkeley asking for such a commission. Twice he proposed that Governor Berkeley authorize a punitive expedition against all Indians to diffuse the potential for an outright western mutiny of the landless against the landed. In other words, Bacon suggested that Berkeley allow the frontiersmen to satiate their anger with the blood of various indigenous peoples. Fearful of a general Indian war like the one occurring in New England at the time, Berkeley chose instead to honor his promises of friendship to the tribes with whom he had previously made peace. In addition, he came to distrust Bacon as nothing more than an upstart, intent on stirring up a rabble to serve his own ambitions. When Berkeley twice refused his pleas, Bacon enacted his desire to annihilate all Indians regardless of their relationship to the Virginia government (Washburn 1957, 35–39; Morgan 1975, 255–259). After first threatening the nearby Pamunkeys into fleeing their village, Bacon and his 300-man “army” marched to an Indian fort near the border with Carolina held by the Siouan-speaking Occoneechees. After convincing them to capture and kill several Susquehannocks in the area, Bacon demanded that they provide him and his men with food. When he determined that the Occoneechees had not complied with his request with enough alacrity, Bacon and his men attacked and killed 150 of them (Morgan 1975, 259).

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

For his part, Sir William Berkeley attempted to destabilize Bacon’s movement. In particular, the governor promised that those Virginians who joined him against Bacon would be exempt from taxes, and he called for the election of a new assembly for the express purpose of allowing the representatives of the people to present their grievances against him. He then invited Bacon to submit himself and intimated his willingness to pardon the rebel or allow him to go to England to plead his case. Berkeley also took the step of classifying all Indians as enemies of Virginia in an effort to placate the intense Indian hatred that Bacon had aroused. However, he strongly insisted that only those given express permission by the Crown via himself as the Crown’s direct representative in the colony could enforce that decree. Since he had denied Bacon’s calls for a commission to lead an expedition against Virginia Indians and they had proceeded anyway, Bacon and his followers were now rebels against the king (Morgan 1975, 259; Washburn 1957, 40–42). In the May elections, New Kent County voters sent Nathaniel Bacon himself to the assembly. After he returned from the campaign on the Roanoke River, Bacon left for Jamestown. Still believing that he could convince the governor to see the wisdom of his position, Bacon anchored a few miles from Jamestown and sent word asking for permission to enter the town. Berkeley responded by instructing one of his lieutenants to apprehend the rebel leader. A few days after he left for the assembly, Nathaniel Bacon entered Jamestown as a prisoner (Washburn 1957, 48–51; Morgan 1975, 261–262). In a dramatic scene described in several sources, Berkeley confronted Bacon face to face. Seemingly forced into submission, Bacon appeared before the assembly in chains and begged Berkeley for his pardon. Berkeley, realizing that killing Bacon would only create a martyr, set him free and restored him to full membership in his Council. In a further effort to pacify Bacon’s supporters, Berkeley promised Bacon a proper commission to proceed against the Indians (Washburn 1957, 48–51; Morgan 1975, 261–262). Over the next several days, the new assembly passed several significant pieces of legislation designed to remake Virginia society in a more egalitarian mold. The assembly granted suffrage to all landless freemen, curtailed the powers of appointed magistrates, and rewrote the tax code to end all the tax exemptions previously granted to Berkeley and his elite brethren. Berkeley assented to all of these measures, but continued to resist efforts to sanction genocide campaigns against Indians. On one occasion, the governor vented his frustration over the killing of the surrendering Susquehannocks by the Washington and Allerton expedition, vehemently admonishing the assembly that the Indians who had sought to parley and peace with the expeditions sent to Maryland were murdered. His resistance to measures calling for the indiscriminate destruction of all Indians succeeded in

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forcing the assembly to admit the possibility that not all Indians harbored murderous intentions toward the colony. In the end, it did little to check the genocidal aims of Bacon and his followers. While the preamble to an act regarding the Indian conflict differentiated between those friendly and those unfriendly to Virginia, the provisions of the act made very little distinction. The act defined any Indian who left their village without express permission from the Virginians as an enemy. Additionally, the assembly discarded Berkeley’s previous defensive policy toward Indians and created a force of 1,000 men with which to attack Indian villages. The legislation also ordered that the members of the expedition would be paid with both Indian possessions and individual Indian prisoners as slaves (Andrews 1915, 25–27; Hening 1810–1823, 341–365; Washburn 1957, 54–55; Morgan 1975, 263–264). Bacon, who had left Jamestown after his pardon to return to his wife and plantations, returned and issued his “Declaration of the People” on July 30, in which he portrayed himself as the true representative of the king in Virginia. The declaration also spelled out Bacon’s intent to eradicate all the Indians of Virginia. Bacon then attacked the Pamunkey Indians who had taken refuge in the Great Dragon Swamp (Andrews 1915, 116–118; Washburn 1957, 56–58, 71). Berkeley then fled to the countryside to recruit a volunteer force to pursue the rebel leader. At first, Berkeley succeeded in recruiting nearly 1,200 men, but when these men discovered that he intended to use them against Nathaniel Bacon and not Indians, his force disintegrated. Upon discovering Berkeley’s plans to march against him, Bacon turned to take the fight back to the governor. Lacking enough troops to match Bacon’s numbers, Berkeley once again officially declared Bacon an outlaw and retreated to Virginia’s Eastern Shore (Andrews 1915, 34, 56–57). Berkeley’s decision to seek refuge on the Eastern Shore actually aided his fortunes. The colonists there were much more willing to aid him. When Bacon sent two men to sail to the Eastern Shore and apprehend the governor, Berkeley, with the help of Eastern Shore colonists, managed to capture the two assailants instead. This success allowed him to recruit a force of nearly 600 men and with which he retook Jamestown on September 8, 1676 (Andrews 1915, 36–37, 64–67). When Bacon learned of Berkeley’s successes as well as the fall of Jamestown, he once again moved against the capital. On his way, Bacon abducted the wives of Berkeley’s most loyal supporters. He besieged Jamestown in mid-September and prominently displayed both the Indian captives he had taken and the female loyalists, many of whose husbands now opposed him inside Jamestown. In the face of this and Bacon’s superior numbers, the governor once again retreated via the water to the Eastern Shore. Not long after, Bacon burned Jamestown, England’s oldest settlement in North America, to the ground (Morgan 1975, 268–269; Andrews 1915, 68–69).

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

After the recapturing of Jamestown, Bacon’s men went wild in an orgiastic frenzy of heavy drinking as well as looting. The sources disagree as to whether or not Nathaniel Bacon was troubled by this turn of events. If he was, his death from dysentery in late October 1676 prevented him from acting upon those concerns. The loss of the rebellion’s leader opened up yet another opportunity for Sir William Berkeley to reestablish control. By early November, having returned from his exile on the Eastern Shore, he defeated several rebel bands. On November 13, Berkeley condemned the leader of one of the defeated bands, Thomas Hansford, to death by hanging. From the scaffold, Hansford proclaimed himself a true and loyal subject of King Charles and refused to repent of his participation in the rebellion (Andrews 1915, 79–81). In January 1677, Berkeley executed five of the rebellion’s leaders and would have surely hanged more had he not been prevented from doing so by the arrival from England of a commission sent by King Charles II to investigate the causes of the unrest. Their report signaled their agreement with many of the rebels that Berkeley and other elites had dealt with them unfairly, but the commissioners also agreed with Berkeley’s contention that the actions of Bacon and his associates constituted an illegal rebellion against the authority of the Crown as manifested in the personage of the royal governor. As a result of Bacon’s Rebellion, elite Virginians placed fewer restrictions on nonelite attempts to acquire Indian land in the west, and the entire colony began to switch from indentured servitude to lifetime African chattel slavery as the colony’s preferred labor system. This switch would help to control the tremendous growth in the landless free population that had occurred in the latter half of the 17th century due to the significant increase in the number of servants who survived their period of indenture (Morgan 1975, 257–272; Andrews 1915, 65). —Ethan Schmidt See also all entries under Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794).

Further Reading Andrews, Charles McLean. Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915. Bacon, Nathaniel. “Manifesto Concerning the Present Troubles in Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1894). Briceland, Alan Vance. Westward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987. “The Family of Nathaniel Bacon, the Rebel.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 14 (1907) and 15 (1907–1908).

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Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Vol. 2. Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1810–1823. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Washburn, Wilcomb. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Bacon, Nathaniel (1647–1676) Nathaniel Bacon is best known for his leadership of the 1676 rebellion that bears his name. Two years after he arrived in Virginia, Bacon led an uprising against Sir William Berkeley, the royal governor of the colony. He and his rebels even succeeded in burning Jamestown, the colony’s capital, to the ground. The rebellion fizzled in October 1676 when Bacon died suddenly of dysentery (Morgan 1975, 250–270). In many ways, the details of Bacon’s personality remain somewhat obscure. At 29 years of age, he was still somewhat young even by the standards of 17thcentury Virginia, which was a death trap. Born to an ambitious family in Suffolk, England, Bacon consistently failed to live up to his father’s expectations. His father enrolled him at Cambridge only to withdraw him after two years, citing his son’s propensity toward “extravagancies (Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1907–1908).” After his forced departure from Cambridge, Bacon continued his ne’er-do-well ways. He entered into a forbidden marriage to the daughter of a local aristocrat and became involved in a plot to swindle a neighboring youth’s inheritance. Bacon’s frustrated father then put young Nathaniel and his wife on a ship bound for

In 1676, English colonist Nathaniel Bacon led a popular revolt of colonial Virginia's frontier settlers, known as Bacon's Rebellion, against Virginia governor William Berkeley and his allies. (Library of Congress)

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Virginia where his kinsmen, also named Nathaniel Bacon, served as the colony’s treasurer (Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1907–1908). Upon his arrival in Virginia, Bacon quickly exploited his family connections as well as his wife’s friendship with Governor Berkeley’s wife to gain for himself a seat on the Governor’s Council. Like many of his neighbors, Bacon had recently obtained a commission from Berkeley and constructed a trading post for the purpose of setting himself up in the increasingly lucrative western Indian trade. Upon learning of Berkeley’s decision to assert greater control over the trade, Bacon reacted furiously. Furthermore, Bacon and his family experienced personally the effects of the increased raiding by Susquehannock Indians from Maryland when a 1675 attack claimed the life of one of his overseers. By the fall of 1675, he had fallen out of favor with Berkeley for arresting a group of Indians whom he accused of stealing corn. His subsequent rebuke by Berkeley seems to have ingrained in him both an antagonistic stance toward the governor and a deep hatred of Indians (Morgan 1975, 254–255). One day after drinking with several of his neighbors, Bacon decided to assume command of a group of landless frontiersmen gathering near his plantation for the purpose of leading them in a campaign to rid Virginia of all Indians. Upon learning of Bacon’s actions, Berkeley, who favored a more diplomatic approach with the colony’s Indians, declared Bacon in rebellion against the government and set out to apprehend him (Morgan 1975, 255–259). From that point, the rebellion quickly descended into a personal battle for supremacy between Berkeley and Bacon, and an opportunity for landless Virginians to redistribute the wealth and possessions of Virginia patricians. After gaining the upper hand militarily, Bacon quickly moved to head off a general rebellion among the landless by forcing Berkeley to commission him as the leader of a campaign (manned by landless frontiersmen) aimed at exterminating all of Virginia’s Indigenous Peoples regardless of their previous relationship to the colony’s government. However, once Bacon set off on the expedition, Berkeley again declared him a rebel and called out the militia against him. To defend himself from Berkeley’s forces, Bacon had to call off the campaign against the Indians and subsequently burned Jamestown to the ground. Shortly thereafter, he became violently ill and died in October 1676. The rebellion subsided not long after his death, but many of the grievances that Bacon and his followers demanded were eventually adopted (Morgan 1975, 259–270). —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Andrews, Charles McLean. Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) “The Family of Nathaniel Bacon, the Rebel.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 14 (1907) and 15 (1907–1908). Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Washburn, Wilcomb. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Berkeley, Sir William (1605–1677) Sir William Berkeley served, with one interruption, as governor of Virginia from the middle of the 17th century until the events of Bacon’s Rebellion ended his tenure. He died in July 1677, shortly after he returned to England to answer for his conduct during the events of the rebellion. Born in Middlesex in 1605, Berkeley spent much of his early adult life as a favorite courtier of Charles I and even dabbled in playwriting. In 1642, he accepted an appointment as governor and captain general of the Virginia Colony. A staunch defender of royal prerogative and patrician privilege, Berkeley actively supported the efforts of the Virginia assembly to enforce deference and submission on the part of the lower orders. During his first year as governor, the assembly passed laws punishing runaway and disobedient servants, forbade servants from marrying during their time of service, granted serving burgesses immunity from arrests, and exempted members of the Governor’s Council from tax levies (Billings 2004, 1; Morgan 1975, 146–147). The other significant achievement of his early tenure was his role in vanquishing the Powhatan Chiefdom, with whom the Virginians had been engaged in intermittent warfare since the earliest years of the colony. On April 18, 1644, Opechancanough, now the titular and de facto leader of the remnants of the paramount chiefdom created by his older brother Powhatan, launched a surprise attack against the English. In the summer of 1644, Berkeley led his troops on what the Virginians referred to as the “Pamunkey and Chickahominy march.” His actions forced the abandonment of the Chickahominy village of Oraniock, and destroyed Opechancanough’s capital village of Menmend. Later that summer, the English attacked the remaining Powhatan groups. In 1645, Berkeley ordered the construction of forts along their border with the Algonquians to aid in the reduction of the

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Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) Sir William Berkeley ruled colonial Virginia almost continuously between 1642 and 1677. He suppressed a popular revolt, known as Bacon's Rebellion, although the ordeal ended his career as governor. (Maurice du Pont Lee)

chiefdom. Finally, in March 1646, Berkeley himself marched against the Algonquians ostensibly to negotiate peace with Opechancanough. When the Indian leader refused his offers of negotiation, Berkeley took “that bloody monster, upon 100 years old,” to Jamestown as his prisoner. By October of that year, the Third Anglo-Powhatan War was over, and the paramount chiefdom of Powhatan had been destroyed. A treaty signed by Berkeley and representatives of the remaining chiefdom groups placed the Indians in a subordinate position to the Virginians (Billings 2004, 96–98; Morgan 1975, 149; Rountree 1996, 84–88). The fall of Charles II’s government to Parliamentary forces and his subsequent beheading forced Berkeley, ever loyal to his executed sovereign, to resign his post. However, he did not return to England. Instead, he retired to his plantation, Green Spring, and awaited his next opportunity to further his political career. That opportunity arrived in early 1660, with end of the Cromwellian Protectorate in England. Within weeks of Richard Cromwell’s abdication, Sir William Berkeley officially began his second tenure as governor and captain general of the colony of Virginia (Billings 2004, 105–112). In 1676, Berkeley responded to Nathaniel Bacon’s extermination campaign against Virginia’s Indians by declaring him a rebel and attempting to arrest him. Eventually, Bacon’s death diffused the rebellion and in an effort to restore his authority and exact vengeance on Bacon’s followers, Berkeley hanged twelve of Bacon’s followers before a royal commission sent from England stopped him

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

and ordered him back to England to answer for his role in driving Virginia’s nonelites to rebellion (Morgan 1975, 250–270). —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Billings, Warren. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Rountree, Helen. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Washburn, Wilcomb. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

House of Burgesses The House of Burgesses represents the first elected assembly in the New World. However, at the time, its establishment represented the failure of the colony both to attract enough settlers and to establish a profitable staple crop economy. The establishment of a representative assembly was one in a series of reforms begun in 1617 by the governing Virginia Company of London in an attempt to revive the sagging fortunes of the 10-year-old colony. Originally, participation in the election of burgesses was limited to landowning males over the age of 20. Despite limitations to the House of Burgesses’ authority in 1624 when the Crown revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and placed the colony under direct royal control, membership in the House continued to represent a significant status symbol for Virginia planters hoping to establish themselves among Virginia’s political and economic elite. Eventually, elite Virginians, wary of challenges to their position by those below them on the social scale, began to restrict membership in the House of Burgesses only to those of their own station. In 1646, the burgesses outlawed secret ballot elections, therefore making it much harder for nonelite Virginians to challenge their social betters for election to the House (Hening 1810–1823, Vol. 1, 334).

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Patrick Henry addresses the Virginia House of Burgesses in opposition to the Stamp Act on May 29, 1765. Henry advocated that only colonial legislatures could require colonists to pay taxes. It was during a decisive speech on this issue that he associated King George III of England with Julius Caesar and Charles I. Interrupted by cries of treason, Henry replied, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” (National Archives)

During the mid-1650s, the assembly also attempted to further curtail the political and legal rights of Virginia’s populace. In the 1655 session, the burgesses attempted to ensure the election of only “persons of known integrity and of good conversation,” by limiting suffrage to housekeepers. This act, in effect, disfranchised landless freemen, who heretofore had participated in the election of burgesses (Hening 1810–1823, Vol. 1, 412, 403; Morgan 1975, 238). In addition to these attempts to curtail the political rights of nonelites, the House of Burgesses in the latter half of the 17th century also attempted to restrict lower-class Virginians access to Indian land and trade. By the mid-1670s, small planters and artisans found themselves subject to a heavier tax burden, denied recourse to the ancient traditions of custom and usage, and forced to watch as the wealthy few who dominated Virginia society engrossed more land, trade, and tobacco to themselves. It is, therefore, not surprising that they revolted against both Sir William Berkeley and the House of Burgesses in 1676. For a brief time during Bacon’s Rebellion, men who sympathized with Bacon dominated the House of Burgesses. The enactments of that assembly of 1676

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

demonstrate the extent to which the previous Houses had alienated nonelite and middling Virginians. Among them were bills that curtailed the powers of the governor and restored voting rights to landless Virginians (Washburn, 1957, 49–67). Eventually, the House of Burgesses came back under the control of the Virginia gentry, and it was there in 1775 that another rebel, Patrick Henry, delivered his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech. The House of Burgesses also launched the careers of such influential American Revolutionary figures as Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and George Washington. —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Hatch, Charles E., Jr. America’s Oldest Legislative Assembly & Its Jamestown Statehouses. Appendix II. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1956. Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Vol. 2. Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1810–1823. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Washburn, Wilcomb. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Indentured Servants Indentured servants represented the best possible solution to meet the intense labor demands of plantation agriculture in England’s colonies. It also created a situation ripe for the outbreak of rebellion. In the colonies, the system was first employed in Virginia. The tobacco boom of the 1620s and 1630s, combined with the high mortality rate, produced a situation in which Virginia’s labor needs far outpaced the available pool of laborers. Colonial planners therefore decided to address this problem while at the same time acting to decrease the idle population back in England. Under the system of indentured servitude, an individual could sign a contract whereby, in return for transportation to Virginia, they agreed to work for the holder of the contract for a specified amount of time. Seven years constituted the most common length of service (Morgan 1975, 84–85, 106–107).

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During the length of the indenture, the owner of the contract held almost complete power over the servant. Masters in this system restricted the freedom of movement and association of their indentured servants and had to give them permission to marry. Masters could also beat their indentured servants. When a servant lived to the end of his/her period of indenture, the contract often required that their masters provide them with land, money, tools, clothing, and food to help them establish themselves as Virginia tobacco planters. However, due to the very active disease environment, the poor nourishment and treatment given them by most masters, and the arduous nature of tobacco work, most servants during the first half of the 17th century died before serving out their full period of indenture (Morgan 1975, 106–107). During the second half of the 17th century, conditions in Virginia improved to the point that many more indentured servants began to outlive their contracted time of servitude. This created a situation in which many masters (whose own profit margins were often incredibly thin) were unable or refused to provide their newly free servants the items for which they had previously contracted. Additionally, even for those servants fortunate to receive their goods and payments from their former masters, the overwhelming majority of the land in the eastern portion of Virginia was already held by a small minority of very large and very powerful tobacco planters. This left landless freeman, as they came to be known, no choice but to head to less settled western reaches of the colony and squat on any land they could find. This brought them into conflict with the Indians who lived in that region under the auspices of treaties negotiated with the Virginia government as well as many wealthy eastern planters who had already established legal claim to the lands themselves, but had not yet developed it. Therefore, during the mid-1670s, when Nathaniel Bacon began to call for a general campaign to rid Virginia of all Indians and eventually to revolt against the wealthy planters who dominated Virginia’s government, he found a fertile ground for recruits to his “people’s army” among landless freeman. There is considerable evidence to support the claim that because of this, in the years after Bacon’s Rebellion, the Virginia government took steps to eliminate the practice of indentured servitude and replace it with lifetime African chattel slavery (Morgan 1975, 184–270). —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) Carr, Lois Green. Colonial Chesapeake Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Vol. 2. Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1810–1823. Jernegan, Marcus Wilson. Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, 1607–1783. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Salinger, Sharon V. To Serve Well and Faithfully: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800. Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2000.

Susquehannock Indians The Susquehannock Indians (later referred to as the Susquehannas or Conestogas) played a crucial role in initiating the 1676 Virginia revolt known as Bacon’s Rebellion. At the time of the initial English settlement of Virginia, the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian-speaking group, lived north of the territory inhabited by the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan Chiefdom. According to early colonial sources, particularly the writings of Captain John Smith, the Susquehannocks often raided south into Powhatan’s domain and he was quite interested in establishing an alliance with the English to protect his people from them (Rountree, 1989, 120; Washburn 1957, 43; Andrews 1915, 112). Throughout the first half of the 17th century, the Susquehannocks engaged in multiple struggles over access to beaver-hunting grounds with the Algonquians of Virginia and Maryland as well as their fellow Iroquoians of the Five Nations. By the 1640s, they had extended Susquehannock control from their original villages along the Susquehanna River in present-day Pennsylvania, east to the Delaware River, south to the Potomac River in Virginia, and as far north as New York. Additionally, they established lucrative trading and military alliances with the Huron in Canada as well as the Erie and Shawnee to their west in the Ohio and Great Lakes regions. This large geographic sphere of Susquehannock influence placed them in an extremely advantageous position for trade with European powers in two ways. First, their location allowed them access to the very productive beaver-hunting grounds of western Pennsylvania, New York, and the Ohio

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River Valley. Secondly, this location allowed them to demand a high price from three competing European powers, each of which were intent on keeping the others out of the fur trade. Through their Huron allies in Canada, they could access French fur traders. In the east, just across the Delaware River, the Dutch eagerly pursued Susquehannock commodities. If neither of those competitors could meet their price (usually large quantities of firearms), the Susquehannocks could take their furs to the English in Virginia. Their success at exploiting this geopolitical advantage made the Susquehannocks one of the most heavily armed native groups in the 1640s. Reportedly, one of their villages in western Pennsylvania even possessed a cannon (Kent 1984, 25–28; Sultzman, “Susquehannock History”). By the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, many Susquehannocks lived in villages just across the Potomac River in Maryland. In July 1675, a group of Susquehannocks became entangled in a trading dispute with a Virginian named Thomas Mathew. In response to his refusal to pay them for some hogs, a group of Susqehannocks crossed the Potomac River and stole the hogs back. This set off a series of reprisals between Mathew and the Susquehannocks, which resulted in the deaths of several Indians as well as two of Mathew’s servants and his son. Over the course of the next few weeks, the Virginia government dispatched retaliatory expeditions against the Susquehannocks that crossed into Maryland and destroyed entire Susquehannock villages. In response to these expeditions, the remaining Susquehannock groups crossed into Virginia in late 1675 and began raiding the outlying settlements indiscriminately. These raids prompted western Virginians under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon to demand authorization for a genocide campaign against all Indians. When the royal governor of Virginia refused, Bacon and the westerners rose up in rebellion during the spring of 1676 (Andrews 1915, 15–16; Washburn 1957, 20–21). —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Andrews, Charles McLean. Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915. Kent, Barry. Susquehanna’s Indians. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania History and Museum Commission, 1984. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Rountree, Helen. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Sultzman, Lee. “The Susquehannock.” The Susquehannock Fire Ring. http:// susquehannock.brokenclaw.net/susquehannock (accessed August 20, 2010). Washburn, Wilcomb. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Tobacco The introduction of West Indian tobacco to Virginia by John Rolfe in 1612 created the economic boom that ensured Virginia’s survival. It also instigated a need for land and labor that spawned over 30 years of warfare against the Powhatan Chiefdom, eventually led to the institution of African slavery in North America, and placed the colony’s social classes on the path toward a cataclysmic rebellion in the latter half of the century (Morgan 1975, 90–91). Initially, James I of England resisted the widespread cultivation and exportation of what he termed a “vile stinking weed” from one of his colonies. However, after he realized the extent to which the exportation of tobacco was rapidly filling his coffers, he relented in his opposition, and Virginia’s entire social and economic life came to revolve around the production of it to the point that they began to grow it in the streets of Jamestown and use tobacco as their currency (Morgan 1975, 196–197). Already on shaky ground with the Powhatan Indians in the midst of whose land they had founded Jamestown, the need for more land on which to produce tobacco

Workers harvest tobacco in colonial Virginia, c. 1650. (Library of Congress)

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led to a series of wars against the Powhatan for control of the area. Since tobacco rapidly depletes the soil in which it grows, and the tobacco economy was so hot during the 1620s and 1630s, the voracious Virginia appetite for land during this period knew no limits. By 1646, the Virginians had completely vanquished the once-powerful chiefdom and converted almost the entire eastern half of the colony to tobacco-producing plantations (Morgan 1975, 92–101, 149). The reliance on tobacco as a staple crop created another problem in that since tobacco was such a labor-intensive crop, the only way to maximize profit was to utilize some sort of mass labor system. Indentured servitude constituted the first attempt by the Virginians to solve their labor shortage. This system, by which poor Englishmen would agree to provide a set number of years’ labor in return for passage to the colony, worked well enough during the heyday of the tobacco boom years. However, it very quickly created an extremely exploitative society in which wealthy planters often utilized unscrupulous methods to extend the service time of their indentured servants, defraud other colonists of their land and servants, and generally avoid living up to their responsibilities under the agreement (Morgan 1975, 115–130). By the 1670s, the inequalities created by the exploitative nature of the tobacco economy in Virginia combined with the fact that indentured servants were increasingly living out their period of indentures to produce a volatile situation in which a large population of landless former indentured servants now demanded land and rights. When the planter elite who dominated the assembly refused them political rights, increased their tax burden, and forbade them from taking the Indian land in western Virginia by force, thus dealing a death blow to their hopes of establishing themselves as a planter, they joined Nathaniel Bacon and rose up against the government. In aftermath of the rebellion, the Virginia government deemphasized indentured servant labor in favor of African slaves who could never attain the status of a landless free man (Morgan 1975, 235–249). —Ethan Schmidt

Further Reading Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Carr, Lois Green. Colonial Chesapeake Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Vol. 2. Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1810–1823. Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676)

Nathaniel Bacon’s Manifesto (1676) This document articulates both the reasons and the justifications for Bacon’s Rebellion, a revolt against the planter class by the lower-class farmers of inland areas of the colony. In it, the rebellion’s leader, Nathaniel Bacon, argues that the royal governor, William Berkeley, is to blame because he places greater importance on assuaging the demands of the region’s Native American populations rather than the demands of English landowners. If virtue be a sin, if piety be guilt, all the principles of morality, goodness and justice be perverted, we must confess that those who are now called rebels may be in danger of those high imputations. Those loud and several bulls would affright innocents and render the defence of our brethren and the inquiry into our sad and heavy oppressions, treason. But if there be, as sure there is, a just God to appeal to; if religion and justice be a sanctuary here; if to plead the cause of the oppressed; if sincerely to aim at his Majesty’s honour and the public good without any reservation or by interest; if to stand in the gap after so much blood of our dear brethren bought and sold; if after the loss of a great part of his Majesty’s colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with our lives and estates to endeavour to save the remainders be treason; God Almighty judge and let guilty die. But since we cannot in our hearts find one single spot of rebellion or treason, or that we have in any manner aimed at subverting the settled government or attempting of the person of any either magistrate or private man, notwithstanding the several reproaches and threats of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us and censured our innocent and honest designs, and since all people in all places where we have yet been can attest our civil, quiet, peaceable behaviour far different from that of rebellion and tumultuous persons, let truth be bold and all the world know the real foundations of pretended guilt. We appeal to the country itself what of what nature their oppressions have been, or by what cabal and mystery the designs of many of those whom we call great men have been transacted and carried on; but let us trace these men in authority and favour to whose hands the dispensation of the country’s wealth has been committed. Let us observe the sudden rise of their estates composed with the quality in which they first entered this country, or the reputation they have held here amongst wise and discerning men. And let us see whether their extractions and education have not been vile, and by what pretence of learning and virtue they could so soon [come] into employments of so great trust and consequence. Let us consider their sudden advancement and let us also consider whether any public work for our safety and defence or for the advancement and propagation of trade, liberal arts, or sciences is here extant in any way adequate to our vast charge. Now let us compare these things together and see what sponges have sucked up the public treasure, and whether it has not been privately contrived away by unworthy favourites and juggling parasites whose tottering fortunes have been repaired and supported at the public charge. Now if it be so, judge what greater guilt can be than to offer to pry into these and to unriddle the mysterious wiles of a

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Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) powerful cabal; let all people judge what can be of more dangerous import than to suspect the so long safe proceedings of some of our grandees, and whether people may with safety open their eyes in so nice a concern. Another main article of our guilt is our open and manifest aversion of all, not only the foreign but the protected and darling Indians. This, we are informed, is rebellion of a deep dye for that both the governor and council are by Colonel Cole’s assertion bound to defend the queen and the Appamatocks with their blood. Now, whereas we do declare and can prove that they have been for these many years enemies to the king and country, robbers and thieves and invaders of his Majesty’s right and our interest and estates, but yet have by persons in authority been defended and protected even against his Majesty’s loyal subjects, and that in so high a nature that even the complaints and oaths of his Majesty’s most loyal subjects in a lawful manner proffered by them against those barbarous outlaws, have been by the right honourable governor rejected and the delinquents from his presence dismissed, not only with pardon and indemnity, but with all encouragement and favour; their firearms so destructful to us and by our laws prohibited, commanded to be restored them, and open declaration before witness made that they must have ammunition, although directly contrary to our law. Now what greater guilt can be than to oppose and endeavour the destruction of these honest, quiet neighbours of ours? . . .

The Declaration of the People For having upon specious pretences of public works, raised unjust taxes upon the commonalty for the advancement of private favourites and other sinister ends, but no visible effects in any measure adequate. For not having during the long time of his government in any measure advanced his hopeful colony, either by fortification, towns or trade. For having abused and rendered contemptible the majesty of justice, of advancing to places of judicature scandalous and ignorant favourites. For having wronged his Majesty’s prerogative and interest by assuming the monopoly of the beaver trade. By having in that unjust gain bartered and sold his Majesty’s country and the lives of his loyal subjects to the barbarous heathen. For having protected, favoured and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty’s most loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring, or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for their many invasions, murders, and robberies committed upon us. For having, when the army of the English was just upon the track of the Indians, which now in all places burn, spoil, and murder, and when we might with ease have destroyed them who then were in open hostility, for having expressly countermanded

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) and sent back our army by passing his word for the peaceable demeanour of the said Indians, who immediately prosecuted their evil intentions, committing horrid murders and robberies in all places, being protected by the said engagement and word passed of him, the said Sir William Berkeley, having ruined and made desolate a great part of his Majesty’s country, have now drawn themselves into such obscure and remote places nad are by their successes so emboldened and confirmed, and by their confederacy so strengthened that the cries of blood are in all places, and the terror and consternation of the people so great, that they are now become not only a difficult, but a very formidable enemy who might with ease have been destroyed, etc. When upon the loud outcries of blood, the Assembly had with all care raised and framed an army for the prevention of future mischiefs and safeguard of his Majesty’s colony. For having with only the privacy of some few favourites, without acquainting the people, only by the alteration of a figure, forged a commission by we know not what hand, not only without but against the consent of the people, for raising and effecting of civil wars and distractions, which being happily and without bloodshed prevented. For having the second time attempted the same thereby calling down our forces from the defence of the frontiers, and most weak exposed places, for the prevention of civil mischief and ruin amongst ourselves, whilst the barbarous enemy in all places did invade, murder, and spoil us, his Majesty’s most faithful subjects. Of these, the aforesaid articles, we accuse Sir William Berkeley, as guilty of each and every one of the same, and as one who has traitorously attempted, violated and injured his Majesty’s interest here, by the loss of a great part of his colony, and many of his faithful and loyal subjects by him betrayed, and in a barbarous and shameful manner exposed to the incursions and murders of the heathen. And we further declare these, the ensuing persons in this list, to have been wicked, and pernicious counselors, aiders and assisters against the commonalty in these our cruel commotions: . . . [a list of 19 names follows] . . . And we do further demand, that the said Sir William Berkeley, with all the persons in this list, be forthwith delivered up, or surrender themselves, within four days after the notice hereof, or otherwise we declare as followeth: that in whatsoever house, place, or ship any of the said persons shall reside, be hid, or protected, we do declare that the owners, masters, or inhabitants of the said places, to be confederates and traitors to the people, and the estates of them, as also of all the aforesaid persons, to be confiscated. This we, the commons of Virginia, do declare desiring a prime union amongst ourselves against the common enemy. And let not the faults of the guilty be the reproach of the innocent, or the faults of crimes of the oppressors divide and separate us, who have suffered by their oppressions.

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Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) These are therefore in his Majesty’s name, to command you forthwith to seize the persons above mentioned as traitors to the king and country, and them to bring to Middle Plantation, and there to secure them, till further order, and in case of opposition, if you want any other assistance, you are forthwith to demand it in the name of the people of all the counties of Virginia.

[signed]

Nath Bacon, Gen’l. By the Consent of the People.

Source: Nathaniel Bacon, “Manifesto Concerning the Troubles in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1894): 56–61.

Nathaniel Bacon’s “Declaration of the People of Virginia” (1676) In July 1676, rebel planter Nathaniel Bacon and his supporters issued the following declaration criticizing the administration of Virginia’s royal governor, Sir William Berkeley. In the document, Bacon accuses Berkeley of governing on behalf of a privileged minority whose members control political office and economic power in the colony. Depicting himself as acting with the will and consent of the people, Bacon denounces the governor for levying unjust taxes, promoting unworthy favorites, and failing to defend the people from Indian raids. After issuing this Declaration, Bacon and his rebels attacked the heretofore friendly Pamunkey Indians and, in September, seized and burned Jamestown. Bacon’s sudden death in October led to the rapid collapse of the rebellion.

1. For having, upon specious pretenses of public works, raised great unjust taxes upon the commonalty for the advancement of private favorites and other sinister ends, but no visible effects in any measure adequate; for not having, during this long time of his government, in any measure advanced this hopeful colony either by fortifications, towns, or trade. 2. For having abused and rendered contemptible the magistrates of justice by advancing to places of judicature scandalous and ignorant favorites. 3. For having wronged his Majesty’s prerogative and interest by assuming monopoly of the beaver trade and for having in it unjust gain betrayed and sold his Majesty’s country and the lives of his loyal subjects to the barbarous heathen. 4. For having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty’s loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring, or appointing any due or proper

Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) means of satisfaction for their many invasions, robberies, and murders committed upon us. 5. For having, when the army of English was just upon the track of those Indians, who now in all places burn, spoil, murder and when we might with ease have destroyed them who then were in open hostility, for then having expressly countermanded and sent back our army by passing his word for the peaceable demeanor of the said Indians, who immediately prosecuted their evil intentions, committing horrid murders and robberies in all places, being protected by the said engagement and word past of him the said Sir William Berkeley, having ruined and laid desolate a great part of his Majesty’s country, and have now drawn themselves into such obscure and remote places and are by their success so emboldened and confirmed by their confederacy so strengthened that the cries of blood are in all places, and the terror and consternation of the people so great, are now become not only difficult but a very formidable enemy who might at first with ease have been destroyed. 6. And lately, when, upon the loud outcries of blood, the assembly had, with all care, raised and framed an army for the preventing of further mischief and safeguard of this his Majesty’s colony. 7. For having, with only the privacy of some few favorites without acquainting the people, only by the alteration of a figure, forged a commission, by we know not what hand, not only without but even against the consent of the people, for the raising and effecting civil war and destruction, which being happily and without bloodshed prevented; for having the second time attempted the same, thereby calling down our forces from the defense of the frontiers and most weakly exposed places. 8. For the prevention of civil mischief and ruin amongst ourselves while the barbarous enemy in all places did invade, murder, and spoil us, his Majesty’s most faithful subjects. Of this and the aforesaid articles we accuse Sir William Berkeley as guilty of each and every one of the same, and as one who has traitorously attempted, violated, and injured his Majesty’s interest here by a loss of a great part of this his colony and many of his faithful loyal subjects by him betrayed and in a barbarous and shameful manner exposed to the incursions and murder of the heathen. And we do further declare these the ensuing persons in this list to have been his wicked and pernicious councilors, confederates, aiders, and assisters against the commonalty in these our civil commotions.

Sir Henry Chichley

William Claiburne Junior

Lieut. Coll. Christopher Wormeley

Thomas Hawkins

William Sherwood

Phillip Ludwell

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John Page Clerke

Robert Beverley

John Cluffe Clerke

Richard Lee

John West

Thomas Ballard

Hubert Farrell

William Cole

Thomas Reade

Richard Whitacre

Matthew Kempe

Nicholas Spencer

Joseph Bridger John West, Hubert Farrell, Thomas Reade, Math. Kempe And we do further demand that the said Sir William Berkeley with all the persons in this list be forthwith delivered up or surrender themselves within four days after the notice hereof, or otherwise we declare as follows. That in whatsoever place, house, or ship, any of the said persons shall reside, be hid, or protected, we declare the owners, masters, or inhabitants of the said places to be confederates and traitors to the people and the estates of them is also of all the aforesaid persons to be confiscated. And this we, the commons of Virginia, do declare, desiring a firm union amongst ourselves that we may jointly and with one accord defend ourselves against the common enemy. And let not the faults of the guilty be the reproach of the innocent, or the faults or crimes of the oppressors divide and separate us who have suffered by their oppressions. These are, therefore, in his Majesty’s name, to command you forthwith to seize the persons above mentioned as traitors to the King and country and them to bring to Middle Plantation and there to secure them until further order, and, in case of opposition, if you want any further assistance you are forthwith to demand it in the name of the people in all the counties of Virginia. Nathaniel Bacon General by Consent of the people. William Sherwood Source: “Declaration of Nathaniel Bacon in the Name of the People of Virginia, July 30, 1676.”Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th series, vol. 9 (1871): 184–87.

Pueblo Revolt (1680) After eighty years of submissive resentment, the Pueblos had finally gone for the jugular. —Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown, 1987, 228

Pueblo Indians of New Mexico had lived under Spanish rule since 1598 when Governor Juan de On˜ate won the contract to settle New Mexico for the Spanish crown, to expand political and religious control beyond the confines of Mexico City and the Zacatecas mine. La Bufa, the Zacatecas silver mine, had effectively stopped the northward progression of Spanish interest in the late 1540s. But renewed interest to the far north resurfaced after a few illegal expeditions had meandered into New Mexico over 40 years after Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s exploratory expedition in 1540–1542 failed to find immediate wealth in the desert and mountainous regions of New Mexico. So in 1598, Governor On˜ate led 129 soldier-colonists and their families, hired by him to join him on a settlement expedition to expand Spanish control and religion into what was called La Nueva Me´xico (short for La Nueva Ciudad de Me´xico, as they hoped to find the same wealth of Mexico City to the north). With them they brought 10,000 head of livestock, including horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and fowl, all with the intention of supporting the new colony amidst a Pueblo Indian population topping 50,000 (and untold numbers of nomadic peoples). Located some 1,500 miles north of Mexico City, through hostile Chichimeca Indian territory, and through a 90-mile stretch of desert referred to as La Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man,” not journey of death as is so oftentimes incorrectly reported). The Spanish colonists, their Indian allies, and their livestock separated into several groups, miles between them, spreading out for days along what would later be known as El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the Royal Road to the Interior). They learned that through the jornada, which held precious little water, for their animals to get enough water, they would have to allow time for the springs to regenerate. This in turn made their band vulnerable to nomadic Indian attacks (which resulted from early illegal slave raiding expeditions by Nun˜o de Guzma´n in the early 1500s near Arizona). As they entered the Rio Grande Valley north of the jornada, they noticed the absence of Indians living in the villages that they encountered. They confiscated corn from one village, renaming it Socorro (meaning assistance or help in

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Spanish), for they needed the sustenance. Pueblo Indians witnessed this theft, and word spread to the north that the invaders would take at will what they wanted. Pueblo Indians fled their villages to the hillsides to watch the Spanish trudge north. According to oral history, the people of Ohkay Owingeh (renamed San Juan Pueblo by the Spanish) took pity on the Spanish settlers, even to the point of giving up one of their villages for the families who had brought their children with them. The Spanish renamed the village San Gabriel de Yungue, and this interaction would be the beginning of an over-200-year, nearly constant association between the Pueblo Indians and the Spanish, who would continue to dominate their homelands until 1821. Once at Ohkay Owingeh, the Spanish built an altar and thanked their Christian God, then immediately began enlisting Pueblo Indians to help them build an irrigation ditch so they could prepare fields to plant crops for the upcoming year. No doubt these fields, laying near the Rı´o Chama and the Rı´o Grande’s confluence, lay on Pueblo Indian lands, but they could do little to convince the Spanish to leave. Perhaps they thought they were merely traveling through, without the intention of remaining; or perhaps they believed that they would stay for a short while. Pueblo Indians had a tradition of sharing resources with their neighbors in times of need, understanding that reciprocal sharing would occur if necessary. But the Spanish did not seem to be leaving; in fact, they became more entrenched as the years passed. Equally as frustrating involved demands made by one group of men who wore long dresses, referred to as friars, or fathers, by the Spanish people. On˜ate had a contract with the king and queen of Spain, required of all Spaniards interested with expanding into territories. His contract explicitly stated that he would finance the settlement expedition with private funds in the name of the Spanish Crown. He would pay the salaries and bring supplies for his settlers, as well as bring Franciscan missionaries to Christianize the Indians that they encountered. In repayment, he would become chief executive (governor), adjudicate cases that might arise, protect both Spanish and Pueblo Indian populations from potential enemies, and reap the financial rewards of the kingdom, among other things. He could also grant encomiendas (grants of Indian tribute, oftentimes incorrectly identified as grants of Indian labor—those were repartimientos—or Indian land). In other words, if he chose to reward his soldiers, they could get a written document that granted him (or her) permission to go to a particular pueblo and collect tribute biennially from a specified number of heads of households. Oftentimes, this involved a bushel of corn and a blanket per home twice a year; sometimes the grant included only half a pueblo, sometimes two pueblos. In return, the encomendero (grant holder) had to protect the pueblo from enemies and provide for their Christianization. It was colonial control divvied out among soldier-colonists, and the encomienda would lay at the heart of much Pueblo Indian anger.

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Pueblo Indians already had their own religion, a very extensive and all-inclusive spiritualism that encompassed far more than just going to mass once a week (see the entry “Pueblo Religion”). Therefore, when the friars began to show up and demand Indian labor in building the missions, they balked. Unfortunately, they had little choice but to build the friar’s missions, tend to his fields (if he happened to live among them in the cloister), and kiss his ring in submission. Luckily for the pueblo people, On˜ate only brought a dozen friars, and far more Indian villages existed throughout New Mexico (which included everything north of El Paso del Norte until other borders became more defined). They likely appreciated Spanish protection against the Apache (Lipan Apache to the southeast and Western Apache groups to their south and west), but grew frustrated at the new body of Spanish laws to which they had to acquiesce, including prohibitions on Pueblo Indians putting together military responses, owning and using weaponry and horses, or even leaving their villages without permission. The Spanish had confined them to their villages, making traditional trips to the salt lakes, to the Plains for trading, and to the west along the Zun˜i Trail, in essence, illegal. On˜ate failed in his attempt to, as John L. Kessell put it, “[m]ake New Mexico pay.” In 1607, he resigned, declaring New Mexico a loss. While he and the majority of colonists suggested abandoning New Mexico, the Franciscans argued that they had converted 7,000 souls (likely an inflated number and based on baptisms, not actual conversions). So the crown decided to make New Mexico a royal colony, for they could not turn their backs on neophytes. On˜ate remained in New Mexico until his replacement Pedro de Peralta arrived, but Peralta arrived with new problems. Friars believed that they had saved New Mexico from abandonment and wielded authority as if they had acquired the governorship of the region. Throughout the “Missionary Era” (1610–1680), a continuous clash occurred between civil and religious authorities in New Mexico, forcing Pueblo Indians and Spaniards to chose sides, and suffering the consequences of their choice (excommunication or lack of governmental support in terms of jobs, land grants, assistance with subsistence, and more). But most frustrating to the Pueblo Indians was not just the increased pressure on them to convert to Christianity, but a new pressure to give up traditional ways. In the past, friars had their hands full, attempting to convert Indians to Christianity who had never before been exposed to these odd, nonnative belief systems. Indian pueblos far outnumbered friars, so some freedom to continue traditional spiritualism occurred due to the friar’s absences as they visited other pueblos. By midcentury, the number of friars grew and their resolve became stronger; as a result, they began to clamp down on Pueblo Indian religions and moved throughout New Mexico, destroying kivas and ceremonial accouterments, and outlawing Pueblo Indian ceremonials. The mixed messages they received from the governor

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in 1661, who rather enjoyed Indian ceremonial dances, frustrated the Pueblo Indians even further. By the 1660s, a drought intensified, causing Spanish and Pueblo Indian crops to fail. Raiding by nomadic tribes seemed to intensify, for they felt the impact of the drought on their ability to hunt and gather enough to sustain their families, too. The nomadic tribes also had acquired horses through raiding, becoming far more capable of running off with more booty, not just in grains, but in sheep and even human captives as well. The Spanish redoubled their efforts to control the Rio Grande corridor as the encomenderos traveled throughout their designated pueblo villages collecting more than their share of tribute. In fact, by the 1670s, stories circulated of Spanish encomenderos coming into Pueblo Indian villages and taking the last of the seed corn that the Indians had saved for the upcoming four or five years. The Pueblo women followed the Spanish wagons for miles, picking up and saving individual pieces of corn that had fallen through the slats of the wagons. A few Pueblo Indians hatched plots to overthrow the Spanish authorities, most of which were discovered before the plan came to fruition, including Esteban Clemente, a much trusted governor of the Salinas Pueblos (Abo´ , Quarai, and Tavibo), villages located in the Manzano Mountains. He had served as a military lieutenant (atypical for an Indian), spoke Spanish, dressed as a Spaniard, and even professed to have converted to Christianity. In the 1660s, however, the Spanish uncovered his plot to drive all of the Spanish horses into the hills, then kill off all of the Spaniards until the last was dead. Apparently, he held wide authority across New Mexico among his fellow oppressed pueblo peoples. Summarily executed, Clemente’s message would not die. The drought intensified and Pueblo Indians once began to realize that the Spanish god could not save them from the drought, nor the ensuing food shortages and illnesses that followed the drought. In some pueblos, over 450 died of hunger and disease, for epidemics circulated among New Mexico’s residents who were more prone to succumb to illnesses due to stress, malnutrition, and increased demands on them for labor. Apache raids stepped up as well. By 1672, the Salinas pueblos were abandoned due to increased nomadic Indian attacks. Shortly thereafter, Governor Juan Francisco Trevin˜o outlawed Pueblo congregations at kivas and ordered the remainder of kivas destroyed. Pueblo Indian identity centered on their spiritualism, however, so their reaction is not surprising. A growing movement rejected Christianity and joined their fellow tribal members who had always remained true to their traditional spiritualism. Their gods had never allowed them to suffer as the Christian god had. So secretly, they retreated to their kivas that had not been destroyed, continued with their ceremonial dances, and returned to beating their drums, singing their songs, and trying to restore the balance that had been lost.

Pueblo Revolt (1680)

But the Spanish had lived in their world for more than 80 years and established relationships with Hispanized Indians among them, and soon the Trevin˜o learned that Fray Andre´s Dura´n and several of his relatives believed that Indian sorcerers had bewitched him. Trevin˜o, angered that Pueblo religious leaders had refused to turn their back on traditionalism, in 1675 rounded up 47 people that the friars and their allies identified as “sorcerers.” Brought to Santa Fe´, these Pueblo Indians found themselves belittled, ridiculed, and charged with sorcery. Trevin˜o sentenced four to death by hanging (one committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out), which incensed the pueblo community. Seventy warriors forced their way into his abode and threatened to kill him and his dependents and incite a broad rebellion if the rest were not set free. The rest had been publicly beaten and whipped, but in the end Trevin˜o acquiesced and sent them home as an example that the Spanish government would not tolerate sorcery. He had unwittingly averted a major rebellion, for Pueblo Indian warriors had scattered about the hills above Santa Fe´, awaiting orders. One of those “sorcerers,” an Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan) spiritual elder, returned home to his village to plot revenge. The Spanish minister of government and war under Trevin˜o and the new governor, Antonio de Otermı´n, however, found out about his brooding and plotting. Pohe´-yemo astutely moved north to Taos, far from the tentacles of Spanish authority. He retreated into a kiva and, according to oral history, word spread among the pueblos that while in the kiva, he encountered and was counseled by three key deities of pueblo cosmology. They told him that he needed to lead a rebellion that would eliminate the Spanish from their homelands, but that they must return to traditional ways—destroying all that the Spanish had brought with them: buildings, livestock, missions, and even seeds. For the “God of the Spaniards was worth nothing and theirs was very strong, the Spaniard’s God being rotten wood.” (Knaut 1995, 168). With the assistance of numerous other tribal war and religious leaders from San Ildefonso, Picurı´s, San Lorenzo, Taos, Jemez, Pecos, Tesuque, Santa Clara, and Santo Domingo, Pohe´-yemo (more commonly known as Pope´), began orchestrating a plan to remove the Spanish and destroy all that they had brought. The revolt would begin on August 12, 1680. To keep the Spanish from finding out, Pope´ and the others observed the strictest secrecy. When it came time to notify other pueblos of the plot, he sent runners out under the pain of death to keep the secret if they were apprehended by Spanish authorities. Moreover, the quipo, or knotted cord that indicated which day the revolt should occur (by untying a knot every day), and instructions were to be accepted and the rebellion agreed to by each village on pain of death. When he held meetings, he held them only during feast days at pueblo villages that he believed to be sympathetic, that no one would question a gathering of so many Pueblo men. At one point, Pohe´-yemo learned that his own son-in-law, governor

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of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, had found out about the plot, and Pohe´-yemo had him assassinated. When two of the runners were apprehended and told all they knew, confirmed by the governors of la Cie´nega, San Marcos, and San Cristoba´l (who refused to participate in the rebellion), the Spanish recognized immediately that a rebellion could occur at any moment. When Pohe´-yemo learned of the leak, he moved the rebellion up to August 10, 1680. With the killing of Padre Juan Pı´o at Tesuque village, the Pueblo Revolt began. Pueblos rose up all over the Rı´o Grande corridor, cutting down individual Spaniards where they found them. Whole families were slaughtered out of anger and frustration and travelers were cut down, but the friars suffered the most humiliating and excruciatingly painful deaths. Not all pueblos supported the killing of their friars, however. At San Felipe Pueblo, downriver from Cochitı´, Pueblos encountered a padre fleeing downriver from the violence. They took him in, and hid him. Realizing that he was not safe in their village, they took him to a mesatop, where they sequestered him from the violence in the valley below. Going without water for days, oral history reports that he performed a miracle by causing water to gush forth from a rock. Therefore, examples of Indians protecting the lives of friars do exist. As news began to spread of the atrocities committed against the Spanish settlers, those who could gathered up what they could and rushed to Santa Fe´ in the north or Isleta Pueblo in the south. For jurisdictional purposes, the governor had divided New Mexico into two districts, the Rı´o Arriba (the upper river, above Cochitı´ Pueblo) and the Rı´o Abajo (lower river, including all south to El Paso del Norte) which had a headquarters in Isleta Pueblo. They hoped that their sheer numbers would protect them against the brutality and wrath of the pueblo people. On their journeys, they encountered horrific scenes of death (animals and humans) and destruction of homes, orchards, and fields. Upon arriving in Santa Fe´, they began to understand the extent of the revolt. The governor quickly realized the gravity of the situation and attempted to get word to Isleta Pueblo and the other Spaniards to the south. The Pueblo Indians quickly surrounded Santa Fe´ and began hollering threats, taunting the Spanish by shouting that God and Santa Marı´a were dead, and that their god whom they had always obeyed had never died. They had clearly turned their backs on the Christian god who let them down, and they quickly diverted the water to Santa Fe´. Pueblo Indians continued arriving at Santa Fe´, setting fire to buildings and infiltrating the outskirts of town. On August 20, confronted by his colonists who were in mourning for the friends and family they had lost and the desperate situation in which they found themselves without food and water, and under constant threat of attack, Governor Otermı´n broke out of the city walls and broke the siege. He received wounds on his face and chest from arrows and gunshots, but when the

Pueblo Revolt (1680)

Spanish had once again retreated behind the gates, they had captured 47 Pueblo men. Interrogating them at length, the governor fully understood that he had lost New Mexico. He began to plan for retreat to El Paso del Norte, to recuperate, request more troops, and rebuild his forces to return and take New Mexico militarily. In the meantime, his charges suffered, and they began to plan for the long and difficult journey south—not knowing if the Pueblos would harass them the entire way or if they would be allowed to leave unencumbered. They had lost most of their horses and oxen, they had few wagons, and those who had made it to Santa Fe´ barely had enough clothing for the cold desert nights, but they had no other choice. Two days later, Otermı´n led his people from Santa Fe´, hoping to gather themselves up with the rest of the survivors in Isleta Pueblo in the Rı´o Abajo. In Isleta, however, the southern survivors had also heard rumors of the brutality throughout the province, especially in the north, and within just over a week, heard that all of the Spaniards to the north had been killed. Realizing the futility of remaining, they gathered up what they could and began the long trek south along the Camino Real de la Tierra Adentro that had brought Juan de On˜ate and the first settlers north nearly 100 years before. Little did they know that a motley crew of ragged survivors were slowly making their way south, along the northern reaches of the Camino Real. Along the way, they witnessed the carnage: whole families lay dead, naked, and beaten, some at the doorways to their homes. Four hundred of their fellow Spaniards had perished in the first few days of the revolt, including 21 of the 32 friars in the province. It was a devastating blow to a far-flung province of New Spain. At Sandı´a Pueblo, just north of what would become la Villa Real de Alburquerque (1706), the mission had been destroyed and the vestments scattered about. Piles of excrement lay on the altar, defiling the sanctity of the mission. Spaniards saw bodies strewn about at ranches, men and women beaten and stripped naked, homes and barns and fields on fire. Relatives they had to leave behind, hoping that the Pueblo Indians watching them from the mesa tops as they left chose to remain in waiting, and not swoop down on them for one final blow. But the Pueblo Indians were not interested in killing more Spaniards; instead, they wanted them gone from their province so they could return to their traditional ways. When the Spanish arrived at Isleta Pueblo, they were dismayed to learn that the survivors had already left for El Paso del Norte, the southernmost outpost of New Mexico. Otermı´n sent messengers ahead to ask the other survivors to await them before entering into the Jornada del Muerto. Gathering together, they headed south for El Paso, where they would establish camp until such time as they could reconquer the apostate province. As they arrived, they encountered Father Ayeta, who had come too late with reinforcements (mostly convicts) to assist the colony. Disheartened by the prospects of reporting to the viceroy, Otermı´n quickly

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reconstituted his rabble into a community and began reorganizing for a mission to reconquer New Mexico the following year. Meanwhile in New Mexico, the Pueblo people celebrated their victory and began the long process of destroying all remnants of Spanish authority and dominance. They first went after the churches, and the enormous mission at Pecos served as an example of the wrath of the pueblos against the demands of the friars. First, they set the wood on fire, the altar, doors, and roof. The fire raged with such intensity that the front doors blew outwards, but because the building was made of adobe, the fire died and the bricks still stood. So they scaled the walls and, one by one, began knocking the bricks off the tops of the walls until they tired of the task. Throughout New Mexico, they destroyed and defiled churches, burned homes, ran off livestock, burned fields, cut down orchards, and destroyed documents in Santa Fe´. Their rage, acquired over the past few generations, culminated in the attempted destruction of all things Spanish. To encourage them, Pohe´-yemo circulated among the Pueblo villages, reminding them what the gods had told him. He demanded that they destroy all tools, seeds, livestock, and buildings, everything they had gained from Spanish trade. He demanded that they go down to the river and wash off their baptisms with yucca and water from their sacred rivers. But he began to meet resistance. He even started to make demands upon the villages he encountered, as if they owed him for his leadership. According to Spanish sources based on interviews during Otermı´n’s attempted reconquest in 1681, Pohe´-yemo demanded tribute and carried an arrogance of authority. Very shortly, Luis Tupatu´ , war captain of Picurı´s Pueblo, renounced and removed him from power. For the next several years, the Pueblo Indians attempted to survive in a world without Spanish influence. But with the Spanish, they took their guns and horses, and their military power. Very quickly, the Apache and Navajo saw the confusion that resulted from the removal of the colonial authority and the deteriorating condition of the pueblo coalition. They were joined by the newly arrived Comanche and Ute, who arrived in the region in the late 1600s and early 1700s from the northern Plains and the Plateau region (respectively). The drought did not let up immediately, and the pueblos continued to suffer. South in El Paso, Otermı´n’s attempted reconquest failed, and he was quickly replaced by a new governor, Domingo Jironza Petris de Cruzate in 1683 (1683– 1686, 1689–1691). Jironza rallied forces and attempted to reconquer New Mexico in 1688, making it as far north as Zı´a Pueblo, sacking and destroying it. From Zı´a, he took captives that he brought to El Paso for questioning. Perhaps the most information about the post-revolt confusion comes from Bartolome´ de Ojeda, a Zı´a man who shared what he knew about the revolt with his captors. Fluent in Spanish, Ojeda informed the Spanish about post-revolt New Mexico, the disarray that had

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developed, the continued Apache and Navajo raids, and the disillusionment of the people with Pohe´-yemo and Tupatu´’s authority. Shortly after Jironza’s attempted reconquest, New Mexico once again broke into disarray. Several Pueblos rejected Tupatu´’s authority, and Pohe´-yemo once again rose to authority, only to be deposed again and likely killed before 1692. Jironza attempted to gain yet another appointment as governor, but he lost out to Don Diego de Vargas (1691–1701, 1703–1704), who arrived just in time to lead an expedition into New Mexico in 1692. He successfully marched all the way to Santa Fe´, where he confronted the apostates and demanded a meeting. He entered the gates of Santa Fe´ without weapons and only a friar at his side. He negotiated a settlement whereby the Spanish would return the following year. During his expedition, he visited numerous pueblos and gained their assurances that they would welcome the Spanish. Standing in as godfather to many whose parents requested baptisms for their children, Vargas secured his position as a “member” of the community with reciprocal responsibilities. In El Paso, he mustered his forces, colonists, and supplies, and in 1693, he headed north for the last time. Upon arriving in Santa Fe´, however, the Pueblo Indians refused to vacate the capital, and Vargas set up camp outside the walls, hoping to negotiate their removal. As winter set in and the colonists began to shiver in the cold Santa Fe´ winds, he laid siege to Santa Fe´—much as had the inhabitants 13 years before—and forced them out. They reoccupied the capital and reestablished Spanish authority in New Mexico once and for all. While they faced intermittent violence among some of the pueblos, by 1696, the Pueblo Revolt had officially ended. Vargas had successfully reconquered a willing New Mexico population. Instead of subservience, encomiendas, demands of tribute, the inability of pueblos to defend themselves or leave at will, and forced conversion to Catholicism, new rules applied. Accommodation would be the goals of the new administration. —Sandra K. Mathews See also all entries under Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Cha´vez, Frey Ange´lico. “Pohe´-yemo’s Representative and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.” New Mexico Historical Review 42, no. 2 (1967): 85–126. Espinosa, Jose´ Manuel. Crusaders of the Rı´o Grande: The Story of Don Diego de Vargas and the Reconquest and Refounding of New Mexico. Chicago: Institute of Jesuit History, 1942.

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Pueblo Revolt (1680) Hackett, Charles Wilson, and Charmion C. Shelby, eds. and trans. Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermı´n’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680–1682. 2 vols. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Kessell, John L., ed. Remote beyond Compare: Letters of Don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675–1706. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Kessell, John L. Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Kessell, John L., and Rick Hendricks, eds. By Force of Arms: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, 1691–1693. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in SeventeenthCentury New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Ortiz, Alfonso. The Pueblo. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994. Sa´ nchez, Jane C. “Spanish-Indian Relations during the Otermı´n Administration, 1677–1683.” New Mexico Historical Review 58, no. 2 (April 1983): 133–152. Sando, Joe. Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History. Santa Fe´, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1992. Simmons, Marc. New Mexico: An Interpretive History. New York: Norton, 1977. Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The Leading Facts of New Mexico History. Volume 1. Albuquerque, NM: Horn & Wallace Publishers, 1963. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Readings. Selected and Introduced by David J. Weber. Historians at Work Series. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999.

Franciscans (1209–Present) A Catholic religious order based on the life of St. Francis de Assisi (1181–1226), the Franciscans are best known for their obligation to “poverty of disposition.” In other words, they could not own property as individuals or as a community (although variations do occur within the various divisions of Franciscans). The first Franciscans arrived in the New World in 1523, and many became avid spokespersons for the Indian people. A primary historical focus for Franciscans involved missionary work and preaching, yet they also have served as confessors, ambassadors, mediators, and inquisitors. Dressed in a habit of brown, tied by a distinctive white cord, they traveled throughout colonial landscapes wearing sandals or barefoot. Rarely did they ride beasts of burden. Their method of travel, in fact, frustrated numerous Spanish explorers as they traveled into New Spain’s northern interior. The first Franciscan to venture into the American West, Fray Marcos de Niza, traveled in 1539 on foot in sandals, much to the consternation of his guide, Esteban. After much haranguing, Fray Marcos allowed his guide to hurry ahead, but to send back signs of his discoveries. Before being killed by the Zuni Indians, Esteban had sent a sign indicating a great find. Fray Marcos hurried to peak over a ridge as the setting sun shined on Hawikuh in western New Mexico, and returned to Mexico City to report on the city of great wealth. The following year, he guided the first expedition into New Mexico under Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Finding no wealthy city, Coronado sent the first Franciscan back to Mexico City to explain his lies. When Juan de On˜ate came to New Mexico in 1598, the Franciscans joined his colonization effort—salaries paid by the Spanish Crown. Since the Pope had granted Spain a Patronato Real, the king had almost complete control over the Catholic Church in the New World. By 1607 when New Mexico failed to produce any immediate wealth, the Franciscans convinced the king that they had Christianized over 7,000 Pueblo Indians. For the next 80 years, New Mexico became a missionary colony. Franciscans would engage in missionary efforts in Texas after 1700, Arizona in 1767 (after the Jesuits were removed), and California in 1769. They served the Spanish populations as priests, the Indians as missionaries, and some served the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Often living among Indians, they brought new seeds and livestock for the Indians to master. They made the tribes build their missions, monasteries, and granaries, and attempted to convert them to the Catholic faith.

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Some regions had a checkered past. In California, Spanish authorities forced Rancherı´a Indians to live in consolidated missions. Disease spread rapidly exacerbated by a different diet, dissention broke out, and some authorities forced them to work in obrajes (sweatshops). Mortality rates soared. While the experience in Texas was devastating to Indians in other ways, the friars spread the faith through missions by enticing poorly defended tribal groups into missions stretching outward from San Antonio. The Indians there purportedly appreciated the protection that the Spanish offered; moreover, they learned key elements of farming, irrigation, and dam building, and instituted new crops. Some of those tribes melded into the local populations and, in essence, seemed to disappear as individually recognizable tribes. In New Mexico leading up to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Franciscans began destroying all Pueblo Indian religious sites (kivas in particular) and ceremonial accouterments, and outlawing Indian ceremonies (see Pueblo Revolt). The Pueblo Indians rose up against the Franciscans in New Mexico and succeeded in forcing the Spanish out of their homeland—even if for only 12 years. Of the 32 Franciscans in New Mexico, 21 were killed—many of them in the most humiliating and violent ways. Pueblo Indians defiled the missions that the Franciscans had forced them to build. Upon returning in 1692, the Franciscans allowed syncretization of Catholicism with native beliefs. The Franciscans never had enough missionaries to succeed in their task, and by the early 1800s, missionaries were not replaced and at times, only one Franciscan tended the entire population of New Mexico—leading to the rise of the Hermanos Penitentes. By the 1820s, Mexico called for the secularization of missions. In the end, the Franciscans succeeded in converting thousands of Indians who today still practice Catholicism (and some, also their traditional beliefs). —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Bandelier, Adolph F. The Discovery of New Mexico by the Franciscan Monk Friar Marcos de Niza in 1539. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Madeleine Turrell Rodack. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981. Chipman, Donald. Spanish Texas: 1519–1821. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

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On˜ate, Juan de (c. 1552–1626) Born the son of a wealthy silver miner from Zacatecas, New Spain, Juan de On˜ate became the first European to establish a permanent colonial settlement in what would become the United States of America in 1598. He won the contract to settle northern New Spain from the Spanish king, who forbade any exploration or settlement without a contract and culpability. Funded mostly out of his own pocket and by investors, On˜ate hoped to find great wealth as Mexico City had yielded. For his contract, he was to recruit then arm and equip 200 soldier-colonists—all of whom had to abide by the Colonization Laws of 1573 that demanded peaceful and charitable expansion and to avoid any conflict with Indian people unless in self-defense. On˜ate supplied 10,000 head of livestock, food, gear, clothing, farming equipment and seed, trade goods, medicines, and other supplies for their arduous 1,500-mile trek north from Mexico City. His contract stipulated he would receive the titles of governor (including civil and criminal jurisdiction), captaingeneral, and adelantado (economic power). He could give out land grants and encomiendas (grants of Indian tribute with responsibilities to Christianize and protect), and he drew a small salary from the royal coffers. The crown furnished five friars and a lay priest to accompany him and convert the Indian people. While many of the Rio Grande Indian villages had been abandoned since Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s visit in 1540–1542, New Mexico’s Indian population perhaps topped 60,000. Arriving along the Camino Real de la Tierra Adentro (royal road to the interior), they traveled through mountains, a 90-mile stretch of desert, and along the Rio Grande again until they reached Okey-Owinge village. Here they immediately set up an altar, thanked God, and began digging an acequia (ditch) with the assistance of the Indians so they would have crops the following year. Within months, On˜ate and several dozen men headed west to find the Sea of Cortez, potentially a less dangerous and shorter resupply route from Mexico City. Along the way, Acoma Pueblo enticed some of the soldiers to ascend their mesa for supplies, then killed 8 of the 13. On˜ate realized that he could not let the act go unpunished with so many tribes surrounding them. After consulting with the colonists, On˜ate called for a brutal campaign, guerra de sangre y fuego (war by blood and fire), against the Acoma people. His nephew and 70 men laid siege to Acoma, and in the ensuing battle killed more than 600 Acoma Indians. They marched the surviving Indians to Santo Domingo Pueblo to stand trial for killing Spaniards. Found guilty, On˜ate intended his sentence to scare the other pueblos. The 24 men over age 25 would have a foot cut off and serve 20 years of personal servitude. The rest of the people over 12 years of age were condemned to 20 years

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~ate (1550–1630), who established the colony Statue of the Spanish conqueror Juan de On of New Mexico for Spain. (Advanced Source Productions)

of personal servitude. Children would be distributed to friars for Christian upbringing. Within a year, most Acomas had escaped servitude and returned home (except for the 60 girls sent to monasteries in Mexico City). On˜ate immediately continued searching for mines, but the raids from Apache and Navajo Indians, continued unease between Pueblo and Spanish settler, frustration and attempted abandonment by settlers, and lack of financial rewards caused On˜ate to give up in 1607. He left New Mexico to the Franciscans, who claimed to have baptized 7,000 Indians, and headed to Mexico City to defend himself at his residencia (“trial” held at the terminus of a term to determine whether he had broken any laws). On˜ate was found guilty of 12 charges, among them using excessive force against Acoma, being a poor example by committing adultery, and execution of two of his men (for desertion). He was exiled from New Mexico forever, forced to live in Mexico City for four years, fined, and forced to pay court costs. His honor destroyed, he spent the next nearly 20 years seeking exoneration— even to the Council of the Indies and two kings. Finally, by 1623, he was exonerated,

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and two years later, the king appointed him to the most-sought-after and prestigious Military Order of Santiago, proving that he had transcended above his disgrace from the New Mexico venture. The following year, he died. —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Ayer, Mrs. Edward E. The Memorial of Fray Alonzo de Benavides. Albuquerque, NM: Horn and Wallace, 1965. Hammond, George P. Don Juan de On˜ate and the Founding of New Mexico: A New Investigation into the Early History of New Mexico. Santa Fe´, NM: Quivira Society, 1927. Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Simmons, Marc. The Last Conquistador: Juan de On˜ate and the Settling of the Far Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Otermin, Antonio de (dates unknown) Governor of New Mexico from 1678 until 1682, Antonio de Otermin oversaw the worst loss that the Spanish ever experienced in the colonial world: New Mexico following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. But the New Mexico that Otermin inherited was already on the verge of collapse. Uprisings had occurred in the 1670s, as well as a serious drought that led to famine and diseases rampaging through communities. To make things worse, the Franciscan friars had lost their tolerance for Pueblo Indian ceremonies and begun destroying ceremonial accoutrements and sacred sites. Serious disagreements between the religious and civil authorities grew, and colonists and Pueblo Indians were caught in the midst. For months, New Mexico’s governor and town council had pleaded with Mexico City to resupply the colony and send reinforcements. Finally, in February 1677, they acquiesced, sending a new governor, Antonio de Otermin, as well. The governor quickly established two defensive outposts at key points along the trail. When Otermin first heard of the Pueblo Indian uprising that began on August 10, 1680, he sent Lieutenant Governor and Maestro de campo Francisco Gomez Robledo and a well-armed contingent to investigate the rumors. The reports could not have been worse. They found that angry Pueblo Indians had brutally killed Spaniards all over New Mexico, defiled churches, and burned homes.

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Scared colonists heard the chants of the enraged Pueblo Indians shouting that “now God and Santa Maria were dead . . . and that their own God whom they obeyed never died” (Kessell 2002, 121). The revolt had moved quickly throughout the Rio Grande Valley, and Otermin had to make a decision. There was no turning back. Barricaded inside the defensive walls of Santa Fe´, Otermin held out hope that he could muster enough survivors and retake New Mexico. Nearly a thousand arrived, but as the days wore on, the pueblos laid siege to Santa Fe´, cutting the ditch carrying water into Santa Fe´. The Indians overran what they could, set fire to the church, and ridiculed Catholicism. On August 20, 10 days after the revolt had begun, Otermin broke the siege. Despite serious injuries sustained (flesh wounds on his face and a gunshot to his chest), he evacuated Santa Fe´ and headed south where he hoped to reunite with Lt. Gov. Robledo, who was to wait for him in Isleta Pueblo. But when he arrived, the southern contingent was already gone—having heard the pueblos had killed all the Spaniards in the north. Picking up the pace, Otermin reunited the survivors and continued their march south. The Pueblo Indians watched them go. Upon his arrival in La Salineta (across from El Paso del Norte) on September 18, they encountered two dozen wagons filled with supplies, thanks to Father Ayeta— too late. La Salineta would be their home for the next 12 years. Immediately, he began to investigate what had happened. The survivors numbered fewer than 2,000; 21 of the 32 friars had been executed; and over 380 Spaniards lay dead, some stripped naked and left for the coyotes. Pope´, the revolt’s instigator, demanded that the Indians destroy all things Spanish (homes, churches, livestock, seeds, papers, etc.), but not all pueblos agreed and, in fact, hid religious items from destruction. Otermin hoped to bank on that sentiment, and in 1681, he led his men into New Mexico. He failed to bring New Mexico back under the fold of the Spanish Crown and, in a desperate request sent via Father Ayeta to Mexico City, he begged, “Do everything you possibly can to get me out of here” (Kessell 2002, 152). As he waited, his health began to fail, and in August 1683, his replacement Don Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate relieved him of New Mexico’s governorship. —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of the North Mexican States and Texas. 2 vols. San Francisco: History Company, 1886, 1889. Hackett, Charles Wilson. Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermin’s Attempted Reconquest 1680–1682. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Pueblo Revolt (1680) Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in SeventeenthCentury New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? New York: Bedford/ St. Martins, 1999.

Pope´ (dates unknown) Pope´ is one of the least-known leaders of a major revolt, certainly in what became the United States, and more broadly, in the Americas. After the Spanish retook New Mexico in 1692 under the leadership of Don Diego de Vargas, a native of Spain, Pope´ had already died. Therefore, the only information that survived about Pope´ came from interviews with participants of the Pueblo Revolt, which began officially on August 10, 1680, in Tesuque when Pueblo Indians killed Padre Juan Pio. Often known as Pohe´-yemo, sources explain that Pope´ lived in San Juan Pueblo, in northern New Mexico. He served his community as a respected and unyielding religious leader, but found himself rounded up by the Spanish authorities in 1675 in response to the Franciscan friars’ desire to squelch Pueblo Indian religions once and for all. They believed they had reason not to trust even those Pueblos who had most closely affiliated with Spaniards—for in the Tompiro Pueblos to the south in the Rio Abajo (lower river, or the southern two-thirds of New Mexico), a welltrusted and Christianized Pueblo Indian governor of the Salinas Pueblos, who had also served as a lieutenant in the Pueblo Indian auxiliaries, had attempted to lead a general rebellion against the Spanish colonists in the 1660s. Authorities uncovered the plot and summarily executed Clemente, only to find in his home a stash of traditional spiritual accoutrements, and learned of his intention to leave not a Spaniard alive in the province. Tensions and fear continued to mount, as friars redoubled their efforts to eliminate all traces of Pueblo Indian spiritualism from the province. In 1675, Pohe´-yemo, along with 46 other Pueblo Indians, were brought to Santa Fe´ and put on trial for being sorcerers. Found guilty, the Spanish authorities sentenced four of them to death by hanging (one purportedly committed suicide before the hangings could proceed) and publicly whipped and humiliated the rest. Allowed to return home, they bore physical and psychological scars that helped lead to the revolt of 1680. Pohe´-yemo retreated first to his home in San Juan, but then after threats from authorities, he sequestered himself in the farthermost pueblo of Taos, hoping to

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Pueblo Revolt (1680)  , Tewa spiritual leader and Statue of Pope organizer of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. No  is image or written description of Pope known to exist. This depiction, by New Mexico artist Cliff Fragua, shows him holding the knotted cord that was used to determine when the revolt would begin. (Architect of the Capitol)

get as far from the tentacles of Spanish authority as possible. For the next five years, Pohe´-yemo plotted revenge. Overcautious in his deliberations, fearful that the Spanish would uncover this plot too, Pohe´-yemo kept his deliberations secret in one of the Taos kivas—purportedly meeting with three key dieties from Pueblo cosmology who helped him plot revenge. Other Pueblo leaders joined him, including men from the pueblos of San Ildefonso, Picurı´s, San Lorenzo, Taos, Jemez, Pecos, Tesuque, Santa Clara, and Santo Domingo. Pope´ feared the discovery of his plot so much that he called for the assassination of his own son-in-law, who had learned about the plans for a region-wide rebellion. According to reports, after the Spanish left and before 1682, Luis Tupatu´ deposed Pope´. Pope´ disappeared from the record until 1688, when he deposed Tupatu´ . Many of the pueblos rejected his authority, and a general uprising

Pueblo Revolt (1680)

occurred during which Pope´ was likely killed. Pohe´-yemo, or Pope´, led the Pueblo Indians on the greatest rebellion in the Americas, and the only successful rebellion by indigenous peoples that ended in the complete eviction of their colonial oppressors. —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Cha´vez, Frey Ange´lico. “Pohe´-yemo’s Representative and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.” New Mexico Historical Review 42, no. 2 (1967): 85–126. Hackett, Charles Wilson, and Charmion C. Shelby, eds. and trans. Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermı´n’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680–1682. 2 vols. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in SeventeenthCentury New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Readings. Selected and Introduced by David J. Weber. Historians at Work Series. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999.

Pueblo Religions Pueblo Indian spiritualism is very different than the Western notion of “religion”; rather, it is all inclusive that requires observance 24 hours a day and seven days a week. There is no single “Pueblo Religion” that encompasses all of the 19 New Mexico Pueblos, or the Hopi Pueblo in Arizona, yet several key similarities can be gleaned. Primarily, Pueblo Indians have a universal belief that all things created by the creator, or as Joe Sando (Jemez Pueblo) writes, “the Great One,” have a spirit. This Great One is omnipresent, yet this omnipresence does not carry the same connotation as the Christian god. In fact, Sando writes that in no pueblo tongue is there a word for “religion.” A general belief among pueblos, indeed among many native tribes, involves the belief in the spiritualism that emanates throughout the earth, sky, water, all plants and animals, and all things. They do not believe they have dominion over the Great One’s creations, but rather that they are merely a part of a balance that exists as a result of the respect and deference that they show the earth and all creation. This included periods in which Indian people needed to utilize the resources of the land.

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Therefore, when a Pueblo Indian needed to hunt, he would first ask permission from the animal to offer up its life for the sustenance of the human. That animal would be treated with the utmost respect according to long-standing spiritual traditions before, during, and in its preparations after the kill. Every time a hunt, or illnesses, drought, battle, or other abnormal event occurred, balance had to be restored. Prayer, ceremony, song, or offering helped provide this balance. They also believed that plants had spiritual components as well. Tree branches, in particular fir trees, played a key role in ceremonial dances, held at various intervals throughout the year. Any part of the natural world taken and not used would be returned to the land in some fashion (branches burned, placed in fields, or given to the river, all of which allowed the branch to return to the earth from whence it came). In fact, traditionalist native peoples maintain a rather rigorous spiritual and ceremonial schedule, to preserve their spiritual connection to Mother Earth and Father Sky (for ceremonies that outsiders may attend, see the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center at http://www.indianpueblo.org). Songs (in particular drumming and singing), stories, and dances played an integral role in the ceremonial dances ritualized in the numerous pueblo communities. These had been passed down for innumerable generations, sometimes by gender, family, or clan. Social and spiritual organization therefore also played a key role in their spiritualism. Traditionally a matrilineal people, Pueblo Indians passed their clan “totem” (corn, turkey, cloud, gopher, to name a few) through the mother’s family, and with clan came a host of stories and obligations that were shared orally from mother to child. Because one could not marry within their own clan, obligations crossed family lines and bonded the community together. Furthermore, clans served important functions within the spiritual system of obligation within a community, and provided the basis for the moiety (a grouping of specific clans). In some pueblos, moieties were divided celestially by the solstices: the winter or northern moiety took over leadership of the tribe and ceremonial functions during the winter months, and the summer or southern moiety took their turn during the summer period. Pueblo spiritualism was confronted by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans, and, up until the 1970s, continued to survive despite these outsiders’ best efforts to destroy it. For a complete understanding of the Pueblo spiritualism, the importance of clans, spacial organization of spiritualism and ceremony, and more, the best source is Elsie Clews Parsons’s two-volume Pueblo Religion. —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Hodge, Frederick Webb. “Pueblo Indian Clans.” The American Anthropologist 9 (October 1896): 345–353.

Pueblo Revolt (1680) Ortiz, Alfonso. The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Parson, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Religion. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Sando, Joe S. Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History. Santa Fe´, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1992.

Santa Fe´ Established in 1609 officially, Santa Fe´ saw its first permanent Spanish inhabitants perhaps as early as 1608, when Juan de On˜ate began moving some of his colonists south from San Gabriel del Yungue, in an attempt to find a more defensible and certainly less crowded community. When colonial proprietor and son of a silver miner Juan de On˜ate won the contract to settle this northern province of New Spain in 1598, he brought with him 129 soldier-colonists and their families as well as Indian allies as auxiliaries, over 10,000 head of livestock, and seed provisions to start farming immediately. He found relatively receptive Pueblo Indians at Okay Owinge (San Juan Pueblo), where they established the first Spanish community in New Mexico. By 1607, New Mexico had failed to yield profitable resources, so On˜ate gave up his term as governor and began reshifting the remaining colonists further south to what would become the first formal villa under the Spanish legal system. Governor On˜ate’s replacement, Pedro de Peralta, declared the community La Villa Real de Santa Fe´ de San Francisco de Asisi by viceregal orders in 1610. Moving the capital officially from San Gabriel to Santa Fe´, Peralta hoped to provide his constituencies with the same that On˜ate hoped to provide, a more defensible position, but also a more central one to the numerous pueblos that surrounded the Spanish settlers. Santa Fe´’s location, along the river and at the base of the beautiful Sangre de Cristos, was an excellent location for a community. The valleys provided farmland that had not already been claimed by Pueblo Indian people, and also had enough space for the Indian auxiliaries, the Tlaxcalans, to also have homes and farm sites. Therefore, at Santa Fe´, the longest-established U.S. capital continued to operate into the 21st century from very humble beginnings. Built around a center square or plaza, Santa Fe´ emanated out from its official buildings on the plaza to neighborhoods divided by narrow streets. On the plaza, one would typically find the governor’s mansion (now part of the Museum of New Mexico), a mission or cathedral, a military installation, and perhaps other official homes or headquarters. Santa Fe´, however, is the “city different,” and

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instead located San Miguel Mission off the main plaza. The Spanish military did eventually have a presidio at Santa Fe´, but it did not occur in 1610. The plaza provided the focal point for the community, and the stream became its lifeblood. Because of the constant raids and counterraids by Apache and Navajo, who had historically raided Pueblo Indian communities for stores of grain but now found that the Spanish had even better selections of goods (horses, sheep, crops, and even human captives for the taking), the Spanish turned Santa Fe´ into a walled city. The walls could not keep out the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, however, and many of the Spanish outside those walls suffered death at the hands of angry Pueblo Indians, incensed at demands made by their colonial oppressors (see the entry “Pueblo Revolt”). When the Pueblo Indians arrived at Santa Fe´, inside was huddled just over half of the remaining 2,500 Spanish colonists and their allies. When the Spanish refused to leave the city, the rebels diverted the river of life and forced the Spanish to vacate Santa Fe´ and flee south to El Paso del Norte, where they waited more than a dozen years to retake their capital. In the meantime, Pueblo Indians occupied the buildings of Santa Fe´ , turning the governor’s mansion into a multistoried, pueblo-styled building. When the Spanish returned in 1692 under the leadership of Governor Diego de Vargas, he walked boldly inside the walls of Santa Fe´ to parlay with the Pueblo Indians at the plaza—with no weapons and only a friar at his side. His show of bravado and promises of protection against the nomadic raiders caused the pueblos, one by one, to acquiesce to the return of Spanish control. When the Spanish returned to Santa Fe´ the following year, however, the Pueblo occupiers refused to give up the homes they had occupied for over half a generation. The Spanish laid siege and took back the capital, which served as the capital of Spanish New Mexico until 1821. That year, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, and Santa Fe´ became a Mexican capital. Within 25 years, Santa Fe´ would fall under U.S. authority when General Stephen Watts Kearney and the Army of the West conquered New Mexico without encountering any resistance. Santa Fe´, “The City Different,” has since become a mecca for tourists from all over the world. Its downtown plaza retains its charm as a quiet small town, but just outside of the old Spanish district, Santa Fe´ bustles like any town of the 21st-century American West. —Sandra K. Mathews

Further Reading Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in SeventeenthCentury New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Simmons, Marc. New Mexico: An Interpretive History. New York: Norton, 1977.

Pueblo Revolt (1680) Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Readings. Selected and Introduced by David J. Weber. Historians at Work Series. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999.

Declaration of Pedro Naranjo, December 19, 1681 Taking the form of testimony given, this document presents the views of Pedro Naranjo, of San Felipe Pueblo, as to the course of events that led to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In it, Naranjo explains the role that religion played in the revolt, although the transcription of the testimony is clearly from the Spanish point of view.

Declaration of Pedro Naranjo of the Queres Nation [Place of the Rio del Norte, December 19, 1681.] In the said plaza de armas on the said day, month, and year, for the prosecution of the judicial proceedings of this case his lordship caused to appear before him an Indian prisoner named Pedro Naranjo, a native of the pueblo of San Felipe, of the Queres nation, who was captured in the advance and attack upon the pueblo of La Isleta. He makes himself understood very well in the Castilian language and speaks his mother tongue and the Tegua. He took the oath in due legal form in the name of God, our Lord, and a sign of the cross, under charge of which he promised to tell the truth concerning what he knows and as he might be questioned, and having understood the seriousness of the oath and so signified through the interpreters, he spoke as indicated by the contents of the autos. Asked whether he knows the reason or motives which the Indians of this kingdom had for rebelling, forsaking the law of God and obedience to his Majesty, and committing such grave and atrocious crimes, and who were the leaders and principal movers, and by whom and how it was ordered; and why they burned the images, temples, crosses, rosaries, and things of divine worship, committing such atrocities as killing priests, Spaniards, women, and children, and the rest that he might know touching the question, he said that since the government of Sen˜or General Hernando Ugarte y la Concha they have planned to rebel on various occasions through conspiracies of the Indian sorcerers, and that although in some pueblos the messages were accepted, in other parts they would not agree to it; and that it is true that during the government of the said senor general seven or eight Indians were hanged for this same cause, whereupon the unrest subsided. Some time thereafter they [the conspirators] sent from the pueblo of Los Taos through the pueblos of the custodia two deerskins with some pictures on them signifying conspiracy after their manner, in order to convoke the people to a new rebellion, and the said deerskins passed to the province of Moqui, where they refused to accept them. The pact which they had been forming ceased for the time being, but they always kept in their hearts the desire to carry it out, so as to live as they are living today. Finally, in the past

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Pueblo Revolt (1680) years, at the summons of an Indian named Pope´ who is said to have communication with the devil, it happened that in an estufa of the pueblo of Los Taos there appeared to the said Pope´ three figures of Indians who never came out of the estufa. They gave the said Pope´ to understand that they were going underground to the lake of Copala. He saw these figures emit fire from all the extremities of their bodies, and that one of them was called Caudi, another Tilini, and the other Tleume; and these three beings spoke to the said Pope´, who was in hiding from the secretary, Francisco Xavier, who wished to punish him as a sorcerer. They told him to make a cord of maguey fiber and tie some knots in it which would signify the number of days that they must wait before the rebellion. He said that the cord was passed through all the pueblos of the kingdom so that the ones which agreed to it [the rebellion] might untie one knot in sign of obedience, and by the other knots they would know the days which were lacking; and this was to be done on pain of death to those who refused to agree to it. As a sign of agreement and notice of having concurred in the treason and perfidy they were to send up smoke signals to that effect in each one of the pueblos singly. The said cord was taken from pueblo to pueblo by the swiftest youths under the penalty of death if they revealed the secret. Everything being thus arranged, two days before the time set for its execution, because his lordship had learned of it and had imprisoned two Indian accomplices from the pueblo of Tesuque, it was carried out prematurely that night, because it seemed to them that they were now discovered; and they killed religious, Spaniards, women, and children. This being done, it was proclaimed in all the pueblos that everyone in common should obey the commands of their father whom they did not know, which would be given through El Caydi or El Pope´. This was heard by Alonso Catitı´, who came to the pueblo of this declarant to say that everyone must unite to go to the villa to kill the governor and the Spaniards who had remained with him, and that he who did not obey would, on their return, be beheaded; and in fear of this they agreed to it. Finally the senor governor and those who were with him escaped from the siege, and later this declarant saw that as soon as the Spaniards had left the kingdom an order came from the said Indian, Pope´, in which he commanded all the Indians to break the lands and enlarge their cultivated fields, saying that now they were as they had been in ancient times, free from the labor they had performed for the religious and the Spaniards, who could not now be alive. He said that this is the legitimate cause and the reason they had for rebelling, because they had always desired to live as they had when they came out of the lake of Copala. Thus he replies to the question. Asked for what reason they so blindly burned the images, temples, crosses, and other things of divine worship, he stated that the said Indian, Pope´, came down in person, and with him El Saca and El Chato from the pueblo of Los Taos, and other captains and leaders and many people who were in his train, and he ordered in all the pueblos through which he passed that they instantly break up and burn the images of the holy Christ, the Virgin Mary and the other saints, the crosses, and everything pertaining to Christianity, and that they burn the temples, break up the bells, and separate from the wives whom God had given them in marriage and take those whom they desired. In order to take away their baptismal names, the water, and the holy oils, they were to plunge into the rivers and wash

Pueblo Revolt (1680) themselves with amole, which is a root native to the country, washing even their clothing, with the understanding that there would thus be taken from them the character of the holy sacraments. They did this, and also many other things which he does not recall, given to understand that this mandate had come from the Caydi and the other two who emitted fire from their extremities in the said estufa of Taos, and that they thereby returned to the state of their antiquity, as when they came from the lake of Copala; that this was the better life and the one they desired, because the God of the Spaniards was worth nothing and theirs was very strong, the Spaniard’s God being rotten wood. These things were observed and obeyed by all except some who, moved by the zeal of Christians, opposed it, and such persons the said Pope´ caused to be killed immediately. He saw to it that they at once erected and rebuilt their houses of idolatry which they call estufas, and made very ugly masks in imitation of the devil in order to dance the dance of the cacina; and he said likewise that the devil had given them to understand that living thus in accordance with the law of their ancestors, they would harvest a great deal of maize, many beans, a great abundance of cotton, calabashes, and very large watermelons and cantaloupes; and that they could erect their houses and enjoy abundant health and leisure. As he has said, the people were very much pleased, living at their ease in this life of their antiquity, which was the chief cause of their falling into such laxity. Following what has already been stated, in order to terrorize them further and cause them to observe the diabolical commands, there came to them a pronouncement from the three demons already described, and from El Pope´, to the effect that he who might still keep in his heart a regard for the priests, the governor, and the Spaniards would be known from his unclean face and clothes, and would be punished. And he stated that the said four persons stopped at nothing to have their commands obeyed. Thus he replies to the question. Asked what arrangements and plans they had made for the contingency of the Spaniards’ return, he said that what he knows concerning the question is that they were always saying they would have to fight to the death, for they do not wish to live in any other way than they are living at present; and the demons in the estufa of Taos had given them to understand that as soon as the Spaniards began to move toward this kingdom they would warn them so that they might unite, and none of them would be caught. He having been questioned further and repeatedly touching the case, he said that he has nothing more to say except that they should be always on the alert, because the said Indians were continually planning to follow the Spaniards and fight with them by night, in order to drive off the horses and catch them afoot, although they might have to follow them for many leagues. What he has said is the truth, and what happened, on the word of a Christian who confesses his guilt. He said that he has come to the pueblos through fear to lead in idolatrous dances, in which he greatly fears in his heart that he may have offended God, and that now having been absolved and returned to the fold of the church, he has spoken the truth in everything he has been asked. His declaration being read to him, he affirmed and ratified all of it. He declared himself to be eighty years of age, and he signed it with his lordship and the interpreters and assisting witnesses, before me, the secretary. ANTONIO DE OTERMI´N (rubric); PEDRO NARANJO; NICOLA´S RODRIGUEZ REY (rubric); JUAN LUCERO DE GODOY (rubric); JUAN Ruiz DE CASARES (rubric); PEDRO DE LEIVA (rubric);

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Pueblo Revolt (1680) SEBASTI´AN DE HERRERA (rubric); JUAN DE NORIEGA GARCI´A (rubric); Luis DE GRANILLO (rubric); JUAN DE LUNA Y PADILLA (rubric). Before me, FRANCISCO XAVIER, secretary of government and war (rubric). Source: Charles Wilson Hackett, Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermin’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680–1682, vol. 2 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1942), 245–249.

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) Leisler’s Rebellion was a New York–based uprising against the Dominion of New England that lasted from May 31, 1689, to March 20, 1691. Jacob Leisler’s brief regime was characterized by virulent anti-Catholicism and suppression of dissent, but it also made important strides toward intercolonial cooperation and representative government. In the 1680s, New York witnessed the clash of conflicting impulses toward absolutism and representative government. In the autumn of 1683, New York’s first legislature drafted the Charter of Liberties and Privileges, a liberal constitution that provided for individual liberties and triennial meetings of the colonial assembly. The colonists’ timing was poor: Charles II was considering a massive reorganization of imperial administration to strengthen the Crown’s authority over the British dominions in North America. After Charles’s death in 1685, his brother James II disallowed New York’s charter and, in 1688, ordered that the colony be incorporated into the highly centralized Dominion of New England. James’s administrative reforms were widely unpopular. They fanned his subjects’ fears that James, a Catholic, might have a penchant for absolutism. Anxiety escalated when James’s young wife gave birth to a son on June 10, 1688. The new baby, by virtue of his sex, would displace his older, Protestant sisters in the line of succession. His very existence raised the specter of an enduring Catholic dynasty in England. In the spring of 1689, word reached America that James II’s Dutch son-in-law, William of Orange, had invaded England at the behest of Parliament and established a Protestant monarchy. On April 18, 2,000 militiamen staged a coup d’e´tat in Boston, arresting the Dominion’s governor, Sir Edmund Andros. The four New England colonies then reinstated elected governments under their old charters. In New York, the Dominion’s lieutenant governor, Francis Nicholson, nervously expanded his council in an attempt to ward off a similar uprising or a foreign invasion. He did so in vain. On May 31, the New York militia seized Fort James. Nicholson fled to England. His absence created a vacuum of power in the colony, especially as Nicholson’s councilors hesitated to swear loyalty to William III. On June 8, a provincial committee of safety declared a prominent militia officer, Jacob Leisler, captain of Fort James, and on June 22, Leisler’s government proclaimed William and Mary’s

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reign. On August 16, the committee of safety appointed Leisler commander in chief of the province and dispatched two agents to England to seek validation for the new government. Meanwhile, two of the Dominion councilors, Nicholas Bayard and Stephanus Van Cortlandt, fled to Albany, where they organized opposition to Leisler’s government. Leisler dispatched troops to take the city by force, but the expedition failed when Mohawks who were loyal to the opposition threatened to attack them on the outskirts of Albany. Leisler’s agents, particularly the uneducated publican Joost Stoll, made a poor impression at court, and Leisler grew impatient waiting for their return. In December 1689, Leisler received an Order in Council addressed to Francis Nicholson or whomever was administering New York in Nicholson’s absence. Leisler interpreted these instructions as legitimizing his government. He claimed the title of lieutenant governor, dissolved the committee of safety, formed a new council, and called for elections to a provincial assembly. This regularization of the rebels’ de facto government was accompanied by a purge of Leisler’s opposition and the imprisonment of Nicholas Bayard. By now, anti-Catholicism was fast becoming one of the distinguishing traits of Leisler’s regime. In February 1690, an allied French and Iroquois force attacked the frontier settlement of Schenectady, killing 60, taking 27 prisoners, and burning the settlement to the ground. Leisler responded by imprisoning Catholics and Catholic sympathizers. He also seized this opportunity to recover his authority over the cowed residents of Albany by promising to protect them from French aggression. To do so, he solicited other colonies’ military assistance. On May 1, 1690, delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New York met to plan a military expedition to Quebec; Maryland and Barbados participated by letter. This convention marked the colonies’ first attempt to plan coordinated military interaction on their own initiative, rather than under the auspices of the Crown. Leisler’s regime grew steadily more unpopular over time. In June 1690, New Yorkers learned that William had appointed Nicholson lieutenant governor of Virginia. Dissidents rioted and attacked Leisler, who soon had to face the failure of his military campaign to Quebec as well. Leisler responded by briefly imprisoning the commander, Fitz-John Winthrop, thereby alienating the English Puritan settlers on Long Island. The anti-Leislerians were a diverse group, including James II’s prote´ge´s (“the Duke’s men”), affluent Dutch merchants who had assimilated to English rule, and commercially oriented English immigrants. All of these men valued broad toleration and individual civil liberties, as outlined in the 1683 charter, and feared Leisler’s authoritarian tendencies. Although Leisler aimed to establish legislative government in New York, he never made a coherent statement of his constitutional philosophy and seemed to believe that military authority trumped individual freedoms.

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691)

Meanwhile, William III, unimpressed by Leisler’s agents’ presentation of his case, had appointed Henry Sloughter governor of New York and reinstated Nicholson’s council. The first detachment of troops representing Sloughter’s government arrived in January 1691, under Captain Richard Ingoldesby. Leisler held Ingoldesby’s troops at bay for two months, refusing to surrender to anyone other than the duly appointed governor. When he did at last surrender to the newly arrived Sloughter on March 20, Sloughter—responding in part to the persuasions of Leisler’s old rival Nicholas Bayard—had him arrested and tried for treason. Leisler refused to plead; nevertheless, he was convicted, hanged, and beheaded on May 16, 1691. Jacob Milborne, Leisler’s secretary, lieutenant, and son-in-law, was also executed. Several other Leislerians suffered imprisonment and confiscation of property. The hasty executions of Leisler and Milborne garnered criticism for Sloughter’s regime. The Dutch initiated an inquiry into the executions, and Dutch pressure on the English government led Parliament, in 1695, to reverse both men’s convictions and posthumously legitimize Leisler’s administration. In 1702, the New York Assembly followed suit by voting an indemnity of £2,700 to Leisler’s heirs. In the same year, Leisler’s old nemesis, Nicholas Bayard, was tried for treason by a government sympathetic to Leisler’s rule. Though Bayard was acquitted, Leislerian and anti-Leislerian factions remained discernible forces in provincial politics until at least 1710. Leisler’s Rebellion defies easy interpretation. Clearly, it was one manifestation of the Glorious Revolution in America, a counterpart to similar uprisings in Massachusetts and Maryland. Some historians have envisioned Leisler’s Rebellion as an expression of ethnic conflict, a last-ditch effort by Dutch nationalists to reestablish Dutch hegemony in New York. Yet the Leislerians and the anti-Leislerians were both Anglo-Dutch coalitions; Leisler’s bitterest enemies, Bayard and Van Cortlandt, were themselves members of the Anglicizing Dutch merchant class. A class model, pitting New York’s liberal Anglo-Dutch mercantile elite against the more traditional middling Dutch colonists whom Leisler mobilized, fits the facts somewhat better. What can be said with some certainty is that Leisler’s Rebellion was the last hurrah of Dutch power in New York; after 1691, Dutch colonists, Leislerians and anti-Leislerians alike, rapidly assimilated to a British colonial identity. In the aftermath of Leisler’s Rebellion, New York’s political scene stabilized along lines that, though fractious and corrupt, were decidedly more liberal than those that prevailed in the 17th century. From its founding until 1689, New York was ruled by a series of regimes that privileged royal or proprietary prerogative. Leisler, though an uncertain republican, set an important precedent by summoning a provincial legislature to legitimate his rule. When anti-Leislerians returned to

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power in 1691, they swiftly established a colonial assembly that would meet annually and pass laws that would be effective unless and until they were disallowed by the Crown. Ironically, Leisler’s coup d’e´tat helped his colony attain its longed-for representative government. —Darcy R. Fryer See also all entries under Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794).

Further Reading Archdeacon, Thomas J. New York City, 1664–1710: Conquest and Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976. Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lovejoy, David S. The Glorious Revolution in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Murrin, John. “The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century New York.” In Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz, John M. Murrin, and Douglas Greenberg. 5th ed., 380–418. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Ritchie, Robert C. The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664– 1691. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Calvinism Calvinism, also known as the Reformed theological tradition, was a form of Protestantism that sprang from the teachings of the Swiss pastor John Calvin (1509–1564). It took root in New England as “Puritanism” and in New Netherland under the aegis of the Dutch Reformed Church. Calvin’s numerous writings, especially The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536–1560), laid the groundwork for Calvinist theology. The Synod of Dort (1618– 1619) identified five core tenets of Calvinism, including the total depravity of human beings; God’s unconditional election of a few human beings for eternal life; Christ’s limited atonement for the sins of the elect, but not for the sins of others; and irresistible grace, which those elected for salvation achieved not by works but solely by overwhelming awe before the incomprehensible majesty of God and corresponding disgust for the loathsome insignificance of human beings. The role of the Calvinist church was to gather those who were predestined for salvation—the “visible saints”—and unite them in a quest to reform society along godly lines. The Synod of Dort’s final tenet, the perseverance of the saints, assured the elect that God would preserve them in a state of grace and prevent them from falling permanently into a state of sin. In practice, Calvinists emphasized an austere lifestyle and rigid community discipline. In Calvin’s model city, Geneva, the consistory strictly regulated residents’ behavior and excommunicated those who failed to abide by community standards. During the 16th century, John Calvin developed a strict moral brand of Protestantism that would become known as Calvinism, which would become the primary religious influence of the Puritans in New England. (Library of Congress)

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Most European Calvinists adopted a y¨resbyterian organizational model, in which individual congregations sent representatives to regional presbyteries and synods. Most New Englanders preferred Congregationalism, a form of Calvinism in which individual congregations exercised complete autonomy. In either case, Christ was considered the sole head of the Church; ministers and elders were called by their congregations and answered to them, not to an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Swiss in origin, Calvinism took root in many parts of Europe, including France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England, by the end of the 16th century. French Calvinists were known as Huguenots, while the most influential group of English Calvinists—those who sought to “purify” the established Church of England by purging it of latitudinarian practices—were called Puritans. In 17th-century North America, Calvinists dominated the religious scene north of the Hudson River; the Puritans of New England and the Dutch Reformed of New Netherland shared the same tenets of faith. Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 brought a third wave of Calvinists, approximately 2,000 Huguenot refugees, to British North America, where their arrival roused popular indignation at Catholic persecution of Protestants. Calvinism was a religious movement with political implications. By the late 17th century, Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic associated Calvinism with representative government and opposition to tyrants and Catholicism with the centralizing tendencies of such absolutists as Louis XIV of France. Calvinists were prominent among those who opposed James II’s scheme of centralization, and Jacob Leisler’s ardent Calvinist faith was a major factor that propelled him to assume leadership of the rebellion that bears his name. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. McNeill, John T. The History and Character of Calvinism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Dominion of New England (1686–1689) The Dominion of New England was a short-lived conglomerate colony created by James II in 1686 to streamline colonial administration and strengthen the monarch’s authority over the American colonies. Unpopular from the start, the Dominion was overthrown by Leisler’s Rebellion in 1689. When the Duke of York—the patron for whom New York was named—came to the throne as James II in 1685, one of his priorities was to exert greater royal

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691)

control over England’s diverse and individualistic American colonies. James II had spent several of his formative years in France following the execution of his father, Charles I, in 1649. As the son of a deposed king, and as a Catholic, he admired the French absolutist model of monarchy. James II also believed that wringing more revenue from the colonies would diminish the monarch’s financial dependence on Parliament—one of the chief sources of his father’s political struggles—and thus enhance his authority at home. In 1686, James II consolidated five colonies—Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—into a single super-colony called the Dominion of New England. In 1688, he added New York and East and West Jersey as well. James II dissolved the existing colonial assemblies and concentrated power in the hands of a governor-general, Sir Edmund Andros, a deputy governor, Francis Nicholson, and an appointed council. Andros ruled from Boston, while Nicholson was stationed in New York. As governor of the Dominion, Andros introduced numerous innovations, all of them unpopular. Many of his measures were specifically designed to yield revenue: he rejected existing land titles to reap fees from the reissuance of land grants, required landholders to pay annual quitrents, substantially increased taxes, and strictly enforced the Navigation Acts. Andros also infringed on colonists’ political rights, limiting New England town meetings to one per year and suspending the colonial legislatures. He sought to undermine New England’s Puritan churches by forbidding ministers to draw their salaries from public funds. Andros raised the specter of absolutism by articulating a radical new political theory that inhabitants of the British Empire, unlike Englishmen at home, were subject solely to the arbitrary power of the monarch and were not entitled to representative government or other English civil rights. The Dominion of New England was unpopular from the start. American colonists resented the loss of elected assemblies, rising taxes, and the Crown’s interference with local religious, social, and legal traditions. When rumors of the Glorious Revolution reached New England in the spring of 1689, the residents of Boston promptly arrested Andros and reinstated the old, separate colonial governments throughout New England. New York’s uprising, which began in late May of the same year, was complicated by the colonists’ tangled ethnic and religious loyalties, but at root, it too was a popular effort to restore the colony’s government to a form that better reflected the needs and values of the people who lived there. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Lovejoy, David S. The Glorious Revolution in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Viking, 2001.

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Leisler, Jacob (c. 1640–1691) Jacob Leisler served as New York’s de facto lieutenant governor from June 1689 until March 1691. He governed the colony with a mixture of pragmatism, militant Calvinism, and tendentious autocracy. Leisler was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in a region roiled by the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). His family was both highly educated—his grandfather was a prominent jurist who championed subjects’ rights to oppose monarchs—and devoutly Calvinist—Leisler’s father, a Huguenot minister, had fled the Inquisition in Spanish-occupied Frankenthal just a few years before Jacob’s birth. After studying at a Protestant military academy, Leisler immigrated to New Netherland in 1660 as second-in-command of the Dutch West India Company’s troops. Leisler prospered in America, trading in furs, tobacco, and slaves and investing extensively in real estate. His marriage to Elsie Tymens van der Veen linked him to the port’s emerging mercantile elite. By the 1680s, Leisler was one of the richest men in New York and one of the city’s leading civic activists. At various times, he served as a juror, court-appointed arbitrator, justice of the peace, tax assessor, militia captain, and colonial agent. A founding member of New York’s French Reformed Church, he became an activist on behalf of Huguenot refugees. Aside from his championship of the Calvinist faith, Leisler had few discernible political convictions; he cooperated with both the Dutch and English regimes. Soon after the Dominion of New England crumbled in the spring of 1689, Leisler emerged as the leader of the dissident faction in New York. The exact sequence of events that brought him to power remains obscure, but on August 16, 1689, Leisler became the province’s commander in chief, and in December, he seized the title of lieutenant governor. Leisler’s leadership of New York was pragmatic and vigorous. He strengthened the fortifications at Fort James and, after an initial defeat, succeeded in quelling a rival regime based in Albany. He called for new elections to a provincial assembly, symbolically restoring legislative government. Following a French and Indian attack on Schenectady on February 9, 1690, Leisler lashed out against Catholics and, in May, convened a meeting of delegates from four colonies (two others participated by letter) to plan a military response to the perceived Catholic menace. This meeting marked the American colonies’ first attempt at coordinated military action independent of the British government. Leisler’s fall came swiftly. Henry Sloughter, whom William III had appointed to govern New York, finally arrived in the province in March 1691. Leisler, who had been holding Sloughter’s deputy at bay, promptly surrendered to the new

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governor. Nevertheless, Sloughter, influenced by Leisler’s political opponents, had his predecessor arrested. He was convicted of treason, hanged, and beheaded on May 16, 1691. This was not, however, the final verdict on Leisler’s role in the Glorious Revolution. In 1695, Parliament, under diplomatic pressure from the Dutch, posthumously legitimized Leisler’s administration and reversed his conviction for treason. The New York Assembly subsequently granted an indemnity of £2,700 to Leisler’s heirs. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Archdeacon, Thomas J. New York City, 1664–1710: Conquest and Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976. Voorhees, David William. “The ‘Fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 51 (1994): 447–472.

Religious Conflict in 17th-Century New York Religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, among different types of Protestants, and within the Dutch Reformed Church played a prominent role in Leisler’s Rebellion. The intermingling of religious and political conflict in Leisler’s New York echoed the situation in early modern Europe, where the fusion of religious and political agendas had sparked the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and the English Civil War (1642–1649). Late-17th-century New York was characterized by exceptional ethnic and religious diversity. The Netherlands was an oasis of religious freedom, and the Dutch settlements in America attracted every sort of Protestant, as well as some Catholics and Jews. These immigrants were chagrined to find that New Netherland granted them less latitude than Holland did; Peter Stuyvesant, in particular, vigorously suppressed the worship of Lutherans, Quakers, Mennonites, Catholics, and Jews. Some religious minorities welcomed the English conquest in 1664 because the English, unlike the Dutch, permitted them to worship publicly. Dutch Calvinists felt threatened by the English government’s welcoming attitude toward other Protestants, but they reserved their greatest animus for Catholics. The Duke of York (later James II) appointed several Catholic administrators, including Thomas Dongan, who served as governor from 1683 to 1688. The establishment of a Jesuit school in New York City also attracted Catholics to

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the province. Anti-Catholic prejudice was particularly strong among poor and middling Dutch colonists, and Jacob Leisler—a devout Calvinist—effectively mobilized this prejudice to secure popular support for his government. Ironically, some of the bitterest religious conflict associated with Leisler’s Rebellion took place within the Dutch Reformed Church. Churches were one of the principal settings in which 17th-century colonists participated in civic life, and conflicts evoked by Leisler’s Rebellion often played themselves out, at the local level, as disputes over church affairs. The intermingling of political and religious conflict cut both ways: sometimes attitudes toward Leisler determined parties within the local church; sometimes, as in the scandal over the behavior of Reverend Laurentius van den Bosch of Kingston, local issues took precedence over provincial affairs, forging unlikely coalitions between Leislerians and anti-Leislerians. The principal fault line within the Dutch Reformed Church lay between the clergy and the laity, especially laymen of modest means. By the 1680s, the Dutch Calvinist clergy had discovered that a quiet acquiescence to English rule was the most effective means of securing doctrinal autonomy. Some found Leisler’s rabid anti-Catholicism repugnant, and many feared that the collapse of English authority would make it difficult to collect the taxes that supported the church. For all of these reasons, the Dutch clergy hesitated to support Leisler’s regime. Many less affluent congregants resented the clergy’s failure to embrace Leisler. This resentment played itself out in diminished attendance at services, disputes over church finance, and ultimately, a shift in popular allegiance. In the early 18th century, middling Dutch colonists drifted away from the established Dutch Reformed Church to join congregations led by less learned, more pietistic preachers. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Balmer, Randall. A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Balmer, Randall. “Traitors and Papists: The Religious Dimensions of Leisler’s Rebellion.” New York History 70 (1989): 341–372. Haefeli, Evan. “A Scandalous Minister in a Divided Community: Ulster County in Leisler’s Rebellion, 1689–1691.” New York History 88 (2007): 357–389.

Jacob Leisler’s Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety at Boston, June 4, 1689 This letter, written by Jacob Leisler near the beginning of the rebellion he led against the government of the Dominion of New England, reflects the religious and political strife taking place at the time, both in the colonies and in England. In it, he asks for the help of the Committee

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) of Safety in Boston and newly installed governor Simon Bradstreet, against those supporters of James II (England’s new, Catholic king). Honored Sirs—I make bold to acquaint you of the securing of the fort by the traine bonds of New york. Here enclosed is the declaratione N: 1: In two dayes after the Governor & his Counsell with severall of their creatures had gained so much upon the people that they were afraied & halfe of myne company were they worked most upon had left me, but the second of this instant being my watch in the fort I came with 49 men & entered in the fort, without the word, nor to be questioned whereupon I resolved not to leave till I had brought all the traine bound fully to joine with me, The 3d wee had newes of three ships in sight upon which I tooke occasione to allarume the towne & gott five Captanes besides me & 400 men to signe the enclosed paper N: 2: which discouraged the adverse party, and since they have been indifferent still, The Lievt Governor Nicholls is departed last night without taking leave, It is beleeved he intends to goe with Collo” dongane who has layen in the bay this sixteen dayes. N: 3: is a copie of an evidence whereof we have three of the same tenor, N: 4 is a copie of an address to his ma’ies sent to four merchants with Capt Selock & one with Capt wathland who has faithfullie promised to deliver for to be presented to the King, and depose what they know more, then wee declare, I have made one full Inventory of the fort with guns and ammunitione, and found of 33 great gunes but fifteen fitt to use of 50 barrells pouder was but one that could goe 7 degrees the rest &ct. 3. 4: & 5 some non at all, the most part of the country have invited the rest to appeare as a counsell of safty two men out of one County, the 26th of this instant In the mean tyme the fort is guarded by five companies two watches 1^ company per night, and the Capt whose watch it is is for that tyme Capt of the fort, the Collector in the Custome house is a rank papist, I cannot gett the other Captanes to resolve to tume him out but acts still as before The Mayer medles with no civil 1 affaires & discourages constables to keep the peace expecting some seditione for to make the Inhabitants odious, there is non acts others then in quality of a single Capt, sir Edmond Andross & his wicked crew have carried all the Records out of this country to Boston, I hope by the prudent care in the late expeditione at Boston have taken care to preserve it, and I request you to take a speciall care for it, till our Committee of safety may take some prudent care about it, the time will not permitt me to enlarge onely I desire your advice in approbatione in our actione, If wee deserve it and after myne respects I remain & c. Jacob Leisler. Source: E. B. O’Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, vol. 2 (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1849), 3–4.

Jacob Leisler: “A Modest and Impartial Narrative” (1690) Leisler’s Rebellion was a popular uprising that erupted in the colony of New York in May 1689. Led by Jacob Leisler, the rebellion was a Protestant reaction to the colonial administration

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Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) appointed by the Catholic king, James II. The following description of the start of the insurrection comes from an account of the rebellion entitled “A Modest and Impartial Narrative,” which is attributed to Nicholas Bayard, one of Leisler’s most vocal opponents. As such, the account is neither “modest” nor “impartial,” but a virulent attack on Leisler and his supporters, who governed the colony between 1689 and 1691. Opposed by the landed and merchant interests, who lost control of the colonial economy during his administration, Leisler was subsequently arrested and executed for treason. A Modest and Impartial Narrative Of several Grievances and Great Oppressions That the Peaceable and most Considerable Inhabitants of Their Majesties Province of New-York in America Lye Under, By the Extravagant and Arbitrary Proceedings of Jacob Leysler and his Accomplices. Printed at New-York, and Re-printed at London 1690. The Reader is hereby advertised, That the Matters contained in the following Declaration and Narration, were intended to have been presented to the Mayor’s Court in New York, the 25th of January last past, but that the Fury and Rage of this Insolent Man Leysler, was grown to that height, that the day before, by his order, several Persons of Note were violently seized and divers Houses broken open, so as it was not thought safe to proceed in such Method. For which reason it’s thought well to publish the same, for information of all into whose hands it may come, but more especially for the benefit of our fellow Inhabitants, who are abused by the Pretentious of this common Violator of our Laws and Liberties, as by the following Narrative will plainly appear: Wherein the Courteous Peruser is desired to take notice, it hath been our great Care to relate nothing but Matters of Fact, of which we have substantial Credible Evidences.

The Narrative, etc. Out of the deep sense we have of the good providence of Almighty God, in their Majesties happy accession to the Imperial Crown of England, etc., In the first place we, in a most Christian manner, with hearts and hands lifted up to Heaven, give Glory to Almighty God, for this so happy a Revolution, whereof it hath pleased the most High to appear the Principal Author. In the next place, we cannot but declare and publish to the world our hearty and thankful resentments of the Noble, though hazardous Enterprise of the late Prince of Orange, our most dread Sovereign King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc., the Noble Hero of this Age, for the Protestant Religion, and the preservation of the Laws and Liberties of the English Nation inviolated, manifesting hereby that as in duty bound, so in point of Gratitude, we can do no less than dedicate our Lives and fortunes to their Majesties services, with our most serious and continued prayers for their Majesties long and happy Reign over us, being well satisfied in our own selves, that what our native Land so plentifully enjoys under their Reign, to wit, the Laws and Liberties of the English Nation, we (though inhabiting a remote part of their Dominions) shall share with them in the common Propriety.

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) In consideration whereof, in all humble and obedient manner as Dutiful subjects to their Majesties, and well wishers to this their Province of New York, we can do no less than in the presence of God, and to the world, declare our abhorrence and dislike of the unreasonable, Illegal and Arbitrary proceedings of some Men inhabiting with us in this their Majestys Province who have usurped Authority over us. Against all such proceedings of theirs hereafter faithfully and impartially set down and against them, as the Actors thereof, we do hereby publickly declare and protest. Now to the end that the Reasonableness of this our Protestation may appear unto all to whose hands it may come, we count ourselves obliged to give a brief recital of the case of our Late Lieutenant Governour Francis Nicholson, for the more peaceable quiet and satisfactory governing this their Majestys Province. To obviate all suspicion of Jealousies that might arise in ill affected turbulent spirits, our said Lieutenant Governour by and with the consent of so many of the Council as here resided (upon the whispering of the late happy change) did convene together, 1 with the Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council men of the City of New York, with all the Commission Officers of the Militia of this City and Country; at which convention our said Lieutenant Governour proposed to admit of part of the Train-bands of this City and County to take their turns of watching and warding within their Majesties Fort under their own Officers; And further offered, with the advice and consent of his Council, Civil and Military Officers, there met and assembled, that the Customs formerly paid by the Inhabitants of this Province should still continue, only with this alteration, that whereas formerly it was expended and laid out in defraying of the charges of the Government, and Soldiers in pay in the Garrison, it should thence forward be imployed in the fortifying and putting this City in a posture of defence against a foreign Enemy, on which the welfare and safety of this Province so much depends. In pursuance of the same an order issued forth from the said convention, signed by the Lieutenant Governour, his Council, the Mayor and Aldermen of this City, and most of the Commission Officers of the Militia, none shewing so great a dislike to it as Jacob Leysler, one of the Captains of the Train bands of this City, who at that time had a Ship loaden with wines, the customs whereof amounted to upwards of one hundred pounds; the payment of this he utterly refused, alledging, The Collector, being a Papist, was not qualified to receive it, denying the then power to be legal; but whether for that or his own private interest let the impartial judge. The turbulent mind of this person not being satisfied in denying the payment of the usual Customs, though appointed for the use aforesaid, he sets himself upon inventing ways how he might overturn the Gov’t which was then peaceable and quiet. The first thing he falls upon was to stir up and animate the people of the East end of Long Island to advance with sufficient force to take possession of the Fort, lest it should be in danger of being delivered up to a Foreign Power; this readily took with them whose minds were already heated by the example of Boston in clapping up of our Governour Sir Edmund Andros, and after some consultations amongst themselves, they put forward in a Hostile manner increasing as they came along the Island, until they were so far advanced as the Town of Jamaica, being then about eighty in number, whence they halted, and sent up

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Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) three1 of their principal leaders to discourse the Lieutenant Governour, who upon their coming convened his council, the Mayor and Aldermen of this City, and the Commission Officers of the Militia of City and County, into which Convention the Persons sent were admitted, where after some long debates they seemingly went away satisfied, at least so far as that they and the men accompanying them returned home to their own Townes and habitations, without doing the least hurt or damage to any. This stratagem failing . . . Leysler, in a short time after a Rumour was spread amongst the quiet Inhabitants of this City, of a horrible design there was of murdering them, their wives and children, as they were worshipping of God in the Dutch Church within the Fort, and the Sunday prefixed, when this cruel act was to be accomplished; Captain Leysler in the mean time instigating and stirring up the Inhabitants to self preservation against this imaginary design, which so far prevailed with part of the Inhabitants as that the Friday before the Sunday markt out by this report for the pretended massacre, they rose in a hostile manner; the first who appeared in arms were some under Leyslers Command who (as a plot was laid) went to the House of their Captain, and threatened to shoot him if he did not head them. This no ways surprised the courageous Captain; a substantial reason why, himself being the sole contriver of it: Yet whether prevailed most, the want of valour, or the apprehensions, if he should miscarry in this bold attempt, the Country would be destitute of one so fit as himself to command, we leave the judicious to determine. However it was it seemed not good unto this Champion to venture himself, but commits the conduct of his Men unto one Stoll, famous for nothing, unless his not being worth a groat; up marches Stoll with his brisk followers, and to the Fort gates they draw near, where they met with a very civil Gentleman, one Hendrick Cuyler, left under Captain Abraham Depeyster, who commanded that part of the Train bands, who by turn had the Guard in the Fort that day; this Persons civility was such that it’s hard to determine whether Stoll and his party without were more desirous to enter, than he within was ready to open the Gates to them. In fine, entrance they had with great acclamations and joy on both sides, that so meritorious a design was not prevented. How far this valiant Lieutenant Cuyler, in this base act of his, hath answered the Law of Arms or the trust reposed in him, we will not now determine; but sure we are, the season they took for accomplishing this their unmanlike contrivance, doth not a little add to their crime, it being of that juncture of time when our Lieutenant Governour and conventment (whereof we have before made mention) were consulting for the more orderly and peaceable Governing this their Majesties Province, who at this sudden change were startled, and acted what was left in their power, publickly protesting against this rude Action, and the Actors thereof. By this time their great Champion Leysler being well assured all danger and hazard was over, he most couragiously Girds on his Sword, Marches stoutly up to the Fort, in order to his carrying the Game he had so fairly begun, where he is joyfully received, and a consultation immediately held, how they should obtain the Keys of the Fort, which the Lieutenant Governour had in Custody, being in the City Hall, where he was in consultation as is already hinted. The evening approaching, Captain Lodwick and his Company advances to the Fort to mount the Guard, as his turn was; some time after his being in the Fort, nothing would

Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) satisfy the Tumultuous Multitude, but that three or four files of men must be sent under the Command of William Churchill, Sergeant to Captain Lodwick, to fetch the keys from the Lieutenant Governour (a fitter person for such a Message could not be sent than this Churchill, infamous for v/his mutinous and turbulent spirit). With much Insolence this impertinent impudent fellow rushed into the room where the Lieutenant Governour was, and demanded the keys; the Lieutenant Governour commanded him to call his Captain, who was prevailed with to come, hoping thereby to appease the people, unto whom the Lieutenant Governour delivered the keys, and Captain Lodwick returning to the Fort, the expectations of the multitude being answered, after publishing Ja. Leysler Colonel, all leave the Fort to Captain Lodwick and his Company, who stayed their usual time and it was then agreed upon amongst the Captains, that each should take his turn to reside in the Fort as Chief, till their Majestys pleasure should be further known. The Lieutenant Governour, his Council and Convention aforesaid, taking into their serious considerations, what danger the Moneys was in, paid by the Inhabitants of this their Majestys Province as well for Customs as Publick Taxes, which at that time was secured in the Fort, The said convention agreed upon and ordered the Moneys should be removed to the House of Frederick Phillips1 one of the Council, a man of known credit and the most considerable for Estate in their Majesties Province. This was concluded on the day our Usurper Leysler, by his Instruments, seized the Fort, being the 31st day of May last past. But to no purpose was this agreement of the convention; for those who had made themselves masters of their majesties Fort were resolved to command the Money too, being the sum of seven hundred seventy three pounds, which they peremptorily denied the removal of, when demanded by the Lieutenant Governour, in pursuance of the order aforesaid. How they have disposed of this Money, is not our present business to enquire; we leave that until the happy arrival of a Governour Legally commissionated from the King. The Fort being thus in possession of the Captains of this City, by turns, all the violence used for severall days was that upon the arrival of any Vessel, great or small, a file of Musqueteers were sent on board, the Masters and Passengers carried to the Fort, and the Letters taken from them, some whereof were open’d, and publickly read amongst the People. Never the like known in this place, under any former English Governor. Source: Charles M. Andrews, ed., Narratives of the Insurrections 1675–1690, Original Narratives of Early American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 320–326.

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Stono Rebellion (1739) In 1739, approximately 20 slaves in South Carolina developed a plan for escaping to freedom in Spanish-held Florida. This event, known as the Stono Rebellion, is the largest and bloodiest slave rebellion of colonial British North America. South Carolina emerged in the early 18th century as an agricultural colony based on a plantation economy that centered on rice and later indigo. Both crops were labor intensive and grown on large plantations along the coast. Demands for labor were met by the initial enslavement of Native Americans and then the importation of individuals from Africa. In particular, South Carolinians favored slaves from the west coast of Africa. Slaves exceeded the number of free individuals in South Carolina as early as 1708. By 1740, there were approximately 39,000 slaves in South Carolina representing 66.1 percent of the total population in the colony (Edgar 1998, 78). The resistance of slaves to their condition assumed many forms. At times, a slave would strike a white overseer or other individual mistreating him. However, such actions led to severe punishments, including death. Slaves learned to hold their anger and frustration or to resist through other means. Slaves practiced many alternative forms of resistance to their plight, with sabotage or work slowdowns the most common choices. Barns mysteriously burned and animals disappeared from their pens. Many slaves yearned to escape and head south toward Spanish Florida, where freedom awaited them. In 1726, South Carolina dispatched an official delegation to St. Augustine, Florida, to secure Spanish acknowledgement to abide by a 1713 agreement to return fugitive slaves from the English colonies. The delegation returned without receiving a firm assurance from the Spanish. Slaves continued to escape and make their way to Florida, where some were armed and returned to raid farms in English-held territory. Despite the hope of freedom, many fugitive slaves or those on captured English vessels were sold rather than freed by the Spanish. In 1733, the king of Spain issued a decree that officially granted freedom to all fugitive slaves from English territory. Although the Spanish in Florida did not immediately abide by the decree, by 1738 they began freeing many fugitives who had escaped from English colonies to the north. The Spanish Decree of 1733 and increasing rumors of slave unrest were issues addressed by the South Carolina Assembly when it met in early 1739. The

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members also discussed the problem of increasing numbers of slaves escaping and heading south toward Spanish Florida, where apparent freedom awaited. In July 1739, a Spanish vessel arrived in Charleston (spelled Charlestown at that time) reportedly carrying a message from James Oglethorpe of Georgia. Rumors later emerged that the vessel carried a man of African origin who spoke English and stopped at several small inlets along the coast as it approached Charleston. Whether these rumors are true and the Spanish helped instigate the Stono Rebellion have never been proven. On September 9, 1739, approximately 20 slaves met near the Stono River in St. Paul’s Parish. Many of these slaves were recent arrivals from Angola and were led by a man whose name has been definitively lost to history but reported as “Jemmy” or “Jonny.” The group crossed the Stono Bridge, approximately 20 miles south of Charleston, and entered Hutchinson’s Store where they stole weapons and gunpowder and murdered Robert Bathurst and Mr. Gibbes, who operated the establishment. The fugitives left the heads of both men on the front steps. They then entered the home of Mr. Godfrey and murdered him, his son, and daughter. Continuing southward, the fugitives arrived at Wallace’s Tavern. The innkeeper, known to be benevolent to slaves, survived the encounter. However, the group murdered Mr. Lemy along with his wife and child before moving on and burning the home of Colonel Hext, whose overseer and his wife did not survive the incident. The fugitives burned the homes of three more families and killed the inhabitants as they continued south toward the Georgia border at the Savannah River. They approached the home of Thomas Rose, another man well known for this benevolence toward slaves. Rose’s slaves hid him and his family to ensure their safety. As the fugitives marched, they gathered those who willingly joined them and forced many others to accompany the group to prevent any from warning the white population. Reportedly, the fugitives raised a standard and acquired two drums to mark their advance. Many other white individuals who encountered the band were murdered. Lieutenant Governor William Bull and four other men were riding north toward Charleston when they encountered the fugitive group, which numbered approximately 50 individuals at this point. Bull and his companions managed to escape and rode to the south, warning the countryside. The fugitives continued their progress toward the Georgia border while increasing their numbers. By the afternoon, they halted near the Jacksonboro (Jacksonborough) ferry at the Edisto River. Armed white citizens organized and rode to intercept the fugitives marching toward them. They found the group resting where they had stopped along the Edisto River. At least two of the fugitives fired upon their opposition, while others loaded weapons or turned to run. The armed white planters fired a volley killing

Stono Rebellion (1739)

or wounding approximately 14 individuals. Others surrendered, only to be shot after brief questioning. Some who persuaded the planters that they had been forced to join the fugitives were spared. Escaping fugitives were hunted and killed before the planters placed their heads on the mileposts along the road as a warning to other slaves. The Stono Rebellion resulted in the deaths of approximately 75 black and white individuals. Fear and shock resulted in rumors of other supposed plots over the next few months. Many white planters moved their families to Charleston for safety while militia members increased patrols. Six months later, a slave tipped white settlers to another plot that resulted in trials for 67 slaves and the execution of 10. In the spring of 1740, the South Carolina Assembly passed a piece of legislation known as the Slave Codes. The document modified earlier codes that set rules of behavior for slaves and slave owners. Viewing Spanish Florida as an instigator of slave agitation in the colony, South Carolina authorized public funds, vessels, and men to accompany James Oglethorpe of Georgia for a punitive expedition against the Spanish. The operation failed and proved to be a waste of money. The legislature also placed a new importation tax on slaves, doubling their cost. Recent slaves arriving from Angola were seen as organizers of the Stono Rebellion and South Carolina wanted to reduce the numbers of these individuals who were seen as troublemakers. This plan succeeded and reduced the number of imported slaves during the 1740s to 1,562 from 12,589 brought into the colony between 1735 and 1740 (Edgar 1998, 76). In turn, the colony encouraged increased immigration from white settlers to ease the high percentage of slaves in South Carolina. This action failed to make a significant reduction in the percentage of slaves in the colony. Historical questions about the Stono Rebellion still linger. First, the Stono Rebellion is sometimes known as “Cato’s Rebellion”; however, it is not accurately known whether the slave named “Cato” was associated with the Stono Rebellion or the suppressed insurrection of 1740. Second, despite the existence of Spain’s 1773 decree and the arrival of the Spanish vessel in Charleston, there is little historical evidence for direct Spanish involvement in the Stono Rebellion. However, the knowledge that possible freedom awaited in Florida did prompt those in the Stono Rebellion, as well as many other individuals before 1739, to escape south toward the Spanish colony. —Terry M. Mays See also all entries under New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

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Further Reading Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Smith, Mark M. “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion.” Journal of Southern History 67, no. 3 (August 2001): 513–534. Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1101–1113. Wax, Darold D. “ ‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739–1745.” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 136–147. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

Slave Codes Many states enacted slave codes as early as the 17th century and maintained them until the end of the Civil War. The codes were state regulations governing the movement and activities of slaves and, in some cases, the conduct of plantation owners. The purposes for developing these codes included the suppression of slaves to prevent escape attempts from servitude as well as possibly reduce the chances of any slaves gathering in large numbers for the purpose of revolts. South Carolina passed its first slave code in 1686 and the state’s Slave Code of 1740, written as a result of the Stono Rebellion of 1739, proved to be the most comprehensive in colonial America and the pre–Civil War United States. Georgia based its 1755 slave code on South Carolina’s 1740 document. The Slave Code of 1740, known by its official title as An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province, restated many of the regulations in South Carolina’s earlier slave codes as well as added new provisions specifically developed as a result of the 1739 Stono Rebellion. The Code consisted of 17 handwritten pages directed at all individuals who could be classified as slaves,

The plantation police, or home guard, examine African American passes on the levee road in the South. Black codes were used during Reconstruction to control and regulate the movement of former slaves. (Bettmann/Corbis)

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including “Negroes” (those individuals transported directly from Africa or other locations and sold in South Carolina as well as their children), “Indians,” “mulattoes” (individuals of ethnically black/white mixed parentage), and “mustizoes” (individuals of ethnically Native American/white mixed parentage). The document’s official purpose can be seen in two separate categories. First, the Slave Code established rules to ensure slaves remained in obedience and subjugation. Second, it outlined regulations to govern the conduct of slaveholders to ensure they did not prompt slaves to run away or rebel through excessive mistreatment. After listing those categories of people who could be held as slaves, the 1740 document defined the institution of slavery and outlined the position of individual slaves and their offspring as personal property to be held in perpetuity unless changed in accordance with existing laws such as those permitting the granting or purchasing of personal freedom. Regulations governing the conduct of slaves included restrictions on movement. A slave could not cross the boundary of a plantation or town, if living in the latter, without being accompanied by a white person unless carrying written permission of the slaveholder. The 1740 Act even included an example of a permission note. Punishment for this violation could be the receipt of up to 20 lashes on the bare back. Any white individual who provided written permission for the movement of a slave without consent of the slaveholder had to pay 20 pounds to the latter. Other restrictions placed on slaves included details on the trial and punishment of slaves who violated the 1740 Act, punishments for striking free individuals, and the banning of personal business transactions conducted by slaves in Charleston. The 1740 Act outlined guidance for slaveholders and included the punishment for beating a slave without “sufficient cause” as a 40-shilling fine. Slaveholders who did not provide slaves with a labor-free Sunday without justification were subject to fines. The document provided the laws associated with the pursuit and capture of escaping slaves. The General Assembly of South Carolina agreed in the document to compensate any individual injured while pursuing or apprehending a runaway slave or a slave conducting an act deemed unlawful by the Slave Act of 1740. Despite the existence of the rigid slave code, both slaves and slaveholders tended to ignore the regulations whenever possible. A scanned copy and a transcription of the actual Slave Code of 1740 from South Carolina can be found at the website of the Teaching American History in South Carolina project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. —Terry M. Mays

Further Reading “1740 South Carolina Slave Code.” Acts of the South Carolina General Assembly, 1740 # 670. South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina.

Stono Rebellion (1739) Teaching American History in South Carolina. “Transcript of the 1740 Slave Code.” http:// www.teachingushistory.org/tTrove/1740slvcodetranscrip.html (accessed August 30, 2008). Wax, Darold D. “ ‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739–1745.” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 136–147. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

South Carolina Colonial South Carolina developed an early plantation-based economy requiring a large work force. Landowners solved the labor issue by importing slaves from Africa and the Caribbean when Native Americans did not work out well as plantation labor. The pre-American Revolution economy of South Carolina depended heavily on the production of rice and later indigo for export. Rice in particular was a very labor-intensive and challenging crop to produce on a large scale. As a result, South Carolinians favored the importation of slaves from what is referred to as the Senegambia region of West Africa, where slaves were often experienced in rice production. In fact, many of these individuals had been slaves in West Africa before being sent to South Carolina. As the plantation economy grew, so did the number of slaves imported to Charleston. Slaves exceeded the number of free individuals in South Carolina as early as 1708. By 1740, the approximately 39,000 slaves in the colony made up 66.1 percent of the colony’s total population (Edgar 1998, 78). Charleston served as a major importation and transit center for slaves bound for the American colonies. Approximately 40 percent of all slaves brought directly from Africa to the 13 colonies transited through the city. The large number of West African slaves retained in the South Carolina lowcountry surrounding Charleston led to the development of a unique coastal culture and the Gullah language, which was still spoken by some individuals in the early 21st century. Although South Carolina developed slave regulations beginning in the late 17th century and, in 1740, passed the strictest slave code in the colonies as well as independent America, slaves in the colony often lived in better conditions than those in other areas, including North Carolina and Virginia. The sheer numbers of slaves in South Carolina and their critical importance to a successful plantation economy prompted many slaveholders to ignore some provisions of the slave codes and not interfere in various aspects associated with the personal lives of slaves,

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although such benevolence could not substitute for freedom (Littlefield 1991, 62–64; Edgar 1998, 78–79). Other slaveholders could be quite repressive. Slaves not only worked the plantations and performed household tasks, but also served in the early-18th-century militia fighting against both the Spanish and Native Americans. Many slaves practiced passive resistance against the institution of slavery, while others offered a more active form by running away alone or in larger numbers. Rebellions involving mass runaways and violence were not common but stirred fear among the white population and prompted the development of slave regulations, known as slave codes, as early as 1686. The first slave rebellion in South Carolina dates from 1720 and is known as the Primus Plot. A slave reported the scheme before it could fully develop, forcing the escape of those involved. Many associated with the plot were later captured and executed. The largest and most famous slave revolt in the 13 American colonies is known as the Stono Rebellion. The 1739 South Carolina incident resulted in the deaths of approximately 75 people (black and white) and the passage of the Slave Code of 1740. South Carolina resisted attempts to end slavery throughout the latter half of the 18th century and played a significant role in ensuring its protection was added to the fledging U.S. Constitution in 1787. —Terry M. Mays

Further Reading Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Wax, Darold D. “ ‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739–1745.” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 136–147. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

Description of the Rebellion by Georgia Governor James Oglethorpe (1739) On September 9, 1739, a literate slave named Jemmy (or, in some sources, Cato) led about 20 other slaves in an armed uprising that eventually resulted in the deaths of about 25 whites. After recruiting another 50 to 60 slaves, Jemmy tried to lead his followers into Spanish Florida, but the slaves were caught by the South Carolina militia, and more than 40 died in the ensuing battle. Below is a description of the uprising and its aftermath by James Oglethorpe, the governor of the colony of Georgia. The Stono Rebellion was the largest African slave insurrection of the colonial period.

Stono Rebellion (1739) Sometime since there was a Proclamation published at Augustine, in which the King of Spain (then at Peace with Great Britain) promised Protection and Freedom to all Negroes Slaves that would resort thither. Certain Negroes belonging to Captain Davis escaped to Augustine, and were received there. They were demanded by General Oglethorpe who sent Lieutenant Demere to Augustine, and the Governour assured the General of his sincere Friendship, but at the same time showed his Orders from the Court of Spain, by which he was to receive all Run away Negroes. Of this other Negroes having notice, as it is believed, from the Spanish Emissaries, four or five who were Cattel-Hunters, and knew the Woods, some of whom belonged to Captain Macpherson, ran away with His Horses, wounded his Son and killed another Man. These marched f [sic] for Georgia, and were pursued, but the Rangers being then newly reduced [sic] the Countrey people could not overtake them, though they were discovered by the Saltzburghers, as they passed by Ebenezer. They reached Augustine, one only being killed and another wounded by the Indians in their flight. They were received there with great honours, one of them had a Commission given to him, and a Coat faced with Velvet. Amongst the Negroe Salves there are a people brought from the Kingdom of Angola in Africa, many of these speak Portugueze [which Language is as near Spanish as Scotch is to English,] by reason that the Portugueze have considerable Settlement, and the Jesuits have a Mission and School in that Kingdom and many Thousands of the Negroes there profess the Roman Catholic Religion. Several Spaniards upon diverse Pretences have for some time past been strolling about Carolina, two of them, who will give no account of themselves have been taken up and committed to Jayl in Georgia. The good reception of the Negroes at Augustine was spread about. Several attempted to escape to the Spaniards, & were taken, one of them was hanged at Charles Town. In the latter end of July last Don Pedro, Colonel of the Spanish Horse, went in a Launch to Charles Town under pretence of a message to General Oglethorpe and the Lieutenant Governour. On the 9th day of September last being Sunday which is the day the Planters allow them to work for themselves, Some Angola Negroes assembled, to the number of Twenty; and one who was called Jemmy was their Captain, they suprized a Warehouse belonging to Mr. Hutchenson at a place called Stonehow [Stono]; they there killed Mr. Robert Bathurst, and Mr. Gibbs, plundered the House and took a pretty many small Arms and Powder, which were there for Sale. Next they plundered and burnt Mr. Godfrey’s house, and killed him, his Daughter and Son. They then turned back and marched Southward along Pons Pons, which is the Road through Georgia to Augustine, they passed Mr. Wallace’s Tavern towards day break, and said they would not hurt him, for he was a good Man and kind to his Slaves, but they broke open and plundered Mr. Lemy’s House, and killed him, his wife and Child. They marched on towards Mr. Rose’s resolving to kill him; but he was saved by a Negroe, who having hid him went out and pacified the others. Several Negroes joyned them, they calling out Liberty, marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating, pursuing all the white people they met with, and killing Man Woman and Child when they could come up to them. Collonel Bull Lieutenant Governour of South Carolina, who was then riding along the Road, discovered them, was pursued, and with much difficulty escaped & raised the Countrey. They burnt Colonel

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Stono Rebellion (1739) Hext’s house and killed his Overseer and his Wife. They then burnt Mr. Sprye’s house, then Mr. Sacheverell’s, and then Mr. Nash’s house, all lying upon the Pons Pons Road, and killed all the white People they found in them. Mr. Bullock got off, but they burnt his House, by this time many of them were drunk with the Rum they had take in the Houses. They increased every minute by new Negroes coming to them, so that they were above Sixty, some say a hundred, on which they halted in a field, and set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums, to draw more Negroes to them, thinking they were now victorious over the whole Province, having marched ten miles & burnt all before them without Opposition, but the Militia being raised, the Planters with great briskness pursued them and when they came up, dismounting; charged them on foot. The Negroes were soon routed, though they behaved boldly several being killed on the Spot, many ran back to their Plantations thinking they had not been missed, but they were there taken and [sic] Shot, Such as were taken in the field also, were after being examined, shot on the Spot, And this is to be said to the honour of the Carolina Planters, that notwithstanding the Provocation they had received from so many Murders, they did not torture one Negroe, but only put them to an easy death. All that proved to be forced & were not concerned in the Murders & Burnings were pardoned, And this sudden Courage in the field, & the Humanity afterwards hath had so good an Effect that there hath been no farther Attempt, and the very Spirit of Revolt seems over. About 30 escaped from the fight, of which ten marched about 30 miles Southward, and being overtaken by the Planters on horseback, fought stoutly for some time and were all killed on the Spot. The rest are yet untaken. In the whole action about 40 Negroes and 20 whites were killed. The Lieutenant Governour sent an account of this to General Oglethorpe, who met the advices on his return form the Indian Nation He immediately ordered a Troop of Rangers to be ranged, to patrole through Georgia, placed some Men in the Garrison at Palichocolas, which was before abandoned, and near which the Negroes formerly passed, being the only place where Horses can come to swim over the River Savannah for near 100 miles, ordered out the Indians in pursuit, and a Detachment of the Garrison at Port Royal to assist the Planters on any Occasion, and published a Proclamation ordering all the Constables &c. of Georgia to pursue and seize all Negroes, with a Reward for any that should be taken. It is hoped these measures will prevent any Negroes from getting down to the Spaniards. Source: Allen Chandler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, vol. 22 (Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd Press, 1913), 232–236.

New York Slave Insurrection (1741) The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741, also known as the New York Conspiracy of 1741, involved some slaves and also poor white settlers planning to burn down New York City in a series of fires, and then take over. The ill treatment of slaves in New York had led to plots and conspiracies hatched by slaves either to escape or to take revenge on their masters as well as ordinary people whose attitude to slavery was seen to be, at best, apathetic. These seem to have taken place every two or three years from the 1690s, and in 1737, George Clarke, the acting governor of New York, told the state legislature that slaves should not be hired out to businesses where they could undercut the rates of pay charged by white craftsmen and artisans because this was forcing some of the latter out of business, and some of these had been forced to leave the state. The War of Jenkins’ Ear, between Britain and Spain, broke out in 1739, and in the following year, it became part of the bigger War of Austrian Succession. The Spanish, to stir up trouble in the British colonies, had offered freedom to any slave who supported them, and this had led to a small slave revolt in South Carolina known as the Stono Rebellion, which had broken out in September 1739. With many of the state troops in New York helping with the British attack on Cuba, there were also fewer soldiers in the state than normal. In the winter of 1740–1741, there was an economic depression in New York City, which at that time had a population of 11,000, of whom 2,000 were slaves. It was a cold winter, and some of the people were living in miserable conditions, unable to afford enough fuel to keep warm. There was also great tension between the poor whites and the slaves. Although the economic situation improved slightly, by the early spring of 1741, many people were still in hardship. On March 18, 1741, the residence of the governor caught fire, and the flames spread to the church adjoining it. Worried that the city archives might be destroyed if another nearby building, where they were kept, also caught fire, the governor ordered all the records thrown out the windows, and they were then taken to the City Hall. A soldier, Griffith Evans, was burned to death in the fire. Another fire broke out on March 25, after the one at the governor’s house, and this time it was at the Battery, which burned down quickly. There was another fire

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a week later, on April 1, and more fires followed this on a weekly basis. There were often fires in the city, but the number of them and their locations did make some people suspicious. On April 6, 1741, a series of four fires broke out, and a white passerby saw a black man running away. He tried to catch him, and although he was unsuccessful, with the help of other people, the suspect was identified as a slave called Cuffee who was owned by Adolph Philipse. In theory, the slaves were supposed to be watched and prevented from wandering the street at night, but this was found to be impractical and hence not enforced. The Council of the City of New York then began an investigation into the fires, and this task was entrusted to Daniel Horsmanden, who established a grand jury to investigate “whites who sold liquor to blacks.” The first man in his sights was John Hughson, a poor shoemaker who had grown up in the town of Yonkers and then moved to New York City about five years earlier along with his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law. Unable to find work as a cobbler, he opened a tavern near Trinity Churchyard on the Hudson River, quickly gaining a reputation as a place for slaves, free African Americans, and soldiers. Stolen goods were regularly sold there but the police were unable to pin the thefts on Hughson. The investigations by Horsmanden centered on a group of convicted thieves—Cuffee, and two others called Caesar (a slave owned by John Vaarck, a baker) and Prince (a slave owned by John Auboyneau)—who became known as the Geneva Club. Caesar and Prince had already come to the notice of the authorities in 1736 when they led slaves to steal gin from Baker’s Tavern in New York—both being publicly whipped as punishment. Horsmanden had to get evidence on Hughson, which was finally provided by Mary Burton, an indentured servant of Hughson. She told him that there was a conspiracy by which poor whites and African Americans were intent on burning down New York. Gradually, Horsmanden managed to get more information from Burton, especially after he threatened to jail her. She told him that Hughson was working with Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee, and the four of them were hiring other people to light a number of the fires. Horsmanden then offered a reward of £100 for a white person, £45 for a free black or Indian, and £20 and freedom for any slave, for information. On May 2, 1741, Caesar and Prince were found guilty of burglary and sentenced to death. On the following day, a fire engulfed seven barns, and the two slaves who were caught were then burned at a stake. On May 6, Hughson and an Irish woman called Peggy or Margaret Sorubiero, who worked as a prostitute at Hughson’s tavern, were also arrested. Caesar and Prince were hanged on May 11, and enough evidence was collected to start trials of other conspirators. Those arrested named other people, and those investigated named more. It was not long before the hysteria had seen the naming of about half the adult male

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population of New York. Some of the slaves captured were Spanish sailors, or at any rate claimed to be such, and this meant that they had to be sold to slave dealers who took them to the Caribbean. However, in his investigations, Horsmanden was convinced that the arson attacks were too well organized for somebody such as John Hughson to organize. This led him to investigate the background of John Ury, a teacher who had recently arrived in New York. He spoke Latin and was arrested on suspicions that he was actually a Roman Catholic priest, and then Horsmanden came to the view that he was a Spanish agent who came to New York to stir up trouble. He was tried, named by Burton as a conspirator, and executed. The result of the trials was that 17 African Americans and 4 whites were hanged, 13 African Americans were burned to death, and 70 were banished from New York City. As the hysteria died down, many of the remaining prisoners were released. There is doubt that the Spanish were actually involved, with many historians believing that it was actually a conspiracy of slaves rather than inspired by the Spanish. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953– 1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York. New York: Free Press, 1985. Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime and Colonial Law. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. Johnson, Mat. The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in EighteenthCentury New York. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

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Fires With most homes in New York in 1741 having a large number of open fireplaces, and with candles being used throughout the city, which boasted many wooden houses, the likelihood of a fire was high. It was made worse by many places having quantities of hay for horses and other livestock. As a result, as early as 1648, the Dutch in New Amsterdam introduced the first Fire Ordinance, a “bucket law” by which people needed to have a bucket ready in case of fires. Because many thought that these precautions were wholly inadequate, in 1731, “A Law for the Better Preventing of Fire” was passed, and a New York Fire Brigade was established, with two water-pumping machines—‘two Compleat fire Engines,’ ” which cost $200—being bought from a Mr. Newshams, from England. These needed trained operators, and there was also sufficient worry about arson that in 1736 the first fire brigade office was established in front of City Hall, and on December 16, 1737, the New York Volunteer Fire Department was established, with a staff of 30. In addition, the firemen would always be helped by members of the public, who would form a line passing buckets of water to any conflagration. The problem with the arson attack on March 18, 1741, was that as the fire spread from the residence of the governor, people thought that it might set ablaze the gunpowder store at the fort, in spite of the store being sealed underground. It was at times such as these that many people who were helping the firemen pulled out. Moreover, during times of arson attacks such as that on March 18, 1741, the city authorities feared that looting might also take place and quickly put soldiers onto the street. Certainly instances like this led some slaves to feel that a series of arson attacks might destroy the city and allow them to escape. Because the crime of arson could be so indiscriminate—fires easily spreading from one place to another, especially in cities where most buildings were made of wood—the penalties for arson were very severe. In British America, arson was a common law offense, with first-degree felony arson being when people were harmed or killed in the fire. Second-degree felony arson involved significant loss of property. There were also severe penalties for setting fire to uninhabited buildings such as sheds. Executions for arson often involved the culprits being burned to death, with 13 slaves being executed by this manner between May and August 1741. During the period of British rule at the start of the American Revolutionary War, there were two large fires of suspicious origins in New York City. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Costello, A. E. Birth of the Bravest: A History of the New York Fire Department from 1609 to 1887. New York: Forge Books, 2003. Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York. New York: Free Press, 1985. Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Manhattan Island Covering nearly 23 square miles, Manhattan Island is the location of New York City, which, in 1741, covered only five square miles of the island, although that still made it one of the largest cities in British North America, and certainly one of the major ports on the East Coast, along with Boston and Charleston. There has been debate about the origin of the word Manhattan, which is thought to have meant “Island of many hills” in the language of the Lenape people. It is certainly mentioned (as “Manna-hata”) in the logbook of Robert Juet in 1609 and on a map of the following year. Legally, the Walloon trader Peter Minuit had bought the island from the local Native Americans for goods then worthy 60 guilders. In 1736, the city had expanded to incorporate the nearby town of Harlem, the area between the two being farmland, and early maps of New York during this period show that the vast majority of Manhattan Island was devoted to farming. As one of the major commercial centers at the time, the city had long expanded from the fort that the Dutch had built there, and the palisade wall from which Wall Street partially gets its name had been removed in 1699 and Walloons from Belgian (the other origin of the street name) moved there soon afterwards. Manhattan Island, in 1741, was part of the Province of New York, and at that time was one of the main urban centers of slavery in British North America. Indeed, only Charleston in South Carolina had more slaves per capita. On Manhattan Island, some 20 percent of the 11,000 living on the island were African Americans, the vast majority of whom were slaves. This was in spite of widespread migration from Europe to Manhattan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Living in Manhattan, numbers of Dutch families traced their time there back to before August 27, 1664, when the island was captured by the British from the Dutch; and also British families who had moved to New York from other parts of North America. From 1710, there were also large numbers of German migrants from the Palatine. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York. New York: Free Press, 1985. Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Smith, William, Jr. The History of the Province of New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Investigation into a New York Slave Conspiracy (1741) In the spring of 1741, a series of mysterious fires led many New York residents to suspect arson. When a black slave was arrested fleeing one of the fires, rumors of a slave conspiracy to burn the whole town quickly sprang up. Within days, over 100 slaves and some poor whites who were suspected of being party to the conspiracy were in custody. Reproduced here are records of the initial investigation into the supposed slave plot. At a Supreme Court of Judicature held for the province of New York, at the city-hall of the city of New York, on Tuesday, April 21, 1741-Present, Frederick Philipse, esq. Second justice; Daniel Horsmanden, esq. third justice. The grand jury were called. The following persons appeared, and were sworn-viz.: Mr. Robert Watts, merchant, foreman; Messrs. Jeremiah Latouche, Joseph Read, Anthony Rutgers, John M’Evers, John Cruger, jun. John Merritt, Adoniah Schuyler, Isaac De Peyster, Abraham Keteltass, David Provoost, Rene Hett, Henry Beekman, jun. David Van Horne, George Spencer, Thomas Duncan,Winant Van Zant, merchants. Mr. Justice Philipse gave the charge to the grand jury, as followeth: Gentlemen of the grand jury, It is not without some concern, that I am obliged at this time to be more particular in your charge, than for many preceding terms there hath been occasion. The many frights and terrors which the good people of this city have of late been put into, by repeated and unusual fires, and burning of houses, give us too much room to suspect, that some of them at least, did not proceed from mere chance, or common accidents; but on the contrary, from the premeditated malice and wicked pursuits of evil and designing persons; and therefore, it greatly behoves us to use our utmost diligence, by all lawful ways and means to discover the contrivers and perpetrators of such daring and flagitious undertakings: that, upon conviction, they may receive condign punishment; for although we have the happiness of living under a government which exceeds all others in the excellency of its constitution and laws, yet if those to whom the execution of them (which my lord Coke calls the life and soul of the law) is committed, do not exert themselves in a conscientious discharge of their respective duties, such laws which were intended for a terror to the evil-doer, and a protection to the good, will become a dead letter, and our most excellent constitution turned into anarchy and confusion; every one

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New York Slave Insurrection (1741) practising what he listeth, and doing what shall seem good in his own eyes: to prevent which, it is the duty of all grand juries to inquire into the conduct and behaviour of the people in their respective counties; and if, upon examination, they find any to have transgressed the laws of the land, to present them, that so they may by the court be put upon their trial, and then either to be discharged or punished according to their demerits. I am told there are several prisoners now in jail, who have been committed by the city magistrates, upon suspicion of having been concerned in some of the late fires; and others, who under pretence of assisting the unhappy sufferers, by saving their goods from the flames, for stealing, or receiving them. This indeed, is adding affliction to the afflicted, and is a very great aggravation of such crime, and therefore deserves a narrow inquiry: that so the exemplary punishment of the guilty (if any such should be so found) may deter others from committing the like villainies; for this kind of stealing, I think, has not been often practised among us. Gentlemen, Arson, or the malicious and voluntary burning, not only a mansion house, but also any other house, and the out buildings, or barns, and stables adjoining thereto, by night or by day, is felony at common law; and if any part of the house be burned, the offender is guilty of felony, notwithstanding the fire afterwards be put out, or go out of itself. This crime is of so shocking a nature, that if we have any in this city, who, having been guilty thereof, should escape, who can say he is safe, or tell where it will end? Gentlemen, Another Thing which I cannot omit recommending to your serious and diligent inquiry, is to find out and present all such persons who sell rum, and other strong liquor to negroes. It must be obvious to every one, that there are too many of them in this city; who, under pretence of selling what they call a penny dram to a negro, will sell to him as many quarts or gallons of rum, as he can steal money or goods to pay for. How this notion of its being lawful to sell a penny dram, or a pennyworth of rum to a slave, without the consent or direction of his master, has prevailed, I know not; but this I am sure of, that there is not only no such law, but that the doing of it is directly contrary to an act of the assembly now in force, for the better regulating of slaves. The many fatal consequences flowing from this prevailing and wicked practice, are so notorious, and so nearly concern us all, that one would be almost surprised, to think there should be a necessity for a court to recommend a suppression of such pernicious houses: thus much in particular; now in general. My charge, gentlemen, further is, to present all conspiracies, combinations, and other offences, from treasons down to trespasses; and in your inquiries, the oath you, and each of you have just now taken will, I am persuaded, be your guide, and I pray God to direct and assist you in the discharge of your duty. Court adjourned until to-morrow morning ten o’clock. The grand jury having been informed, that Mary Burton could give them some account concerning the good stolen from Mr. Hogg’s, sent for her this morning, and ordered she should be sworn; the constable returned and acquainted them, that she said

New York Slave Insurrection (1741) she would not be sworn, nor give evidence; whereupon they ordered the constable to get a warrant from a magistrate, to bring her before them. The constable was some time gone, but at length returned, and brought her with him; and being asked why she would not be sworn, and give her evidence? she told the grand jury she would not be sworn; and seemed to be under some great uneasiness, or terrible apprehensions; which gave suspicion that she know something concerning the fires that had lately happened: and being asked a question to that purpose, she gave no answer; which increased the jealousy that she was privy to them; and as it was thought a matter of the utmost concern, the grand jury was very importunate, and used many arguments with her, in public and private, to persuade her to speak the truth, and tell all she knew about it. To this end, the lieutenant governor’s proclamation was read to her, promising indemnity, and the reward of one hundred pounds to any person, confederate or not, who should make discovery, etc. She seemed to despise it, nor could the grand jury by any means, either threats or promises, prevail upon her, though they assured her withal, that she should have the protection of the magistrates, and her person be safe and secure from harm; but hitherto all was in vain: therefore, the grand jury desired alderman Bancker to commit her; and the constable was charged with her accordingly; but before he had got her to jail, she considered better of it, and resolved to be sworn, and give her evidence in the afternoon. Accordingly, she being sworn, came before the grand jury; but as they were proceeding to her examination, and before they asked her any questions, she told them she would acquaint them with what she knew relating to the goods stolen from Mr. Hogg’s, but would say nothing about the fires. This expression thus, as it were providentially, slipping from the evidence, much alarmed the grand jury; for, as they naturally concluded, it did by construction amount to an affirmative, that she could give an account of the occasion of the several fires; and therefore, as it highly became those gentlemen in the discharge of their trust, they determined to use their utmost diligence to sift out the discovery, but still she remained inflexible, till at length, having recourse to religious topics, representing to her the heinousness of the crime which she would be guilty of, if she was privy to, and could discover so wicked a design, as the firing houses about our ears; whereby not only people’s estates would be destroyed, but many person might lose their lives in the flames: this she would have to answer for at the day of judgment, as much as any person immediately concerned, because she might have prevented this destruction, and would not; so that a most damnable sin would lie at her door; and what need she fear from her divulging it; she was sure of the protection of the magistrates? or the grand jury expressed themselves in words to the same purpose; which arguments at last prevailed, and she gave the following evidence, which however, notwithstanding what had been said, came from her, as if still under some terrible apprehensions or restraints. Deposition, No. 1.-Mary Burton, being sworn, deposeth, 1. “That Prince (a) and Caesar (b) brought the things of which they had robbed Mr. Hogg, to her master, John Hughson’s house, and that they were handed in through

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New York Slave Insurrection (1741) the window, Hughson, his wife, and Peggy receiving them, about two or three o’clock on a Sunday morning. (c) 2. “That Caesar, prince, and Mr. Philipse’s negro man (Cuffee) used to meet frequently at her master’s house, and that she had heard them (the negroes) talk frequently of burning the fort; and that they would go down to the Fly (d) and burn the whole town; and that her master and mistress said, they would aid and assist them as much as they could. 3. “That in their common conversation they used to say, that when all this was done, Caesar should be governor, and Hughson, her master, should be king. 4. “That Cuffee used to say, that a great many people had too much, and others too little; that his old master had a great deal of money, but that, in a short time, he should have less, and that he (Cuffee) should have more. 5. “That at the same time when the things of which Mr. Hogg was robbed, were brought to her master’s house, they brought some indigo and bees wax, which was likewise received by her master and mistress. 6. “That at the meetings of the three aforesaid negroes, Caesar, Prince and Cuffee, at her master’s house, they used to say, in their conversations, that when they set fire to the town, they would do it in the night, and as the white people came to extinguish it, they would kill and destroy them. 7. “That she has known at times, seven or eight guns in her master’s house, and some swords, and that she has seen twenty or thirty negroes at one time in her master’s house; and that at such large meetings, the three aforesaid negroes, Cuffee, Prince and Caesar, were generally present, and most active, and that they used to say, that the other negroes durst not refuse to do what they commanded them, and they were sure that they had a number sufficient to stand by them. 8. “That Hughson (her master) and her mistress used to threaten, that if she, the deponent, ever made mention of the goods stolen from Mr. Hogg, they would poison her; and the negroes swore, if ever she published, or discovered the design of burning the town, they would burn her whenever they met her. 9. “That she never saw any white person in company when they talked of burning the town, but her master, her mistress, and Peggy.” This evidence of a conspiracy, not only to burn the city, but also destroy and murder the people, was most astonishing to the grand jury, and that any white people should become so abandoned as to confederate with slaves in such an execrable and detestable purpose, could not but be very amazing to every one that heard it; what could scarce be credited; but that the several fires had been occasioned by some combination of villains, was, at the time of them, naturally to be collected from the manner and circumstances attending them. The grand jury therefore, as it was a matter of the utmost consequence, thought it necessary to inform the judges concerning it, in order that the most effectual measures might be concerted, for discovering the confederates; and the judges were acquainted with it accordingly.

New York Slave Insurrection (1741) SUPREME COURT Friday, May 1. Present, the second and third justices. The king against Caesar and prince, negroes. On trial. The jury called, and the prisoners making no challenge, the following persons were sworn, viz.: Roger French, John Groesbeek, John Richard, Abraham Kipp, George Witts, John Thurman, Patrick Jackson, Benjamin Moore, William Hamersley, John Lashier, Joshua Sleydall, John Shurmur. These two negroes were arraigned on two indictments, the twenty fourth of April last; the one for their entering the dwelling house of Robert Hogg, of this city, merchant, on the first day of March then last past, with intent then and there to commit some felony; and for feloniously stealing and carrying away then and there the goods and chattels of the said Robert Hogg, of the value of four pounds five shillings sterling, against the form of the statutes in such case made and provided, and against the peace of our sovereign lord the king, his crown and dignity. The other for their entering the dwelling house of Abraham Meyers Cohen in this city, merchant, on the first day of March with the intent then and there to commit some felony; and for feloniously stealing and carrying away then and there the goods and chattels of the said Abraham Meyers Cohen of the value of five pounds sterling, against the form of the statutes, etc. And against the king’s peace, etc. To each of which indictments they pleaded, not guilty. The Attorney General having opened both the indictments, he with Joseph Murray, Esq. of council for the king, proceeded to examine the witnesses, viz., For the king, Mrs. Hogg, Mrs. Boswell, Christopher Wilson, Rachina Guerin, Mr. Robert Hogg, Mr. Robert Watts, Margaret Sorubiero, alias Kerry, Abraham Meyers Cohen, James Mills, Thomas Wenman, John Moore, Esq. Cornelius Brower, Anthony Ham, Mary Burton. For the prisoners, Alderman Bancker, Alderman Johnson, John Auboyneau. The prisoners upon their defence denied the charge against them. And, The evidence being summed up, which was very strong and full, and the jury charged, they withdrew; and being returned, found them guilty of the indictments. Ordered, that the trials of the Hughsons and Margaret Kerry, be put off until Wednesday of the 6th inst. Court adjourned until Monday morning, 4th May, at ten o’clock. (a) Caesar. SUPREME COURT Friday, May 8 Present, the second and third justices. The king against Caesar and Prince, negroes. The prisoners having been capitally convicted on two several indictments for felony, and being brought to the bar the court proceeded to give sentence; which was passed by the second justice as followeth:

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New York Slave Insurrection (1741) You, Caesar and Prince, the grand jury having found two indictments against each of you, for feloniously stealing and taking away from Mr. Hogg, and Mr. Meyers Cohen, sundry goods of considerable value. To these indictments you severally pleaded not guilty; and for your trials put yourselves upon God and the country; which country having found you guilty, it now only remains for the court to pronounce that judgment which the law requires, and the nature of your crimes deserve. But before I proceed to sentence, I must tell you, that you have been proceeded against in the same manner as any white man, guilty of your crimes, would have been. You had not only the liberty of sending for your witnesses; asking them such questions as you thought proper; but likewise making the best defence you could; and as you have been convicted by twelve honest men upon their oaths, so the just judgement of God has at length overtaken you. I have great reason to believe, that the crimes you now stand convicted of, are not the least of those you have been concerned in; for by your general characters you have been very wicked fellows, hardened sinners, and ripe, as well as ready, for the most enormous and daring enterprizes, especially you, Caesar: and as the time you have yet to live is to be but very short, I earnestly advise and exhort both of you to employ it in the most diligent and best manner you can, by confessing your sins, repenting sincerely of them, and praying God of his infinite goodness to have mercy on your souls: and as God knows the secrets of your hearts, and cannot be cheated or imposed upon, so you must shortly give an account to him, and answer for all your actions; and depend upon it, if you do not truly repent before you die, there is a hell to punish the wicked eternally. And as it is not in your powers to make full restitution for the many injuries you have done the public; so I advise both of you to do all that in you is, to prevent further mischiefs, by discovering such persons as have been concerned with you, in designing or endeavouring to burn this city, and to destroy its inhabitants. This I am fully persuaded is in your power to do if you will; if so, and you do not make such discovery, be assured God almighty will punish you for it, though we do not: therefore I advise you to consider this well, and I hope both of you will tell the truth. And now, nothing further remains for me to say, but that you Caesar, and you Prince, are to be taken hence to the place whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there you, and each of you, are to be hanged by the neck until you be dead. And I pray the Lord to have mercy on your souls. Ordered, that their execution be on Monday next, the eleventh day of this instant, between the hours of nine and one of the same day. And further ordered that after the execution of the said sentence, the body of Caesar be hung in chains. Court adjourned till Monday morning next ten o’clock. Source: Supreme Court of Judicature, New York City, “New York Conspiracy,” Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators, at New York in 1741.

Philadelphia Election Riot (1742) The election riots that took place in Philadelphia, the state capital of Pennsylvania, on October 1, 1742, came from an attempt by the Anglicans to break the political dominance of the Quakers in the city. It was during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, which had broken out in 1739, but Pennsylvania was to be largely unaffected by the war, which was mainly fought in the Americas at sea, although in Europe it became subsumed by the War of Austrian Succession. Pennsylvania itself had owed its origins as a British colony to the Quaker thinker and activist William Penn (1644–1718), who was granted the land on March 4, 1681, by King Charles II of England. Penn had the aims of establishing a region that would allow religious freedom for Quakers who were, at that stage, often persecuted and discriminated against elsewhere, especially in England. They had been granted freedom of worship during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, but his death in 1658 led to the Restoration of the Monarchy in England two years later. With this, the Anglicans of the Church of England were keen to enact laws to reverse the liberal religious laws of Cromwell. The freedom of worship in Pennsylvania became known around the world and attracted not only Quakers, but also substantial numbers of German settlers and some Quakers from Scotland and Ireland. By 1742, about a third of the population of Pennsylvania were Germans, but this community tended to vote for the Quakers because of their support for pacifism and also their belief in less influence of government and hence low taxes. With the War of Austrian Succession, some of the Germans were from states in modern-day Germany that sided with the Austrians (against the British and the Prussians), and they were also supporters of the Quakers, again as a way of keeping out of the conflicts of Europe. Gradually, however, migrants from Britain from the Church of England—the Anglican faith—started coming to Philadelphia, and one of these, William Allen (1704–1780), established the Proprietary Party, which relied heavily on Anglican voters. His father, William Allen Sr., who had migrated from Dungannon, County Tyrone, Ireland, had been a close colleague of William Penn, but his son, emerging as wealthy and powerful, was keen to demonstrate his support for the British Crown. He had been mayor of the city of Philadelphia in 1735, and had bought,

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five years earlier, the site on which the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) was later built. Allen wanted to take control of the city and had started trying to gain support from the Germans. This led to heightened tensions as the Anglicans and the Germans could certainly control the political process. These came to a head on October 1, 1742, the election day, when Allen himself was nominated to be inspector for the elections. It was a significant victory and was based on Anglicans turning out in large numbers after rumors spread that the Quakers were bringing in Germans from nearby to boost their support. This caused Anglican vigilantes to start taking to the streets to prevent what they thought might be Germans arriving to vote out Allen and his supporters. For many people in Philadelphia, there was much concern about whether Allen would be impartial, and with disputes arising as to how the election should be properly supervised; some 70 sailors who supported Allen declared their support for him. They produced clubs, and shouting anti-Quaker slogans, they attacked a number of Quakers and Germans in the city’s courthouse—the Quakers and the Germans having objected to the choice of Allen. The Germans, and also the Quakers, fought back, the latter claiming self-defense as Quakers were against fighting. They managed to drive the sailors out, and bolted the doors of the courthouse to continue their debate. Rumors quickly spread that the Quakers and Germans were holding one of the Anglican sailors in the courthouse, and Anglican supporters marched on the building. It was soon established that the Quakers were not holding any hostages, and a Quaker was able to explain this to the Anglican vigilantes. Certainly, this stopped some of the overzealous Anglican demonstrators who held back, and this allowed the sheriff to arm the Germans and the Quakers, who were able to drive out the Anglicans. The election then proceeded with the Quakers and Germans in control of the voting area, and many Anglicans worried about approaching. The result was that the Quakers won the poll, with the Proprietary Party being convincingly defeated. There was evidence that some of the voters had changed their original vote, and many of those who had voted for the Proprietary Party altered their votes to support the Quakers and their candidates. Either way, it was a clear vote in favor of the Quakers and against Allen. The rioting led to some 54 sailors and people connected with the Proprietary Party being jailed on charges or rioting and other related charges. However, the main legal repercussion was that Allen sued one of the leaders of the Quakers, who had declared that Allen had prepared for an attack. The court heard from 49 witnesses, most of whom were Quakers. At the end of these proceedings, the court ruled that Allen; a business partner of Allen; Clement Plumsted, the Mayor of Philadelphia; and two other Anglicans were all to be investigated for negligence in their work, and also for the subversion of the Pennsylvania Charter of 1682.

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The matter was finally referred to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which was controlled by the Quakers. Eventually, George Thomas, the state governor, intervened, and he decided that the Mayor’s Court had jurisdiction, and that the recorder, the alderman, and the mayor, all of whom were Anglicans, would hear the case, with the unusual legal quirk of the mayor hearing the case against himself. Finally the two sides compromised, and with Allen dropping the court case, and his adversary their slander, the rules for voting were changed to prevent similar disturbances from happening again. Allen was to be the eponym of Allentown, Pennsylvania, which he founded in 1762, being chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from 1750 until 1774. He was a prominent loyalist in the American War of Independence 24 years later, and died on September 6, 1780. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844); Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856).

Further Reading Cohen, Norman S. “The Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 3 (July 1968): 306–319. Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

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Anglicanism The Church of England was created in 1534, breaking from the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) of England. It created a church for which the king or queen of England was the head of the Church of England and its sister churches, the Church of Scotland, the Church of Ireland, and the Church of Wales. The group together, later joined with other churches, became known as the Anglican Communion—after the American War of Independence, the followers of the Church of England became known as the Episcopalians, as the Church of England upholds that the king (or queen) of England is the supreme head of the Church of England. Because of the close connections between church and state, most of the members of the British establishment were Anglicans, as were a majority of people in England and a sizeable proportion of people in Wales and Scotland. Certainly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), although most of the people had probably grown up as Roman Catholics, they attended Church of England services in parish churches, and many came to prefer the more independent thought allowed by the Anglicans. With the introduction of the Authorized Bible, or King James Bible, in 1611, the majesty of the new translation of the Bible, combined with the Book of Common Prayer introduced in 1549 during the reign of King Edward VI (r. 1547–1553), many people had access to the Biblical texts in English, allowing for greater knowledge of the Biblical events, which led to “free thinkers,” which in turn led to the emergence of nonconformists and later Puritans. In 17th- and 18th-century England, Anglicanism was not just a religious belief as it now is. The country was divided into counties, but the church dioceses were also important in terms of the church courts, which prove wills and the like. These dioceses were divided into parishes, and much of the local administration of England took place on a parish basis with the local vicar recording the dates of baptism, marriage, and burial in parish registers and also in rural areas, helping with the administration of the Poor Law, which was done on a parish basis. As municipal cemeteries had not yet come into being, the vast majority of people were also buried in the grounds of parish churches, or nearby areas. This system had been translated to parts of British North America, but unlike England, the parish administration did not control the Poor Law—indeed, there was no such institution—and there were some municipal cemeteries. This helped separate church and state from an early period, and as a result, the Anglicans were never as powerful as a single political unit in the Americas as they were in England. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Edel, Wilbur. Defenders of the Faith: Religion and Politics from the Pilgrim Fathers to Ronald Reagan. New York: Praeger, 1987. Rhoden, Nancy L. Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy during the American Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Quakers On March 4, 1681, William Penn managed to get a grant of a land tract by King Charles II of England. This colony was for religious freedom, with William Penn being a Quaker and anxious for a place for Quakers to settle. This was unlike many of the other settlements in North America, where the majority of the population were Anglican (Episcopalian). The Quaker movement started in 1648 as the Religious Society of Friends as a breakaway movement from Puritanism. This coincided with the period after the English Civil War when there was the formation of many Nonconformist movements with the spread of the Quaker movement. They refused to fight in wars or

Quakers became known for their quiet worship, waiting to be moved by the Spirit. (Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California—Santa Barbara)

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kill people, and they also refused to bow or doff their hats to social superiors, which led to problems in the societies in which they lived. The Quakers were persecuted in England with one of the movement’s most famous members, William Penn—a friend of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers—being accused of “preaching Quakerism to an unlawful assembly.” The jury, much to the anger of the Lord Mayor of London, who was judging the case, found Penn not guilty, whereupon he moved to North America, where many other Quakers had settled. Penn, after he managed to get the grant of land in 1680, was soon joined by Quaker settlers from Wales, and also others from England, Germany, and the Netherlands, with complete freedom of religion for anybody who believed in God being guaranteed in Pennsylvania. This drew not only Quakers, but also Huguenots (French protestants), and Amish, Catholics, Jews, Lutherans from southern Germany, and Mennonites. The Quakers enjoyed this, and these groups generally had more in common with the Quakers than they did with the Anglicans in the other states. This allowed the Quakers to effectively control the early politics of Pennsylvania. Gradually, many migrants from Germany, and also Scotland of Ireland, led to the Quakers becoming a minority, but with clear political control. The Quakers and their connections dominated politics in Pennsylvania for many years. The first governor, William Markham (c.1635–1704), governor from 1681 to 1682 and 1693 to 1699, was a cousin of William Penn; and he was followed by Penn who served as governor from 1682 to 1684, and from 1699 to 1701. The third governor, Thomas Lloyd (1640–1694), governor from 1684 to 1688 and 1690 to 1693, had been jailed for a period because of his Quaker beliefs. The sixth man to be governor, Edward Shippen (1639–1712; governor, 1703– 1704), joined the Quakers after arriving in America; his successor from 1709 until 1717, Charles Gookin, was from a Puritan family; and James Logan (1674–1751), governor from 1736 to 1738, had been a secretary of William Penn. Many of other early officials, including some mayors of Philadelphia, were also Quakers. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Baltzell, E. Digby. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Dobrie, Bonamy. William Penn. London: Constable, 1932. Dunn, Richard S., and Mary Maples Dunn. The World of William Penn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Geiter, Mary K. William Penn. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Pima Revolt (1751) The Pima Revolt occurred in 1751, when the Pima Indians attacked the Spanish settlers in Arizona in what became one of the largest conflicts on the northern frontier of New Spain. It came after attacks by Native Americans on Spanish settlers going back to 1684, when the Spanish started impacting on the lives of the Pima Indians through mining and the enclosing of lands. At the time of the revolt, the Spanish settlers had come to equal the population of Native Americans, and as a result, the Native Americans feared that the Spanish would quickly try to take over the entire region. Most of the Spanish did try to have positive interactions with the Native Americans, and vice-versa, but many of the tribes were worried about the increase in Spanish settlements and the expansion of their areas of control. Cattle were easy to raise in the frontier areas, and these rapidly became the cause of many disputes. The Spanish were angered when the Native Americans hunted them—they had become important sources of food, and also leather for clothing—and they were also often after horses, which had become important in their societies. Some Spanish had not been too concerned about the loss of some cattle, but with the theft of horses, and the ability for the Native Americans to use the horses to round up cattle, problems arose more and more frequently. Introduced diseases also proved a problem for many Native Americans. By the early 1700s, some of the Native Americans also had access to firearms, which they bought from the French. They started raiding outlying Spanish settlements, and in return the Spanish started providing guards for these and also mining camps and other larger establishments. The Spanish were also involved in punitive raids, which were similar in some ways to those by some Native Americans. Raiding parties would attack any opposition, and use the attack as a way of seizing cattle, horses, and slaves. Counter-reprisals started a series of border conflicts that came to a head in 1751 when the Pima Indians decided to act. The increasing numbers of Spanish meant that they were soon becoming a minority in what had been their lands, and they were worried about the continual colonization of the most fertile areas of the region. The harshness of the terrain in Arizona had meant that there was going to become fierce competition for the resources, but had also meant that for the early part of the 18th century, the Spanish and Native American communities had lived in relative harmony, and this had led to a large mixed

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Spanish–Native American population. There were also many Native Americans who had grown up influenced by Spanish missions. The first revolt in the region was in 1737 when the Seris and the Western Apache, and the Lower Pimas were involved in attacks on the Spanish. In 1740, the rebellion was joined by the Yaquis and the Mayos, but the Spanish troops were able to prevail. In 1749, the great Seri Revolt led to a prolonged series of attacks on the Spanish, and as a result, the colonial authorities had to transfer many of their troops from Sonora to fight the Seris and the Apaches. This left the Spanish population in Arizona without much military support, and this was one of the reasons why the Pima undoubtedly decided to attack in 1751. There had been a rising level of discontent among the Pima Indians, and as a result, Luis Oacpicagigua (Luis “of Sa´ric”) started trying to unite the Native Americans, a difficult task as the tribes had no central authority. It had been achieved in the Seri Revolt, and with that as an inspiration, gradually Luis Oacpicagigua had managed to get about 15,000 people together and then decided to launch his attack. It has been suggested by historians that there was no single “spark” that caused the Pima Revolt, but rather long, simmering discontent, along with resentment about the missionaries taking a larger role in the educating of children, and the whippings they administered to men. Before the attack came, however, Oacpicagigua recognized that the Spanish would lead a punitive raid against the Pima women and children, and thus he managed to get most of the civilians to move their families to the mountains of Baboquivari, taking with them enough food to sustain themselves there. The attack on the Spanish began when Oacpicagigua lured some 18 settlers to his home in Sa´ric. There, the settlers were all killed, and Luis Oacpicagigua then led his supporters in attacks on a number of other isolated settlements including the mission at Tubutama. However a missionary, Father Jacobo Sedelmayr, had alerted another priest, Father Juan Nentvig, and the two had time to rally some loyal Native Americans and barricade the mission as Oacpicagigua and some 125 men attacked it. They set fire to some of the mission but were unable to take it. Two missionaries were killed in the fighting, and attacks broke out elsewhere in the region. Most of these were scattered, and about 100 settlers were killed in total. Captain Jose´ Diaz del Carpio was sent to deal with the problem, and Luis Oacpicagigua was forced to surrender on March 18, 1752, in a negotiated agreement. The leaders of the revolt blamed the disturbances on the Jesuit missionaries—and Oacpicagigua was able to provide details on the actions of Jesuits there who had been involved in using land to produce revenue for their order. This went down well with the Spanish authorities as they were looking to expelling the Jesuits from Spain and the Spanish Empire, which took place in 1767. It also allowed the Spanish military commander, Captain Jose´ Dı´az del Carpio, to be more accommodating toward the Native Americans who surrendered.

Pima Revolt (1751)

Fighting continued on a small scale, and Luis Oacpicagigua himself died in 1755 in a Spanish jail. This followed the arrest of two other Pima chiefs who had continued the fighting against the Spanish and had been captured and tortured. Both had attempted to commit suicide in prison, and some people suspected that Oacpicagigua’s death was from suicide. To prevent any further outbreaks of revolt from the Pima, the Spanish then split the region into three presidios: San Ignacio de Tubac (now Tubac County, Arizona), Santa Gertrudis de Altar (now Altar, Sonora, Mexico) and San Carlos de Buenavista (now Buenavista, Sonora, Mexico). Gradually, the tribes were assimilated with many more Native Americans were converted to Christianity. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Bannon, John Francis. The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974. Dobyns, Henry F. Tubac through Four Centuries: An Historical Resume and Analysis. Phoenix: Arizona State Parks Board, 1999. Ewing, Russell C. “The Pima Uprising 1751–1752: A Study in Spain’s Indian Policy.” PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1934. Ewing, Russell C. “Investigations into the Causes of the Pima Uprisings of 1751.” Mid-America 23 (April 1941): 138–151. Ewing, Russell C. “The Pima Outbreak in November 1751.” New Mexico Historical Review 8 (1938): 337–346. Ewing, Russell C. “The Pima Uprising of 1751.” In Greater America: Essays in Honor of Herbert E. Bolton, ed. Adele Ogden. Berkeley: University of California, 1945. Salmo´n, Roberto Mario. “A Marginal Man: Luis of Saric and the Pima Revolt of 1751.” The Americas 45, no. 1 (July 1988): 61–77.

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Jesuits The Jesuits were members of the Roman Catholic religious order called the Society of Jesus, which was formed following a meeting in 1534 in Paris of Ignatius of Loyola and other ardent Catholic students who wanted to form a group to work against the ideas of the Protestant Reformation. They received papal approval for their work three years later, and they were soon heavily involved in the CounterReformation. Over time, the Jesuits became feared in Protestant countries where persecution was common. In Roman Catholic countries they became a powerful religious force which was heavily involved in gaining support from some of the wealthiest and most powerful Catholic rulers in Europe. As the Catholic powers, in particular Portugal and Spain, started taking land in Asia, parts of Africa, and the Americas, the Jesuits soon became associated with missionary work. To help pay for this, many were involved in establishing what were, effectively, communes. Native American tribesmen were encouraged to operate farms, which provided the Jesuits with funds to keep their missions going. The most famous of these communes were the reductions in Paraguay, shown in Robert Bolt’s film The Mission (1986). In North America, the Jesuits operated in New Spain, where they worked with the Pima and other peoples. Initially some of these were successful, but the way in which the Jesuits administered the ones in modern-day Arizona was clearly a cause of the Pima Revolt. The Pima saw the produce from these Jesuits’ “plantations” going to enrich the Jesuits, and not necessarily for the benefit of the people. They also resented the Jesuits building whipping posts and being involved in publically flogging Pima. The Pima saw this as unnecessarily humiliating, as were the use of canes by missionaries who treated Native American warriors as children. However the Jesuits do seem genuinely to have converted so many people to Christianity that the number involved in the revolt was far lower than otherwise would have been the case. As a result, when the leader of the revolt, Luis Oacpicagigua, came to an accommodation with the Spanish with his surrender in March 18, 1752, the Spanish colonial authorities (in particular the governor Diego Ortiz Parilla) saw that the dislike of the Jesuits provided an easy scapegoat for the revolt. They were able to catalog the grievances of the Pima against the Jesuits, and this in turn was to help encourage—in time—members of the Spanish government bring together their plans for ejecting the Jesuits from the lands they controlled. However because of the Seven Years’ War, this did not happen until the end of that conflict, when, in

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1767, the rulers of Portugal, Spain, France, Parma, and the Two Sicilies (Naples) decided to suppress the order and banish all Jesuits from lands they controlled. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Ewing, Russell C. “Investigations into the Causes of the Pima Uprisings of 1751.” Mid-America 23 (April 1941): 138–151. Salmo´n, Roberto Mario. “A Marginal Man: Luis of Saric and the Pima Revolt of 1751.” The Americas 45, no. 1 (July 1988): 61–77.

Oacpicagigua, Luis (d. 1755) Luis Oacpicagigua was the leader of the Pima Revolt; little is known about his life before 1751. He had been appointed by the Spanish as the “Indian governor” of the province of Sa´ric, and this obviously meant that they trusted him. Undoubtedly, Oacpicagigua must have spoken Spanish and been able to study some of their military tactics. He also had contact with the Seri, which helped him coordinate his attack on the Spanish. It is also recorded that he spoke many of the dialects of the Pima Indians, and this gave him an advantage in getting people from other tribes together to attack the Spanish. The outbreak of the revolt was the meeting Oacpicagigua held on November 20, 1751, where he outlined his plans to attack the Spanish. This shows that he clearly expected Spanish reprisals, and taken the precautions of moving the women and children into the mountains of Baboquivari so that they would not be able to be attacked when the revolt started. Certainly the first attack on the Spanish— the massacring of the 18 settlers when they came to visit Oacpicagigua at his house in Sa´ric, showed that he recognized the need to have an incident to show that the revolt had started. However, the very lackluster nature of the subsequent attack on the nearby mission, and then the rapid collapse of any really organized attack on the Spanish, points to another possible interpretation into the cause of the revolt. Oacpicagigua certainly knew about the war between the Spanish and the Seri, and he was well known to Diego Ortiz Parilla, who may have even encouraged him in his resentment of the Jesuits. Luis may also have known that the Spanish were planning to expand their settlements on the Gila and Colorado rivers, and felt he had to strike before this took place. In spite of this, Luis would have needed to persuade many people uncertain about attacking the Spanish to take part in the revolt, and it might also have been that the killing of the first settlers in

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Oacpicagigua’s own house was to show to them his commitment to the cause. Nevertheless, in spite of this, the revolt petered out fairly quickly. It failed to draw many of the Native Americans from Spanish settlements into it, and Luis Oacpicagigua seemed to have recognized quickly the futility of any other major attacks, although isolated ones continuing for months. It seems that his former friendship with Diego Ortiz Parilla had caused Luis Oacpicagigua to finally turn himself in. In May 1753, Oacpicagigua and another Pima Indian leader, Luis of Pitic, were asked to meet with the Spanish authorities. They were immediately arrested and brutally interrogated by the Spanish. Both tried to commit suicide in prison, but remained alive—Oacpicagigua remaining a prisoner until his death at Horcasitas Jail in early 1755. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Salmo´n, Roberto Mario. “A Marginal Man: Luis of Saric and the Pima Revolt of 1751.” The Americas 45, no. 1 (July 1988): 61–77. Waldman, Carl. Who Was Who in Native American History. Indians and Non-Indians from Early Contacts through 1900. New York: Facts on File, 1990.

Parrilla, Diego Ortiz (c. 1715–c. 1775) Diego Ortiz Parilla was a Spanish governor of Nuevo Reyno de Andalucia (Sinaloa and Sonora) at the time of the Pima Revolt of 1751. Little is known about his early life except that he was born in about 1715, at Villa de Lu´car, near Almeria, in the south of Spain, and was the son of Toma´s Ortiz Parrilla y Montoya and Don˜a Andrea Parrilla y Montana, both of whom were from the Spanish nobility. In 1734, he was commissioned as an alferez (second lieutenant) in the Almanza Dragoons, and sent to Cuba where he served under Juan Francisco de Guemes, Conde de Revillagigedo. When the count was appointed as Viceroy of New Spain, Parilla moved with him to Mexico, and was captain of the dragoons at Veacruz. In 1747 he was involved in putting down a revolt by the local people at Puebla de los Angeles, and in June 1748 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. The next appointment was on March 27, 1749, when Parilla was appointed as governor and captain-general of Nuevo Reyno de Andalucia (Sinaloa and Sonora), and also captain of Presidio del Pitic. He took his oath of office on September 12, and his first task was to take part in the crushing of the Seri revolt, his earlier involvement in putting down another revolt being why he was promoted at this difficult juncture. Parilla led the Spanish on an attack on Isla de Tiburo´n, and was also

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involved in mapping the region—his maps providing some of the earliest surviving charts of the region. There is some controversy about Diego Ortiz Parilla’s friendship with Luis Oacpicagigua, the leader of the Pima Revolt, and it now seems certain that he did encourage Luis and other Pima in their opposition to the increasing influence in the region of the Jesuits. It was perhaps because of that friendship that Parilla did not leave sufficient garrisons when he took the Spanish troops off to fight the Seri, and this provided the opportunity for Oacpicagigua to attack. However it was this friendship with the Native Americans which seems to have prevented many more taking part in the revolt, and also the subsequent surrender of Luis himself. Subsequently, Diego Ortiz Parilla was involved in other actions against the Native Americans, and from June 1764 until December 1765, he was interim governor of Coahuila (now a part of Mexico). After this, he was sent to start mapping some of the Texas Gulf Coast. In 1766, the Spanish were worried about a possible British invasion, and he organized engineers to map the region up to Galveston Bay. However, in 1774, Parilla finally agreed to requests that he return to Spain, and he was appointed as a brigadier in Valencia by November of that year. He died between then and November of the following year. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Bannon, John Francis. The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974. Weddle, Robert S. “Diego Ortiz Parrilla,” The Handbook of Texas Online, www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/OO/for12.html (accessed November 10, 2008). Weddle, Robert S. The San Saba´ Mission. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Tohono O’odham The Tohono O’odham, or “People of the Desert,” are aboriginal American people who live in the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. The name was first applied to them by the Spanish, and the people were forced north by the Apaches from the early 17th century. However it was not long before, by the early 18th century, the Apache started to make common cause with the other Native American peoples to prevent the Spanish from establishing settlements in their region.

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During the Pima Revolt of 1751, the Pima also sought an alliance with the Tohono O’odham, who had been heavily subject to missionary influences of the Jesuits, which some of them had tried to reject. Eusebio Kino (d. 1711), born in Italy and trained in Germany, had arrived in Mexico in 1681, hoping to work with other Jesuits in China. However, he remained in Mexico, and in the northern parts, he was involved in establishing the Mission San Xavier del Bac, near the presentday city of Tucson. Although some of the Pima and other people were converted to Catholicism, many of the Tohono O’odham resisted fiercely. This was partly because they resented the Spanish settlements, preferring their own isolated villages. In the 1660s, they had staged a major rebellion against the Spanish who had ruthlessly crushed them, and it was not until the 1750s that they were able to stage another large revolt coinciding with the Pima Revolt. This was called the Papago Revolt, the Tohono O’odham being known at the time by the Spanish as the Papago. The advantage that the Tohono O’odham had was that they were able to launch isolated attacks against the Spanish. However, the Spanish were initially able to tolerate these, prior to embarking on their own counteroffensive by sending large numbers of soldiers against the Tohono O’odham. The sheer inhospitableness of the terrain initially hampered the Spanish, but also meant that once the Tohono O’odham villages were destroyed, the people were unable to easily reestablish themselves. Following the defeat of the Tohono O’odham, the Spanish worked more heavily on establishing missions run by the Franciscans, and these helped extend the level of integration of the people into European frontier culture. During the 1770s, the Tohono O’odham were also involved in winning a series of battles against the Apache. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Erickson, Winston P. Shaping the Desert: The Tohono O’odham in History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994. McIntyre, Allan J. The Tohono O’odham and Pimeria Alta. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

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Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) The fall of Montreal in 1760 marked the effective end of the Seven Years’ War in the Upper Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes regions. The defeat of their French allies left many of the natives forced to negotiate peace agreements with the British. General Amherst, commander in chief of British forces in North America, set the stage for the parlays in 1761 by forbidding the customary practice of gift giving to native leaders. Amherst also raised the prices for most trade goods, making it difficult for native peoples to get needed supplies. Trade for certain items, most notably gunpowder, was severely restricted. Amherst’s actions angered and offended native leaders and their followers. The Seneca in New York attempted to seize upon native disillusionment by calling in 1761 for the creation of a confederacy, but their call for war did not elicit the desired response. Despite advice from people experienced in native affairs, such as Sir William Johnson and George Croghan, Amherst continued to sow seeds of discontent. He ordered the construction of a number of forts and then encouraged British colonists to build communities around the structures. The growing presence of British colonists and soldiers and an outbreak of famine and disease during the early 1760s were used as evidence by Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, that native peoples needed to rid themselves of European influences and return to traditional ways. Neolin’s religious message resonated among native peoples of many groups because it helped explain their continued suffering and gave them hope for a brighter future. At a meeting convened on the Ecorse River during April 1763, attended by the Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwas, Pontiac embraced Neolin’s doctrines with the condition that the French be the exception to the rejection of European influences. He then called on the respective native groups to join him in expelling the British from their homelands. With Neolin’s assistance, Pontiac subsequently utilized the Delaware Prophet’s existing intertribal religious revitalization movement to help craft a loosely organized Native American military confederacy. On May 7, 1763, Pontiac and a force made up of Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Huron warriors initiated the conflict known as Pontiac’s Rebellion when they attempted to take Fort Detroit through subterfuge. They had made arrangements with Major Henry Gladwin to stage a ceremonial dance within the fort with the intent of attacking its unsuspecting defenders with concealed weapons. Someone

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Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) Pontiac's men release captives taken during Pontiac's Rebellion, an outgroth of the French and Indian War. (Library of Congress)

forewarned Gladwin of the plot, thus he and his men were fully armed and prepared. Upon seeing the readiness of the fort’s defenders when he entered the fort, Pontiac called off the planned attack. Pontiac’s decision infuriated the warriors. To placate his critics, he then attempted to lure Gladwin outside the fort under the pretense of negotiations to force his surrender, but that ploy also failed. Since native warriors were leery of sustaining heavy casualties in a direct assault on Fort Detroit, Pontiac opted to besiege the fortified post. Trickery proved an effective tactic for other Native American leaders early in the conflict because intercultural relationships were everyday occurrences at British posts. Native American warriors utilized this familiarity and feigned friendships to further their military aims. Fort Sandusky fell on May 16 after its defenders agreed to a council with war leaders of a force comprised of Ottawas and Hurons. At the onset of negotiations, the warriors overpowered the small garrison and claimed an easy victory. Fort Miamis was taken on May 27 with the aid of the native mistress of ensign Robert Holmes, the fort’s commander. She enticed her lover to leave the fort to help bleed a native woman who had fallen ill. Holmes was slain as he exited the fort, and his garrison was quickly overwhelmed. The final fort to fall as a result of deception was Fort Michilimackinac. On June 2, Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Sauk warriors engaged in a game akin to lacrosse outside of the fort. The spectators included the fort’s defenders, who felt so secure that they did not even close the fort’s entrance during the event. During the game,

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which had already lasted several hours, someone slung the ball into the fort. As they entered the fort to ostensibly retrieve the ball, the warriors were handed weapons that had been concealed by native women under blankets. Fifteen of the garrison’s 35 defenders were quickly killed, as was a trader. The remaining colonists in the fort were taken prisoner. The loss of Fort Michilimackinac was particularly damaging because it had not only been strategically located at the confluence of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, but its storehouse of supplies contained firearms and a significant amount of gunpowder. Following so many examples of native creativity in attacking British forts, word was sent to the remaining British garrison to be on their guard. The warning to Fort Venango was ignored by its commanding officer, Lieutenant Francis Gordon. When the Seneca chief Kayashuta approached the fort with a force that included Shawnee and Delaware warriors on June 13, they were welcomed into the fort. The native warriors quickly killed the fort’s defenders, leaving only Gordon alive. Gordon was then forced to document Kayashuta’s grievances, which included the presence of British forts on native lands and the deliberate effort of British officials to deny native peoples access to gunpowder. Once his task was completed, Gordon was tortured until he died. Kayashuta’s force was then joined by another war party comprised of Ojibwa, Ottawa, Huron, and Mississauga warriors for an assault a week later at Fort Presque Isle. The fort’s defenders were forced to surrender the post on June 23 after two days of fighting. The Senecas then turned their attention to Fort Le Boeuf. The attack was launched on June 18. During the fighting, the fort’s blockhouse caught on fire. The smoke helped cover the retreat of the British soldiers as they fled into the night to Fort Pitt. Mid-June 1763 marked the height of the Native American offensive. Native warriors had taken eight forts, including Fort St. Joseph and Fort Ouiatenon. Their military successes had forced the abandonment of Forts Burd and Edward Augustus. Active sieges were underway at Forts Pitt, Ligonier, Bedford, and Detroit. The ease of so many of the victories had obscured the problems that were beginning to affect the war effort. Epidemic diseases, most notably smallpox, had begun to ravage Native American communities. Also, the long-desired support from the French had failed to materialize. While limited supplies were flowing to native forces from French outposts in Illinois, virtually no support was coming from Canada. The French in Canada justifiably feared that any assistance to the native cause would result in severe retribution by Great Britain. Pontiac’s confederates were also unable to gain the support of the majority of the six nations of the Iroquois. Although the Seneca took part in the conflict, the Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora followed the advice of Sir William Johnson and used their demonstrated friendship to forge closer economic and military ties with Great Britain.

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Although it was obvious by mid-July 1763 that General Amherst had grossly underestimated the capabilities of his native opposition, he placed the blame for the fall of so many forts on the commanders and soldiers at the respective posts. He was incredulous that so many of his subordinates had been so gullible as to fall for the number of incidences of subterfuge that occurred, considering that he himself had constantly warned them of what he believed to be the duplicitous nature of Native Americans in general. Amherst believed that the forts reflected the military might of Great Britain and thus their loss served to give the native warriors the mistaken impression that the British were militarily impotent on the frontier. Regardless of Amherst’s views, the British were incapable of protecting their interests in both the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region. The common thread in all of the forts that were either taken or abandoned in the early weeks of Pontiac’s Rebellion was that they were all defended by 35 men or fewer. The forts that were well manned, such as Forts Pitt and Detroit, were able to repel repeated assaults by native warriors. Given the state of affairs, Amherst determined that the only solution was to annihilate the opposition by any means necessary. The depths of the British resolve toward that end became evident at Fort Pitt on June 24, 1763. Fort Pitt had been forewarned of a native attack on May 30, when the survivors from another fort began straggling in with tales of butchery. Believing that they would receive no quarter from native warriors, the fort’s defenders determined to fight to the finish once they were finally attacked. They then began destroying the outbuildings in the vicinity of the fort so that they could not be used by attackers. The soldiers also commenced hoarding supplies and food in preparation for a siege. Delaware warriors assailed the fort on June 22 with little success. On June 24, Delaware negotiators Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee were received outside of the fort under the pretense to discuss possible resolutions to the conflict. In truth, Fort Pitt’s commander, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, wanted to negotiate with the Delaware so that he could present them with blankets and handkerchiefs that had been intentionally retrieved from smallpox patients who were being treated in the fort’s hospital. It was hoped that the vestiges of smallpox on the linens would spark an outbreak of smallpox among the warriors. Whether coincidental or a result of Ecuyer’s gift, a smallpox outbreak did erupt among the native peoples in the vicinity of Fort Pitt by the end of the month. Curiously, the native victims of the epidemic did not include Turtle’s Heart. Amherst was subsequently blamed for the stratagem of using smallpox for germ warfare, but evidence suggests that he approved of the action after it had actually occurred. Following the initial Native American victories, the second phase of the conflict turned to British efforts to reinforce and resupply their besieged garrisons at Forts Detroit and Pitt. Pontiac’s warriors were able to prevent access to Fort Detroit by

Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763)

land, thus the British resorted to moving personnel and supplies through Lake Erie and the Detroit River. The British used two ships, the Huron and the Michigan, during the siege. Both ships carried enough cannons and guns to prevent assaults on Fort Detroit by water. The warriors under Pontiac’s command attempted to catch the ships on fire by floating burning rafts towards them, but the effort went for naught. During the month of July, the British were able to expand their dominance on the water with the addition of four gunboats. As the siege of Fort Detroit wore on, it was Pontiac who began having supply troubles. Native warriors who had begun to question Pontiac’s leadership from the time he had aborted the initial attack on Fort Detroit saw his inability to acquire needed supplies from the French as further evidence of his ineffectiveness in the field. Disillusioned, they quit the fight and began returning to their home communities. By November 1763, the siege had been abandoned, and Pontiac had retreated to a village on the Maumee River. On July 7, Amherst ordered Colonel Henry Bouquet to gather troops to relieve the garrison at Fort Pitt. While en route, Bouquet’s soldiers helped break the sieges at Forts Ligonier and Bedford. The relief column was attacked by Delaware, Huron, Mingo, Shawnee, and Wyandot warriors on August 5 at Bushy Run. During the two-day Battle of Bushy Run, Bouquet sustained heavy casualties but ultimately succeeded in driving off his attackers. Bouquet’s force arrived on August 10 at Fort Pitt with much needed supplies and reinforcements. The ability of the British to break the native siege led to the abandonment of the native effort to seize Fort Pitt. Pontiac’s Rebellion was ultimately brought to a conclusion using the traditional diplomatic methods that Amherst had eschewed from the time he had first arrived in North America. Sir William Johnson took the lead in using diplomacy to break the Native American confederacy. Through his experiences with native peoples, especially the Iroquois, Johnson knew that individual native leaders had joined the conflict to fulfill their personal agendas. Johnson had counseled Amherst on how to use diplomacy to mollify individual native groups, but Amherst had stubbornly insisted on bringing them to submission militarily. Belatedly realizing that Amherst himself was largely responsible for the outbreak of the conflict, British officials recalled him to London during November 1763. Sir William Johnson was subsequently empowered by General Thomas Gage, Amherst’s successor, to address the grievances of the respective native groups in the traditional fashion. Being an astute diplomat, Johnson had anticipated that he would eventually be given that power and had acted accordingly. In meetings held with Iroquois delegations during the months of June and September 1763, Johnson managed to convince them to aid the British effort to end the conflict. Amherst had disapproved of the negotiations because the Seneca

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were included in the discussions. Johnson’s efforts resulted in the Seneca joining the other members of the Iroquois Confederacy in calling for the other native groups to lay down their arms and make peace with the British. The Iroquois did not act out of loyalty to the British, but rather felt that being allied to the British would strengthen their claims to sovereignty over the Ohio Valley. The support of General Thomas Gage and the backing of the Iroquois enabled Sir William Johnson to host a peace conference at Fort Niagara in January 1764 that was attended by the leaders of most of the native groups that had participated in Pontiac’s Rebellion. During the monthlong meeting, Johnson proved a gracious host who fed his guests well and who plied them with an abundance of gifts. The goodwill that was generated resulted in a number of native nations allying themselves with the British and pledging to fight against their former native allies. Although the sieges had been broken at Fort Pitt and at Fort Detroit and many of the warriors, such as Pontiac, had retreated westward, that did not mean that the British considered the war to be over. Two British armies invaded the Ohio Valley during the summer of 1764. Colonel John Bradstreet led a force that was nearly 2,000 men strong, including Iroquois warriors, from Fort Niagara. Colonel Henry Bouquet launched his expedition from Fort Pitt. The British assault towards their home communities convinced those native leaders who had wanted to continue fighting the British that further resistance was futile, thus they too eventually came to terms. Pontiac held out until he was forced to capitulate at Fort Oswego in 1766. —John R. Burch Jr. See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Barr, Daniel P., ed. The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Calloway, Colin. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cave, Alfred A. Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Dixon, David. Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Hinderaker, Eric, and Peter C. Mancall. At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Middleton, Richard. Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2007. Nelson, Larry L. A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs Along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754–1799. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999. O’Toole, Fintan. White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Ward, Matthew C. Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indian, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Amherst, Jeffrey (1717–1797) Amherst, born on January 29, 1717, began his military career in 1731 under the command of Sir John Ligonier. He served under Ligonier during the War of the Austrian Succession as an aide-de-camp. During the French and Indian War, Ligonier used his influence with William Pitt the elder to advance his prote´ge´’s military career. Amherst was a relatively obscure officer who was tapped by Pitt to lead an expedition against the French fort of Louisbourg, which was located on Cape Breton Island. The expedition was launched in March 1758, and the French surrendered the fort on July 26, 1758. Amherst’s victory resulted in his appointment as commander in chief of Great Britain’s forces in North America by late 1758. His greatest military accomplishment was his three-pronged invasion of Canada that was launched in August 1760. The campaign proved so successful that Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial surrendered New France on September 8, 1760. Following the conclusion of the French and Indian War, Amherst turned his attention to Native American affairs. He generally detested Native Americans and saw little value in them as allies. Thus, he stopped the customary practice of giving gifts to tribes that were friendly to the British in 1761. This stance deprived Native American groups of the gunpowder they required for both hunting and warfare. Amherst also actively began encouraging settlers to build communities around British forts. The discontent among native peoples that resulted from Amherst’s actions erupted into open warfare in 1763 when British forts throughout the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River Valley were attacked by a number of different native groups in a conflict that has become popularly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. During the initial stages of the conflict, Amherst appeared to have underestimated the military capabilities of his opponents. Once he realized his error, he ordered British troops to reinforce the posts that did not fall during the initial assaults. His reputation has been besmirched by an act that may not have been committed under his orders. Amherst is credited with having ordered the British garrison at Fort Pitt to intentionally distribute as gifts to the Native Americans besieging the fort blankets that were contaminated with smallpox, in the hopes that an epidemic would eradicate their numbers. General dissatisfaction with Amherst’s handling of relations with Native American groups and the subsequent war led British officials to relieve him of command and recall him to England prior to the conclusion of Pontiac’s Rebellion. Amherst’s military career prospered upon his return to England. His military honors included being named Baron Amherst of Holmesdale in 1776. He received

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a second peerage in 1782 as first Baron Amherst of Montreal. He was twice named commander in chief, first in 1778 and again in 1793. He died on August 3, 1797. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Johnston, A. J. B. Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Nester, William R. “Haughty Conquerors”: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000.

French and Indian War (1754–1763) The French and Indian War was the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France, which was fought from 1754 to 1763. The conflict was ignited in 1754 when Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie ordered Lieutenant Colonel George Washington to construct a fort at the confluence of the Ohio River. Washington’s expedition ended with his surrender at Fort Necessity. Sporadic warfare then followed in 1755, which included the displacement of the Acadians in Nova Scotia by the British and the French defeat of General Edward Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne. The escalation of hostilities led the European powers to formally declare war on May 17, 1756. France selected the marquis de Montcalm to command its forces in North America. British authorities named Lord Loudoun to serve as its commander in chief. Loudon proved ineffectual in that capacity against the French and their Native American allies and was replaced in late 1758 by General Jeffrey Amherst. Great Britain’s military fortunes had begun to change in 1758 with the success of Amherst’s capture of Louisbourg and the successes of General John Forbes in the Ohio country. The British achieved a decisive victory on September 13, 1759, when they took the city of Quebec. Both the marquis de Montcalm and British general James Wolfe were killed during the battle. Amherst completed the conquest of Canada the following year with a three-pronged invasion that culminated with the capture of Montreal on September 7, 1760. Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial surrendered New France the following day.

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Although the surrender of New France resulted in the general end of warfare within North America between France and Great Britain, it did not end warfare between Great Britain and France’s former Native American allies. The sovereign native peoples continued to fight to preserve their autonomy. Rather than trying to negotiate a peaceful end to hostilities with the Native Americans, Amherst opted to inflame their enmity. He banned ceremonial-gift giving to all Native Americans during negotiations in 1761 and began encouraging British settlers to begin building permanent communities around British forts. The resentment over these actions would live long after the French and Indian War technically ended. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on February 10, 1763. The terms of the agreement ceded all of France’s claims to North America to the British, with the exception of New Orleans, which was ceded to Spain. Spain, who had belatedly entered the conflict as a French ally, yielded its claim to Florida to Great Britain. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies & Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Johnston, A. J. B. Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Schwartz, Seymour I. The French and Indian War 1754–1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Neolin (dates unknown) Neolin, also known as “The Delaware Prophet,” was a Lenni Lenape who rose to prominence after experiencing a religious vision sometime during the early 1760s. His subsequent religious prophecies helped inspire Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763. In his religious vision, the Master of Life taught Neolin that the reason why the path to Heaven for Native Americans had become more difficult to traverse was that they had become too dependent on Europeans and their trade goods. To avoid going to Hell, Native Americans were required to abstain from drunkenness, hunt in the traditional fashion with bow and arrow, cease their dependence on European

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trade goods, set aside intertribal warfare, and drive the British from their homelands. Ironically, the presence of Heaven and Hell in his nativist vision indicated the influence of European Christianity. Neolin reinforced his teachings to his adherents through a prayer they were required to recite twice a day, in the morning and the evening, and a map to Heaven that included the Master of Life’s requirements. Neolin’s religious movement spread quickly with the aid of other prophets because it placed the blame for all of the ills that native peoples were experiencing on Europeans. For Native Americans who had suffered through displacement from their homelands, constant warfare, starvation, and epidemic disease, Neolin promised a brighter future once they repudiated and repelled the British interlopers that had brought them so much misery. Although Neolin’s religious movement was but one of many factors that led to the eruption of warfare in 1763, it provided a means for Native American military leaders, such as Pontiac, to set aside intertribal rivalries and fight together against a common enemy. Although Pontiac was influenced by Neolin’s religious teachings, he selectively utilized the prophet’s doctrines. Pontiac did not advocate the abandonment of European technologies. He also was not anti-European, as he hoped that a Native American victory would herald the reestablishment of New France. Pontiac endeavored to direct the ire of his followers against the British. During the spring of 1763, a series of attacks by native groups such as the Delaware, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomie, Shawnee, and Wyandots were launched against British installations throughout the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River Valley. Neolin, who was with Pontiac during the siege of the British fort at Detroit, had promised the warriors that the Master of Life assured them of victory. Despite some initial success, victory proved elusive. Following Pontiac’s failure to capture the British fort at Detroit in 1764, Neolin faded into obscurity. Although his personal influence had waned, his nativist rhetoric and teachings continued to influence other Native American religious leaders, most notably Tenskwatawa, “The Shawnee Prophet.” —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Cave, Alfred A. Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

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Ohio River Valley The Ohio River Valley was vaguely defined during the colonial era as the area west of the Allegheny River in present-day Pennsylvania to the Muskingum River in present-day Ohio. The Ohio River marked the southern border of the area, which extended northward into portions of the Great Lakes region. As a result of a series of conflicts with a number of native groups, most notably the Erie and the Shawnee during the 1600s, the Iroquois Confederacy claimed dominion over the sparsely populated Ohio River Valley. Beginning in the early 1700s, the population of the region began growing rapidly as native groups, such as the Delaware, Shawnee, and Iroquois, began establishing communities within the region. Many of these new immigrants had been displaced from their homelands in the east due to the growth of the British colonies. Other native groups from the west also migrated to the region in hopes of exploiting the abundance of available game for the purpose of trade. These migrants, especially the Shawnee and Delaware, showed little deference to the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois, also known as Mingoes, proved unable to impose their will on these native groups, which helped destabilize the region as native leaders competed against each other both economically and militarily. Representatives of France and Great Britain sought alliances with the various native groups within the Ohio River Valley. Native American leaders actively played the two European powers against each other to benefit their interests. The desire of the European powers to curry favor with the native groups led to a constant influx of European goods into their communities. Native Americans became dependent on access to trade goods, which led them to choose sides when the Seven Years’ War erupted in North America. The conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 was disastrous for all native peoples in the valley, even those who had fought in the war as British allies. They had lost the ability to play New France against the British, which weakened their negotiating power. The natives soon discovered that Great Britain was not interested in negotiations of any sort with them. Great Britain’s commander in chief, General Amherst, went so far as to even cut off traditional gift giving that helped native leaders maintain their authority within their home communities. Great Britain had come to consider the Ohio River Valley theirs by right of conquest and began encouraging settlement of the region by their colonists. Faced with a heavy-handed foe that had no interests in peaceable coexistence, native peoples within the Ohio River Valley were left only with the option of fighting against Great Britain or fleeing the area entirely. —John R. Burch Jr.

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Further Reading Hinderaker, Eric. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673– 1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hinderaker, Eric, and Peter C. Mancall. At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pontiac (d. 1769) Very little is known about Pontiac’s early years. Approximations of his birth year range from 1714 to 1720. By the late 1740s, he had become a respected war leader among the Ottawa who was valued as an ally by New France. During the Seven Years’ War, it is believed that he fought alongside the French at both Fort Duquesne and Fort William Henry in 1757.

Pontiac, an excellent military strategist, instigated and led the greatest Native American uprising ever faced by the British in colonial North America. His call for a pan-tribal alliance nearly succeeded in stopping white encroachment onto Native American lands, and served as a model for later resistance efforts led by Little Turtle, Tecumseh, and Black Hawk. (North Wind Picture Archives)

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Sometime in the early 1760s, Pontiac came under the sway of Neolin, the Delaware Prophet. Although Pontiac echoed Neolin’s call to reject European culture and goods, there is evidence that suggests that Pontiac’s interpretation of Neolin’s teachings excluded the French. It is believed that Pontiac’s Rebellion was launched, at least partially, in the hopes that Native American success would be followed by the return of the French into the region. While France, through its settlements in Illinois, did supply Pontiac and his confederates with some supplies and weapons, it rebuffed his efforts to gain active military assistance in the field. While Pontiac has been immortalized as the primary leader of Pontiac’s Rebellion, he was but one of many influential Native American leaders in a loosely organized confederation. He did provide the conflict’s opening salvo when he led a multitribal force against Fort Detroit on May 9, 1763. During the early stages of the conflict, more than eight forts fell or were abandoned by the British. While other native leaders were finding military success, Pontiac unsuccessfully besieged Fort Detroit until October 1763. The combination of a British counterattack that had reversed the initial successes, a smallpox epidemic, and the realization that the French were not going to intervene on their behalf led to a collapse of the Native American confederacy that had launched the conflict. While the war had effectively been over for several years, Pontiac finally came to a peace agreement with the British at Fort Oswego in 1766. Following the signing of the peace treaty, the British mistakenly believed that Pontiac was a valuable ally who would help allay Native American militancy within the region. While Pontiac did his part by ignoring calls from native groups in the west to continue warring with the British, his own people came to question his loyalty and motives. It is believed that he was severely beaten on multiple occasions before being exiled by the Ottawa from his home community. With his reputation in tatters, Pontiac moved to southern Illinois. While visiting the town of Cahokia on April 20, 1769, he was clubbed and then stabbed to death by a Peoria, whose people were part of the Illinois Confederacy. The attack was probably in retaliation for Pontiac’s stabbing of an Illinois chief in 1766. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Middleton, Richard. Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2007. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indian, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Smallpox Smallpox is an extremely contagious disease caused by the variola virus. Its symptoms include a high fever, headache, backache, nausea, vomiting, convulsions, and pus-filled corpuscles all over the body. Due to the incubation period of the disease, which on average exceeds 10 days, a person unknowingly exposes others to smallpox before the obvious symptoms appear. The disease either kills the afflicted individuals or leaves them horribly scarred. From the time smallpox was first introduced to the Americas by European colonizers, it proved particularly deadly among Native American populations because they had not had previous exposure to the variola virus in any form. During Pontiac’s Rebellion, the defenders of Fort Pitt famously engaged in biological warfare through the use of smallpox. On June 24, 1763, Delaware negotiators Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee were given two blankets and two silk handkerchiefs as gifts by British dignitaries at Fort Pitt. Since gift giving was an established tradition during negotiations, the Delawares accepted the items graciously from their hosts. The British had intentionally obtained the four items from their hospital, which was treating quarantined smallpox patients, with the hope that a smallpox epidemic would erupt among the many Native American groups that were besieging the fort. Within the month, a smallpox epidemic had erupted among native peoples throughout the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region. General Jeffrey Amherst, Great Britain’s commander in chief in North America, has historically been credited with devising the plan to use smallpox as a biological agent against the Native Americans at Fort Pitt. In truth, there are no known records that definitively identify who originated the idea. The most likely culprit was Captain Simeon Ecuyer, who commanded the garrison at Fort Pitt. Undoubtedly, both Amherst and his subordinate Colonel Henry Bouquet approved of the course of action, because both were openly advocating spreading smallpox as a military strategy by July 1763. The very fact that high-level British officers advocated the use of smallpox to attack their enemies was illustrative of the initial successes of the Native Americans besieging the British forts because, under the European conventions of war of the day, such an act was considered an atrocity. It may be too simplistic to credit the outbreak of smallpox among Native Americans in 1763 solely to the defenders of Fort Pitt when one considers that the presence of afflicted individuals in the fort’s hospital suggests that there were probably others afflicted with the disease in the region that were not showing symptoms due to the virus’s incubation period. Irrespective of the number of potential sources for the

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smallpox epidemic of 1763, its toll on the native warriors and their home communities helped Great Britain to quell Pontiac’s Rebellion. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Fenn, Elizabeth A. “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst.” Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1552–1580. Kelton, Paul. Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492–1715. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Kiple, Kenneth F., ed. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Stamp Act Protests (1765) Nonviolent Stamp Act protests began in 1607 when the first English settlers came ashore in New England. They understood their relationship with London. Having being nurtured by the Crown, these pioneers concerned themselves with survival under the protection of England. Fortunately, London through its largess adopted a policy of “salutary neglect,” permitting the growing number of colonies and their populations to develop a newly unique culture. Parliament’s colonial expansion initiated the dawn of a new age. As time passed, these colonists began to identify themselves with their colony and gave less thought and consideration to their traditional rights as Englishmen. They legislated new and more rigid laws, some of which contradicted the English and nascent American common law. In many cases, such as the witchcraft trials, the defendant’s guilt was assumed, and she had to prove her innocence in an environment less than just. These rights, not challenged, became an increasingly important issue after British successes in the French and Indian War in sparsely settled areas west of the colonies. A British achievement in clearing the region of the French “menace” in 1763 was viewed favorably by London. Settlers moved west of the mountains, with or without Crown permission, further removing themselves from English culture. Having bankrupted the Exchequer because of the colonial wars, having had to muster sufficient forces to protect the colonies, and maintaining a fleet to prevent the French from dominating trade and the seas, the Crown changed its conduct toward the colonies. Financial needs required Parliament to remold its attitudes toward her English subjects. Since the colonials generally paid few taxes, the Stamp Act provided a means of returning the Empire to fiscal solvency. First attempts included the American Revenue Act, also known as the Sugar Act, and the extension of the Molasses Act of 1733 were quite comprehensive but did not resolve the problem. In 1764, George Grenville strengthened the Imperial Custom Service, allowing for tighter enforcement regulations against smuggling. Grenville also modified the Currency Act. This change of circumstances is illustrated by Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act by 245–49 on February 6 (29), 1765, when Grenville presented his Stamp Act Bill. The House of Lords approval the Act on March 8 and the king

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Stamp Act rioters hang a stamp distributor in effigy in 1765. (North Wind Picture Archives)

on March 22. It was ordered into effect two weeks later. The debt had grown from 72-plus million pounds to 129-plus million shortly before the act went into effect. The restiveness of the English population because of the high taxes it paid was causing the Crown concern with a possible revolution. The Stamp Act, the first direct parliamentary tax, numbed colonials who lived in “splendid Isolation.” In one moment, the 63 pages of the Stamp Act Orders changed the landscape for the colonies; the colonials were informed that the tax would be used for colonial administration. Direct means of collection were imposed because London realized prior relations could make application of the new laws a controversial matter. Legal documents of all sorts, newspapers, and apprenticeship status were taxed. Merchants and others who would trade in promissory or other forms of financial notes, such as transportation documents, were most vulnerable. At the same time that the Stamp Act became law, the Crown also passed the Quartering Act. Fearful of civil disobedience, the Crown sent large detachments to Boston and other commercial and mercantile centers. The colonials had to provide lodging and supplies for soldiers garrisoning in colonial homes. A second Quartering Act required the billeting of soldiers in inns, almshouses, and unoccupied dwellings.

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Such legislation ignited the events that led to a family separation. The colonies never had voting representations in Parliament, which passed laws for the benefit of the Empire. The colonials had experienced the effect of legislation prior to the Stamp Act, but the harshness of the act encompassed all avenues of income producing taxation. When colonial leaders opposed the act as illegitimate, the members of the colonial community mostly affected resorted to “no taxation without representation.” Calls arose to protect the traditional rights of Englishmen as evidenced by the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Bill of Rights of 1689 that had forbidden the imposing of taxes without the consent of parliament. When protests rose from civil disobedience to physical action, London answered with Blackstone’s theory of “virtual representation.” The concept was clear: Parliament in London made laws governing the Empire, and since the colonials were British subjects, they were bound by its legislation. The theory of “virtual representation” affirmed the legality of control over colonial affairs. But, Parliament was not representative of all classes of society as land requirements and other restrictions limited membership in the House of Commons such that approximately only 3 percent of the men could vote: only Anglicans, and wealthier elements in land and commerce of society. The Crown and Parliament justified their actions by reminding the colonies of the aid and protection they had received on land and sea. Since the English taxpayer bore the burden of supporting the colonies, Parliament had to act. Prime Minister Lord George Grenville advocated the tax by arguing that geography did not matter, but the Empire as a whole supported all English subjects, whether in London or the colonies. The colonies argued that true representation occurred only when one was present and allowed to vote for or against any particular legislation, a view contrary to this parliamentary decision. This ideological loggerhead frustrated the Crown and associated it with the civil disobedience of the colonies. Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765. The comprehensive act addressed every possible source of income for the Crown. Unfortunately, many of its provisions affected the educated and politically astute colonials, many of whom had studied history and geography. This small minority of the population had the capacity to arouse the general public with arguments challenging the Crown’s demands. For example, having to pay higher duties as a result of the legislation meant every legal document had to carry a tax stamp to be legal. One of many, Isaac Barre, a veteran of the French and Indian War, responded negatively to Parliament. He offered the colonial viewpoint to Parliament. He reminded the august body of the colonial contributions in fighting the French and Indians. His minority views failed to alter the situation, and instead, the

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colonies were called upon to support the Empire and not selfishly concern themselves. Parliament reinforced its new attitude toward the colonies by its conduct. Benjamin Franklin, colonial American representative then living in London, met with Prime Minister Lord Grenville prior to the Stamp Act’s approval. Franklin and others asked the British to reconsider their plan. Lord Grenville offered an alternative. He proposed that the colonial assemblies tax themselves to pay the costs involved for keeping the British in North America. The problem with this potential solution was that none of the colonials in London had authority to negotiate. The offer was declined without submission to the various colonial assemblies. Samuel Adams referred to a spontaneous reaction, and through his influence, the Massachusetts Assembly approved his instructions, and copies were sent to all the colonies. Colonial governor Francis Bernard opposed the efforts to unite all the colonies in an effort to protest the Stamp Act. The governor understood the consequences of the call for colonial unity, stating that “demagoguery” was the aim of this conduct. He also alleged that joint action in opposition to the act was against the rights of the people. He didn’t explain the reasons for his allegations. But, the governor saw the economic class of the protesters was not “meddling,” but members of aristocratic and wealthy commercial interests. James Otis appeared more of a legalist and writer than other revolutionary leaders and wrote A Vindication of the British Colonies in 1765. His early views were not generally accepted, but he served in the Stamp Act Congress, advocating colonial representation in Parliament and conceding its supremacy. As an attorney, he opposed the issuance of a Writ of Assistance—a general warrant issued before the crime—to assist in the enforcement of the Sugar Act. Thomas Paine, writing anonymously, sent a large number of copies of his Common Sense throughout the colonies. He advocated an immediate declaration of independence on practical, ideological, and legal grounds. Later, he joined the Revolutionary army and took part in the retreat across New Jersey. Patrick Henry, in the Virginia House of Burgess, on May 30, 1765, carried the legal issues to the fore. He made his famous, or infamous, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell” speech. As a result, the Burgesses resolved “it had the sole and exclusive right to lay taxes . . . upon the inhabitants of this colony . . . who were not bound to yield obedience to any law of parliament attempting to tax them.” The act’s preamble stated its purpose: defraying Crown cost and expenses for defending the western frontiers against the French and Indians and British commerce against the French. Foreign trade was a particular concern. The establishment of Admiralty Courts in 1763 and then Vice-Admiralty Courts represented Crown concern over revenue. The first Admiralty Act gave the Crown wide

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jurisdiction over laws affecting the colonies that were expanded by the Stamp Act of 1765. Since these courts were not common-law courts, Admiralty trials were not considered within the scope of the “rights of Englishmen.” Therefore, the Magna Carta did not protect them with the right to a trial by jury. The acts’ provisions agitated the colonies. Jurisdiction could be anywhere in the Empire. Judges received a percentage of the fines levied, and naval officials were compensated for successful prosecutions. Defendants had no right to trial by jury, and the evidence requirements were slack. This effort to improve the collection of revenue and taxes was highly resented and became a cause ce´le`bre to those opposing the Stamp Act. Smugglers had avoided paying taxes and, like the Peter Zenger Case, the jury would probably vote against the Crown. Vice-Admiralty Courts had concurrent jurisdiction; these courts heard conflicts between merchants and seamen. Its judges were appointed by the Crown and came from England. Its jurisdiction covered the entire east coast of the American colonies. Contrary to existing law, the defendant was presumed guilty. One’s failure to appear resulted in an automatic guilty verdict, even if the defendant could not travel to the court for the hearing. With such threats to commerce, the Massachusetts Colonial Assembly sent a circular letter to all of the colonies in June 1765. All those invited had previously served in colonial assemblies and understood parliamentary procedures. Nine colonies responded to this first American call to the Stamp Act Congress. The various attendees realized their attitudes were all similar. A proposal was made that colonials be appointed members of parliament. The concept of the colonial assemblies’ managing their own financial matters and concern over the number of Loyalists who could be sent to London dissuaded its proponents. The suggestion went nowhere, but what would have happened if London had agreed? Colonials had supported King George III, but the provisions of the Stamp Act proved burdensome. As the cry of “no taxation without representation” spread, and no revenues were collected, Lord Pitt in Parliament opposed the act, and the Crown eventually repealed it. Having evidenced its weakness to colonial resistance, London passed the Declaratory Acts asserting her dominion over the American colonies, but to what effect? The issue now moved from a solely economic matter to a legal, constitutional issue defining the rights of British subjects. On August 14, 1765, the first manifestations against the Stamp Act occurred when tax collectors were hung in effigy in the Boston Commons. A crowd of merchants, skilled craftsmen, and other directly interested parties—financially and politically—led the crowd in a protest against the Crown’s interference in colonial affairs. Within a short time, colonials—women, skilled and unskilled workers, and (freed) slaves—gathered at the Liberty Tree to express their anger over the British imposition. Liberty trees became symbols of resistance and appeared throughout

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the colony. November 11, Pope’s Day, was selected for the protest. This enabled the populace to gather gleefully; the anti-Catholic Protestants used this day to hang the pope in effigy, set fires, and have brawls throughout the city. The lower, and poorer, classes used this day not as a response to the Stamp Act but as a vehicle for augmenting their age-old prejudice against Rome. Two effigies appeared; one represented Andrew Oliver, the Boston Stamp Act Commissioner and the brother-in-law of the colony’s second-highest official, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. The other, a boot, represented a parliamentarian, the Earl of Bute, the innovator of the Stamp Act. When the crowd gathered, the public response initially was mockery, which quickly adopted a political overtone. The crowd went through the city “stamping” everything; it was large and composed of artisans, male and female laborers, children, a few merchants, and a few gentlemen. The effigies were hung to shouts of “liberty, property, and no stamps.” The crowd went to the stamp office and tore the building down. Crown officials became concerned at the disorder and all marched to the Liberty Tree. Zachariah Hood, the Boston tax collector, had to flee. The mob had burned his stamps, and he rode to New York for the protection of the English garrison. Riding his horse to death en route, Hood entered a colony that opted for the nonimportation of goods from England. The mob’s mood changed. Its organizers had lost control of the crowd, and the public officials now became concerned. When a bonfire was lit, an unruly crowd assembled. The object of the anger was Thomas Hutchinson, who was one of the most unpopular figures in Boston and the symbol for all that the mob opposed. His home was ravaged while a large gathering stood by and did nothing. Samuel Adams, an ardent revolutionary, understood the importance of the rioting, and he publicly disavowed knowledge or participation. In every seaport, groups formed were composed of the “middle class.” The Sons of Liberty dressed as workmen and sailors, probably to conceal their middle-class status. They forced Stamp Act distributors to destroy their materials and resign under threat of harm. They also attacked those deemed conspirators of the act’s acceptance. When the act came into effect on November 1, 1765, the apparatus existed to forcibly resist. Colonial Governor Colden had to flee the city; his home was destroyed and carriage burned. He sought refuge on a British vessel. The protesters then marched across the city and attacked the garrison commander’s home, destroying everything in sight. The insurrection continued to spread. In North Carolina, for example, Royal Governor William Tryon, famous for the Regulator revolt, promised the leading merchants and planters special privileges should they obey the Stamp Act. He promised to write London for special privileges for these 50 individuals and

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promised to reimburse them for their expenses caused by the stamp tax. Tryon refused to allow the colonial assembly to convene. Despite his objections, most North Carolinians refused to pay the tax, so royal officials closed Cape Fear River port and others. One thousand Carolinians traveled to Wilmington to confront the tax collector, William Dry, who refused to let vessels pass since they had unstamped clearance papers. North Carolinians forced the North Carolina Gazette editor to issue unstamped editions. The editor made “inflammatory expressions” about the Stamp Act, and the governor hired another newspaper as its official printer. The royal governor tried to enforce the act, and his efforts to quell resistance increased the popularity of the Sons of Liberty. In the February 26, 1766, edition, after declaring its loyalty to the Crown, it related historical freedoms granted the colonies and ended by stating its intent to “prefer death to slavery.” The Gazette called for peaceful protests, if possible. All freeholders entered into a compact to resist by unity of the colonies. Charleston, South Carolina, another notable port city, did not escape the mayhem. Henry Laurens, a leading member of the community who was wealthy in land and commerce, received the crowd’s venom. His residence was searched for Stamp Act stamps. In Newport, Rhode Island, the Sons of Liberty paid someone to terrify the stamp distributors and local customs collectors. Street violence burst forth in Newport in August. Gallows were built, and effigies were hung of Augustus Johnson, the stamp distributor, and two other leading conservative figures in the colony. The mob then attacked homes and destroyed property. The Sons of Liberty opposed violence, but were threatened if they interfered. There were other protests: Maryland, Georgia, and Pennsylvania leaders all argued for a rescission of the Stamp Act. The Sons of Liberty was established in 1765; local groups of protesters assembled in all the colonies, a unifying action not witnessed before in BritishAmerican colonial history. This intercolonial organization existed in various forms before 1765. It was instrumental in developing a pattern for resistance to the Crown that led to American independence. The organization communicated with all the colonies. On November 6, a committee in New York began intercolonial correspondence with the various colonies and they all expressed an interest in joint action to protect their “legal and legitimate rights.” The Sons of Liberty’s membership, an engine in the struggle to rebalance the relationship of the mother country with her North American children, was composed of financially comfortable subjects whose personal interests were greatly affected. The declared intention to enlarge the base of colonial participation may have been ingenious; most colonials, being uneducated, reacted and accepted the verbiage of the aforementioned. Symbolic of the effort, the Sons of Liberty strove

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to control the streets and crowds against violence. The Sons reiterated their loyalty to the Crown and confidence in the belief that Parliament would repeal the act, which violated their historic and legal rights. The Stamp Act, the first direct parliamentary tax, numbed colonials who lived in “splendid Isolation.” In one moment, the 63 pages of the Stamp Act orders would change the landscape for the colonies; the colonials were informed that the tax would be used for colonial administration. Direct means of collection were imposed because London realized prior relations could make the application of the new taxes a controversial matter. Legal documents of all sorts, newspapers, and apprenticeship status were taxed. Merchants and other would trade in promissory or financial notes, such as transportation documents were most vulnerable. In the effort to remove the Stamp Act tax, the first Stamp Act Congress was held in New York in October 1765. The participants included the wealthiest and most influential people in the colonies. The delegates were attorneys (10), merchants (10), and planters and land-owning farms (7). All of the participants had served in elective office, and all but three were born in the colonies. Four would be signatories to the Declaration of Independence; nine would attend the First and Second Continental congresses. Three would remain Loyalists. No delegate appeared from New Hampshire at the Congress; North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia were not represented since their respective colonial governors did not call their legislatures into session for the purpose of selecting representatives to the Stamp Act Congress. Six of the nine colonies agreed to sign a petition to the Crown and Parliament. New York, Connecticut, and South Carolina were not authorized to sign any documents. Robert Livingston’s New York led the assault, questioning Parliament’s legal authority to regulate internal and external trade. Not considering independence, many hoped a resolution to the Stamp Act controversy would strengthen the bond between family members. When Congress met, it was in secret, and no information was released about all its deliberations. A document, “The Declaration of Rights and Grievances” was prepared by Pennsylvanian John Dickinson. It raised 14 points of contention between the two sides. Congress’s members also asserted their traditional and historic rights as Englishmen. They affirmed the conviction that Parliament did not represent the colonies; only colonial assemblies had the authority to tax. They were especially angered by the use of Admiralty Courts, non-common-law courts that did not require trial by jury. Lord Dartmouth, colonial governor, rejected their petition as an “inappropriate” document. While William Beard argued the revolution was solely economic, it may not have been the complete case, but there is some merit to his argument. Many of the delegates discussed their natural rights as Englishmen. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania proposed a resolution referring to the “natural rights of mankind”

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and “common rights of mankind.” Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina raised a point of legal contention. He averred that the law originated with the Crown and not Parliament. Therefore, the petition should be sent to the king. Still unsure, the declaration was sent to the king and the petition to both houses of Parliament. The signatories feared being viewed as traitors, and none signed the document other than the clerk of court. Just prior to the news of the colonial reaction to the Stamp Act, Grenville was relived of the prime minister’s post and replaced by Lord Rockingham, the first lord of the Treasury. At the same time, public attitudes in Great Britain were shifting; some wished to resist application of the Stamp Act, completely oblivious to the precedent’s effect. Others, realizing that colonial resistance did not promise the anticipated finances, urged rescission of the act. Resistance to importation and other commercial issues caused the trading and financial interests to view the situation differently. It became obvious when 200 New York merchants agreed not to import from England until the act’s repeal. Parliament, meeting in December 1765, refused a resolution offered by Grenville. He suggested Parliament condemn colonial resistance to the Stamp Act and take remedial steps. A faction outside of Parliament led by Rockingham, Burke, and others organized London’s merchants, who formed a committee of correspondence to support the act’s repeal. They adopted a “grass roots” approach to the problem by calling on all members to communicate with merchants throughout the country to contact their parliamentary representatives and call for repeal, an action taken by Rockingham on January 14, 1766. A palliative was sought; the colonies would be allowed to pay the tax in their own script to reduce the financial impact on them. However, these efforts to ameliorate the situation failed. William Pitt, no longer silent, declared that Grenville’s colonial program had been wrong, and he remonstrated that Parliament lacked authority to tax the colonies. He did not deny the Crown’s control over the colonies, which was to remain supreme in all matters of government and legislation. His nonplus statement evidenced a desire not to break with the colonies. In a confusing statement, Pitt said taxes were voluntary gifts and grants of the Commons. He did support his claim by averring that “virtual representation” reflected the English common law. Lord Grenville, still in Parliament, made a telling response to Rockingham. He spoke of control, reciprocity, protection, the long historic relationship, and mutual benefits gained by this union. Denial of these terms constituted ingratitude and treason. Pitt’s response spoke of three million people submitting to slavery. In rebuttal, Rockingham continued his attacks about economic repercussions, and the House passed a resolution showing support for the Crown. England’s secretary of state, Henry Conway, introduced what became known as the Declaratory Acts. These acts affirmed the right of Parliament to tax the colonies in all cases and

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admitted the difficulty in enforcing the Stamp Act. Parliament also passed resolutions condemning rioting and granting compensation to those injured by the riots. But the damage had already affected relations between the mother country and her children across the Atlantic. Parliament reaffirmed its right to tax colonials by the Declaratory Taxes by stating it was the sovereign legislature of the British Empire. The Crown agreed to the repeal of the Stamp Act on March 17, 1766. William Pitt and John Burke, ardent supporters of liberty, made speeches attacking the legality of the act, whose effects greatly contributed to colonial unification and opposition to the Crown. Sometime in May 1766, the colonies found out about the repeal, and the masses that John Adams feared rejoiced and proclaimed their loyalty to George. The environment was especially charged because on the day of the repeal, all celebrated the king’s birthday. The happy mob celebrated and the Assembly voted the construction of statutes to William Pitt and George III. —Arthur K. Steinberg See also all entries under Boston Massacre (1770); Boston Tea Party (1773).

Further Reading Alexander, John K. Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Ammerman, David. In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974. Hoerder, Dirk. Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts 1765–1780. New York: Academic Press, 1977. Knollenberg, Bernhard. Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Labaree, Benjamin Woods. The Boston Tea Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Knopf, 1972. Martin, James Kirby. Men in Rebellion: Higher Governmental Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005.

Stamp Act Protests (1765) Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Roche, John F. The Colonial Colloquies in the War for American Independence. Millwood, NY: Associated Faculty Press, Inc., 1986. Ryerson, Richard Alan. The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763– 1776. New York: Columbia University Press, 1918. Shaw, Peter. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Thomas, Peter D. G. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Webking, Robert H. The American Revolution and Politics of Liberty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Weslager, C. A. The Stamp Act Congress. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1976.

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Adams, Samuel (1722–1803) Samuel Adams was born on September 27, 1722, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University. At Harvard, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government influenced him when he wrote of the rights of man and governmental responsibility to care for its people. In his MA thesis, he raised the perrenial question of one’s duty to obey government and recognized that revolution might be necessary to secure individual rights. He believed that British colonial control was illegal. Adams, a zealot for American independence, used any tools at his disposal to gain that freedom. Adams’s abilities as a speaker and political theorist gained him notoriety. In 1746, he became a clerk of the Boston market. His views found expression in his publication. The Public Advertiser’s intention was to be “open to whatever may be adapted to the state and defined the rights and liberties of mankind.” He suggested Parliament had overstepped its bounds by restricting the rights of American colonists. Another admonition was a mirror reflection of John Adams; people should not be mesmerized by the wealthy and/or permit themselves to be controlled by government. The constitution is the authoritative rule of law. Adams was active at Boston town meetings, and a member of the “Whipping Post Club.” He opposed British taxation instituted as a result of the debt caused by the French and Indian War because London hoped to balance the budget by passing the Sugar Act (April 5, 1764). Adams recognized the result of no public reaction would allow for continued violations by Parliament concerning taxation without representation, attacking freedom and liberty. His opposition was the first public effort to unite the colonies. Massachusetts’s legislature joined Adams in opposing the act, but the colonial governor closed the legislature. Adams convinced local merchants to boycott importations of British goods. All the colonies were urged to assemble; the Stamp Act Congress passed motions to the king. Adams, in the assembly, referred to the traditional rights of Englishmen. Adams’s effort contributed to London’s repeal of the Stamp Act. The relationship between colonies and parliament did not improve. After the imposition of the Townshend Act, Adams sought to obtain the passage of a circular letter describing British policy to all colonies, citing the problem as a “national” problem. Britain sent troops to Boston to enforce the new acts. Adams then published the Journal of Occurrences, describing events on a daily basis in Boston. The atmosphere deteriorated after the Boston Massacre. Massachusetts resolved to remove British troops and refuse to pay for their housing. Adams responded with proclamations referring to “the inherent and unalienable rights of the people.”

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Samuel Adams contributed to the atmosphere that led to the Boston Tea Party. His latest circular cautioned that the new act would have a detrimental effect on colonial commerce. He urged a united front. The Sons of Liberty became more active. Adams traveled throughout the colony, receiving support for opposition to the act from other communities. Unity came with the convening of the Continental Congress. In September 1774, Adams was selected as a member of the First Continental Congress and was among the most vocal. He signed the Declaration of Independence, debated for check on a strong central government, and opposed a standing army. He died on October 2, 1803, at the age of 81. —Arthur K. Steinberg

Further Reading Alexander, John K. Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Ammerman, David. In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974. Hoerder, Dirk. Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts 1765–1780. New York: Academic Press, 1977. Labaree, Benjamin Woods. The Boston Tea Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Knopf, 1972. Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Shaw, Peter. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Weslager, C. A. The Stamp Act Congress. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1976.

Declaratory Act (1766) The French and Indian War (1754–1763) ended colonial reliance on the British Empire for protection against the French and Indians on the colonial frontier. British successes were absolute, and the colonies went from adolescents to adults. The colonies now resented the presence of British authority when they realized that there was no need for a large contingent of British forces on colonial soil. To London, the most outrageous aspect of the growing conflict was colonial

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determination to enact legislation to regulate colonial society without British consent. Despite Blackstone’s theory of virtual representation, a legalism manufactured in the hope of quelling colonial restiveness, no colonials represented their colonies in London in either house of Parliament. In response to growing disrespect for the Crown, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, “an act passed for the better securing the dependency of his Majesty’s dominions in America upon the Crown and parliament of Great Britain,” 6 George III, c.12., on March 18, 1766. The act gave the Crown the exclusive right to impose all duties and taxes and finding any attempt to do so illegal. Despite the repeal of the Stamp Act, colonials attacked parliamentary actions viewed as contradictory to the Magna Carta. Colonial businessmen, merchants, and attorneys ranted that the traditional rights of Englishmen were under assault. They argued that the traditional rights their forefathers fought for had been killed by London. The passage of this all-encompassing act could be used to justify passage of other legislation against the interest of the colonies. Notable Americans like John Otis, “No Taxation without Representation”; Samuel Adams of Boston and the Sons of Liberty, who published materials and held meetings for the common people; and Patrick Henry of Virginia were instrumental in guiding the responses. Thomas Paine’s American Crisis represented the growing belief that independence was necessary. Colonial business was negatively affected; mercantile trade would be controlled as smuggling fell under the control of the Admiralty Courts that were not common-law bodies. Attorneys had to deal with the abundance of legalistic paperwork, all restricting and making it more difficult for the average colonial to make a living as British control tightened and affected colonial moneyed interests. The Massachusetts Assembly refused to obey the new act and circulated a letter to all colonies calling all to not obey the internal and external actions demanded under the acts, such as the Quartering and Mutiny Acts. The circulation of grievances to other colonies made all consciously aware of their common causes. The colonies and their various business and political leaders realized some sort of action was necessary if they were to prosper, whether as part of the British Empire or not. But as the atmosphere became increasingly charged, the more rationalized the forces for independence grew. From intercolonial correspondence committees to Stamp Congresses, from committees of grievance to the Constitutional Convention, the flame had been ignited. By the time George III offered to ameliorate the relationship, colonials no longer viewed themselves as subjects, but rather as representative citizens of a new nation. The clash of interests and the controversy arising from two opposed self-interests led to a parting of the ways. —Arthur K. Steinberg

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Further Reading Knollenberg, Bernhard. Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Thomas, Peter D. G. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Webking, Robert H. The American Revolution and Politics of Liberty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Salutary Neglect Salutary neglect represented intelligent British efforts to develop a viable colonial system within the bounds of the mercantile and legal traditions exemplified by the Magna Carta. This policy, beginning with colonization until the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), allowed growth and expansion void of interference from London or Parliament. Whig prime minister Robert Walpole, a founder and supporter of the policy of salutary neglect, believed less governmental interference was best for growth. Colonial growth from total dependence to independence was evidence of the success of this benign policy, but politicians did not foresee the political consequences in London. Colonials, due to a lack of governmental interest from London, functioned independently. Neither party enforced the Navigation Acts— acts compelling the colonies to trade only with Britain—legislated by Cromwell and Charles II but intentionally neglected by Walpole. The Crown’s successes in the French and Indian War caused unexpected responses and attitudes; colonials settling the west contrary to the Proclamation of 1763 no longer feared the French or Indians, and London now believed that the colonies should contribute to satisfying the national debt. Colonials had little regard for Crown subjects in the British Isles, whose taxes were higher than colonial taxes, but the same subjects did care about the financial cost for the new

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security given colonials. Few colonials knew or spoke of the Jumonville Affair, in which George Washington led colonial forces into the west and killed 50 French soldiers, a cause for the international conflict. At the time that the British were losing, William Pitt the Elder, the secretary of state, directed London’s response. He confiscated colonial supplies, drafted colonials into the British army, and took charge of the course of the war. Angered by Pitt’s action, the colonials began expressing their resentment to sudden British interference in their lives. Demands that the colonies contribute to the economic welfare of the Empire clashed with the traditional rights of Englishmen; local control of colonial matters had been accepted as a fait accompli. Colonial resistance to Britain’s attempt to address her financial needs worldwide caused Britain to exert a heavy hand in colonial affairs; the abandonment of salutary neglect resulted when London could refer to Blackstone’s “virtual representation” and the colonies to the traditional rights of Englishmen. Lord George Grenville resigned the chancellorship in July 1765 as the relationship further deteriorated with British attempts to circumvent common law by the imposition of Admiralty Courts to try “smugglers,” the increased efforts to tax without representation, the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, opposition from such vocal groups as the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party, and London’s continual policy of denying the colonies to print their own coin for business and trade. Colonies relied on their legislatures, commercial conduct, and even various religious creeds to stress their independence. King George III’s “Olive Branch” was met by American, not colonial responses; by citizens, not subjects; by adults, and not children. From Thomas Paine to John Adams, colonials had turned from those seeking an arrangement to those calling for independence. The die was cast because Britain had been too successful in decisively winning the French and Indian War and the commercial and merchant classes were the hardest hit by Parliament’s taxing system. —Arthur K. Steinberg

Further Reading Knollenberg, Bernhard. Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Knopf, 1972. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005.

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Stamp Act Protests (1765) Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Webking, Robert H. The American Revolution and Politics of Liberty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Stamp Act Congress (1765) As a result of the passage of the Stamp Act by Parliament, representatives from nine of the colonies assembled in Federal Hall, New York, in October 1765. Only Georgia, Virginia, and New Hampshire were absent from a successful meeting of the various colonies in their call for unity. The subject for discussion was to “consult together on the present circumstances of the colonies.” Most of the vocal opponents were educated and influential members of colonial society. This congress provided the first opportunity for passionate individuals to express their views colony-wide. This action scorched the political atmosphere after a period of political neglect by London caused by the French and Indian War. The Massachusetts colonial assembly, operating under the auspices of he royal governor, sent a circular letter to all the colonies in June 1765. All the invited delegates had served in colonial legislatures; they were aware of parliamentary procedures, and all supported King George III. But the provisions of the Stamp Act were onerous to the colonials but a necessity for the financial maintenance of the Empire. The assembled met in secret. The major issues reflected their “traditional rights of Englishmen”: lack of self-representation, lack of a jury trial and opposition to the Admiralty Court, not a common-law court, whose jurisdiction covered smuggling. Robert Livingston led the attack by questioning the right of Parliament to regulate, and the issue of internal and/or external trade arose. The lack of representation, gleaming back to the Magna Carta, only irritated those averring the legislation was a violation of their traditional rights of Englishmen. Assertions of “virtual representation” did not mollify the assemblage. When the delegates gathered on October 19, the delegates adopted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Fearing being identified as traitors and subject to execution, they did not sign the document. Only the clerk of the court affixed his signature. The document was redacted several times, but the number willing to sign the petitions was small. Lord Dartmouth, who alleged the document was inappropriate, rejected the final petition by the New York House under grounds that an unapproved body

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submitted it. However, the threat of a united front compelled the Crown to revoke the act because of the broad level of opposition realizing that it was unenforceable. In March 1766 while revoking it, the Crown and parliament reasserted its right to complete legislative authority over the colonies. Despite the repeal, the damage had been done. Both the colonies and London recognized the power of colonial America to assert itself. British withdrawal of the act convinced many that pressure would force England to reconsider its conduct. Those who eventually aspired to independence could take heart and look to the future. From passage of the Stamp Act to a call for independence was not a long trip. Replicating the organizational efforts of the colonies and their reaction to London provided a form for Americans such as Patrick Henry, James, Jonathan Mayhew, and Samuel Adams a forum from which to preach independence. —Arthur K. Steinberg

Further Reading Ammerman, David. In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974. Knollenberg, Bernhard. Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Knopf, 1972. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Thomas, Peter D. G. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975. Weslager, C. A. The Stamp Act Congress. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1976.

Taxation without Representation “No taxation without representation” originated in English history long before the British Crown settled the colonies. When pre-feudal and feudal societies merged with monarchy and finally democracy, the means of supporting the governmental

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functions were established. Originally, tax collection to support society evolved without concern for representative government. The first “statutory” espousal of the “traditional rights of Englishmen” occurred in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta. Nobility and king agreed to contractual obligations governing their relationship, and with time, one of the provisions mutated into no taxation without representation. King John conceded much of his fiscal control to representatives of the people, a term loosely used at this time. Fiscal obligations governed colonial development. Because their establishment aided trade and immigration, the Crown made few efforts to establish a viable tax system. While British competition with Spain waned, French rivalry remained intense, requiring the stationing and use of British troops to protect colonial frontiers against the French and their Indian allies. When the French and Indian War (1754–1763) in the colonies ended, England was victorious. Her success was not pyrrhic, only the results of the war. Secure western borders with the removal of French and Indian hostility no longer required large numbers of British garrisons, but the issue of recovering her financial equilibrium remained. London resolved to restore fiscal solvency and chose to tax the colonies for its efforts in North America. British leaders ignored the “traditional rights of Englishmen” as interpreted by the colonials. Parliament defined this as having its parliamentary members legislate colonial tax issues for the benefit of Great Britain. When American colonials objected, the Crown relied upon Blackstone’s concept of “virtual representation,” whereby he argued that Parliament represented the colonials. Unfortunately, his argument did not satisfy the colonials. Parliament could have mollified her position with the colonies. Neither English nor colonial statesmen suggested colonial representation in Parliament. When London passed the Stamp Act in 1765, she instituted what Jonathan Mayhew and others called the Intolerable or Declaratory Acts. Mayhew was a powerful and popular clergyman. His Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission spoke of traditional rights and he assumed the Crown and not Parliament was the culprit; he referred to tyrannical powers exercised by the Crown and initially sought the aid of Parliament to ameliorate the situation. His works were widely published; John Adams and John Otis mirrored his views. Boston, a major center of trade and commerce, witnessed the first organized resistance to the Stamp Act requiring fees for notarization of official documents, meaning an increased cost of all sorts of legal documents. The Stamp Act Congress met in protest, and London, facing violence, withdrew the tax. This did not resolve the impasse, for London instituted new tax legislation. The English response passed a surfeit of legislation covering all aspects of British-American relations, and their intercourse worsened.

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London passed the Admiralty Act, a non-common-law court not requiring trial by jury. The quick succession of acts only irritated their relationship; London’s actions were perceived as hostile to the colonies. In 1773, Parliament granted a monopoly for the importation of tea to the East India Company accompanied by a tax, causing the Boston Tea Party. With the evolving relationship from parent and child to adolescence and parent, the interests of the two parties continued to separate until the child declared his independence and begin its life as an adult. —Arthur K. Steinberg

Further Reading Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Knopf, 1972. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Webking, Robert H. The American Revolution and Politics of Liberty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Stamp Act Resolutions of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1765) After his ally, George Johnston, moved that the House resolve itself into a committee of the whole, Patrick Henry introduced the following provocative resolutions into a thinly attended session of Virginia’s House of Burgesses in May 1765. Because many of the conservative plantation owners and gentlemen who comprised the membership of the House were not present, Henry’s resolutions were adopted after some debate. A fifth resolution was also passed, but on the following day, when Henry was not present, the House leadership succeeded in having it rescinded, thought attempts to also rescind the only four resolutions failed. The fifth resolution, the text of which was later found among Henry’s papers, stated that only the House of Burgesses had the right to impose taxes on the people of Virginia, and that attempts by anyone else to do so had “a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.” Attorney, from the Committee of the whole House, reported, according to Order, that the Committee had considered of the Steps necessary to be taken in Consequence of the Resolutions of the House of Commons of Great Britain relative to the charging Stamp Duties in the Colonies and Plantations in America, and that they had come to several Resolutions

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Stamp Act Protests (1765) thereon; which he read in his Place, and then delivered in at the Table, where they were again twice read, and agreed to by the House, with some Amendments, and are as follow: Resolved, That the first Adventurers and Settlers of this his Majesty’s Colony and Dominion of Virginia brought with them, and transmitted to their Posterity, and all other his Majesty’s Subjects since inhabiting in this his Majesty’s said Colony, all the Liberties, Privileges, Franchises, and Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain. Resolved, That by two royal Charters, granted by King James the First, the Colonists aforesaid are declared entitled to all Liberties, Privileges, and Immunities of Denizens and natural Subjects, to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the Realm of England. Resolved, That the Taxation of the People by themselves, or by Persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what Taxes the People are able to bear, or the easiest Method of raising them, and must themselves be affected by every Tax laid on the People, is the only Security against a burdensome Taxation, and the distinguishing Characteristick of British Freedom, without which the ancient Constitution cannot exist. Resolved, That his Majesty’s liege People of this his most ancient and loyal Colony have without Interruption enjoyed the inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws, respecting their internal Polity and Taxation, as are derived from their own Consent, with the Approbation of their Sovereign, or his Substitute; and that the same hath never been forfeited or yielded up, but hath been constantly recognized by the Kings and People of Great Britain. Source: Kennedy, John Pendleton, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia 1761– 1765 (Richmond, VA: The Colonial Press, E. Waddey Co., 1907), 359–360.

An Account of the Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston (1765) The following selection from the diary of Boston resident John Tudor describes the violence that erupted in Boston in August 1765 as a result of American anger over the Stamp Act. Tudor, who was an eyewitness but not a participant, describes the destruction by a mob of the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was held by the citizens to be partly responsible for the Stamp Act. Tudor, like many Bostonians, later felt ashamed of his failure to act in preventing the destruction, once it became known that Hutchinson had nothing to do with the passage of the act, and had even apparently protested against it.

August 14 This morning was discovered hanging on the great Trees at the South end of Boston the Effigies of . . . Oliver Esqr as Stamp Master & a Large Boot with the Devil coming

Stamp Act Protests (1765) out of the top &c. The Boot to represent Lord Bute &c. The effigies hung all Day and towards evening a number of people assembled, took down the effigies carried them through the Town as far as the Townhouse, then March’d down King Street, and then proceeded to Oliver’s dock, pulled down a New Brick Building called the Stamp Office, belonging to said Oliver & carried the Wooden part of it up to Fort Hill and with Shouting made a Bonfire of it with said Oliver’s Fence which stood near said Hill; and then surrounded Mr. Oliver’s House, Broke his Windows & entered the House & destroyed great part of the Furniture &c. The next Day a Proclamation was Issued out by Governor Bernard and the Council offering £100 . . . Reward for the discovery of any person concerned as aforesaid &c. Things remained something quiet till the 26th when toward evening a number of people assembled in King Street & Attack’d the House and office of WTM Story, Esqr Deputy Register of the Court of Admiralty (which stood near the Town House) Broke the Windows of the House and Office, destroy’d & burnt part of the Goods scattered & burnt most of the papers in a Bonfire they made in King Street near the House. Then proceeded to the House of Benj. Hallowell, Esqr Comptroller of the Custom House; Broke down the Fence & Windows of his Dwelling house, & then entered the House, Broke the Wainscot and great part of the Furniture &c. and carried off £30 Sterling in money &c. This brought it to the dusk of the evening, though it was a moonlight Night near the full Moon. Then the Monsters being enflam’d with Rum & Wine which they got in said Hallowell’s Celler proceeded with Shouts to the Dwelling House1 of the Hon. Thos. Hutchinson Esqr Lieutenant Governor & enter’d in a Voyalant manner, broke the Wainscot, partitions, Glasses &c.; broke & distroy’d every Window, Broke, tore or carried off all the Family’’s Apparel Jewels, Books &c. and Carried off about £900 Sterling in Cash, they worked hard from 8 O’clock on the House, Fences &c. till about 12 or one O’Clock; when they got on the top of the House and cut down a large Cupola, or Lanthron which took up their Time till near Daylight, leaving the House a mere Shell. So great a piece of Cruelty (I believe) on so good, so innocent a Gentleman was never committed since the Creation. The next Day the Governor & Council Issued out a proclamation of £3oo Lawful money to anyone who should discover the Leader, or Leaders of the Mob and £100 reward for the discovery of any Actors in the affair. T’was supposed that several Country Fellows & sailors was concerned in this Mob, as there was but few of them known. There was a number of Boys from 14 to sixteen years of age, some mere Children which did a great deal of damage in breaking the Windows & destroying the Furniture Apparel &c. But what is surprising there was some hundreds of people looking on as spectators, I was one, that had they known each other’s minds they might have prevented the Mischief done at the Lieutenant Governor’s; But there was such a Universal abhorrence of the Stamp Act which [had] past in England & was soon to be put in execution in America and which was the cause of the Mob’s rising and committing such cruelty on the Governor; thinking he had some hand in the Stamp Act, but it was soon known that he was not only innocent, but had protested against it.

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Aug. 26 The next Day there was a full town Meeting, when they Voted unanimously their utter detestation of the violent proceedings of the Mob &c. and had the minds of the people and the Innocence of Governor Hutchinson been known before, as it was at this meeting, the mischief at his house might easily have been prevented, as the next day there was a Universal Lamentation for the Destruction done. Source: Tudor, William, ed. Deacon Tudor’s Diary (Boston: Press of Wallace Spooner, 1896), 17–20.

Boston Massacre (1770) The Boston Massacre was the term given to the event that involved a small group of British soldiers shooting on American civilians who were taunting them in Boston on March 5, 1770. It led to tensions which, in turn, proved to be a cause of the general distrust among the Whigs who opposed elements of British rule, which resulted in the outbreak of the War of American Independence five years later. The shooting in Boston itself resulted in the death of three civilians at the scene, and two afterwards. Although the incident was important, and led to a trial of some of the soldiers, it is best known by the engraving by Paul Revere, and became one of the causes of rise in tensions that was to lead to the War of American Independence, which broke out in 1775. There had been tension in North America since the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). The British victory in the war had removed the French as a threat to the British settlements in the region, but the costs incurred in winning the war had meant that the British government had to raise the level of taxation. The Townshend Revenue Act and other laws, collectively known as the Townshend Acts, were passed by the British Parliament in 1767, taking their name from the proposer, the politician Charles Townshend, who wanted a tax placed on common products imported into the British colonies in North America—Townshend himself died just before the Act became law. This included taxes placed in tea, lead, painters’ colors, glass, and paper. It was expected that this would help the government raise about £40,000. The taxes led to much opposition from many of the residents in North America. Some objected to paying the taxes, but others were angry because the taxes were paid to the British governor and other British-appointed officials in each of the colonies, whereas most other taxes were paid to town assemblies. This would therefore mean that the British authorities were able to fund their rule directly, rather than having to rely on the will of the local assemblies. For the British, however, they saw the taxes as fair owing to the large expense incurred in defending British North America in the wars against the French and the Indians. The latter argument was supported by the Tories—Americans who supported the British—who were, in the American War of Independence, to become the Loyalists. The British foresaw that many people in the city of Boston might resist the new taxes—it was a hotbed of radicalism—so, as a result, the British general Thomas

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Boston Massacre (1770) Paul Revere's sensational illustration of the Boston Massacre, a skirmish on March 5, 1770, in which British soldiers fired on and killed five townspeople. Revere's historic print, released within a month, publicized the event and was hugely influential in stoking anti-British sentiment in the years before the American Revolution. An interesting example of Revere's emphasis on impact over accuracy is the depiction of one of the victims, Crispus Attucks, who was of mixed African-American and Native American heritage, as a white man. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Gage sent over the 29th Regiment of Foot and the 14th West Yorkshire Fusiliers to Boston. The former, after 1881 the 1st Bn, Worcestershire Regiment, was largely raised in Worcestershire in the west Midlands of England. The latter, largely drawn from men from Yorkshire and Kent, had previously been based in Dublin, Ireland, and then in the south of England. As the ships brought the soldiers to Boston, there were problems over accommodating the soldiers, and only after these problems had been surmounted, the reinforcements on disembarked on October 1, 1768, and marched into Boston. There were many tensions between the British troops and the local colonists, but the first time they came to a head with fatal results was on February 22, 1770, when a mob of people started causing a nuisance outside the house of Ebenezer Richardson, a local man who supported the British and was involved in informing on anti-British activists. When the crowd started throwing stones, and one of these hit the wife of Richardson, the Loyalist confronted the crowd with an unloaded shotgun. When they stormed his house, he loaded the gun and opened fire at the people breaking down his front door. Several people were injured, and an 11-year-old local boy, Christopher Seider, died later from his wounds. With a radical doctor performing the autopsy, Richardson found himself charged with murder, but the trial did not take place until after the Boston Massacre itself. The tensions started again in the late afternoon of March 5, 1770. A group of Bostonians, including some radicals, were heading home with Private Hugh White, on sentry duty outside the Custom House (now the Old State House). During this time, Edward Garrick (or Gerrish), an apprentice to a wigmaker,

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spotted Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch and called out, “There goes the fellow that won’t pay my master for dressing his hair.” Goldfinch had actually paid the bill from Garrick’s master, but this did not stop Garrick from continuing with his abuse. Garrick then taunted Private White, who left his sentry box and put Garrick with his (White’s) musket. It did not take long for a crowd to form, and they all started taunting White. Captain Thomas Preston, the Officer of the Day, was unsure exactly what to do. Initially, he had hoped that the situation would die down of its own accord. However, White had been forced by the crowd up the stairs to the Custom House and had his back to a locked door. It was now clear that events were escalating, so Preston sent for a noncommissioned officer, Corporal William Wemms, and several soldiers from the 29th Regiment of Foot, which included John Carroll, James Hartigan, Matthew Kilroy, William McCaulay, Hugh Montgomery, and William Warren. The men—with bayonets fixed—went out, followed by Preston and James Basset. They were able to rescue White at the stairs and drove back some of the crowd. By this time, there were about 300 to 400 people in the crowd, forming a semicircle around the soldiers. The soldiers all had their guns raised with Captain Preston in front of them as people in the crowd shouted “fire” inciting the soldiers to open fire. During this, Private Hugh Montgomery was hit with a club and hit heavily. When he had recovered his balance, he fired his gun and then shouted “Damm you, fire,” a phrase he later admitted to one of his lawyers. After a pause, the soldiers started firing into the large crowd. Some remarked that the firing was a little haphazard, and certainly the soldiers did not let off a volley in unison. Three people were killed instantly. These were an African American sailor (possibly with Native American ancestry) called Crispus Attucks; a rope maker called Samuel Gray; and a mariner called James Caldwell. Samuel Maverick, aged 17, was hit by a ricocheting bullet, and he died several hours later, early on the morning of March 6; and Patrick Carr, aged 30 from Ireland, who made leather breeches, died two weeks later from wounds incurred in the shooting. He made a deathbed testimony to his doctor in which he said that he felt that the soldiers probably acted out of fear for themselves. The funerals for the first of those killed took place on March 8, with the coffins containing the bodies of Attucks, Gray, Caldwell, and Maverick being taken on a procession around the Liberty Tree and then to the cemetery—following the route of that of Seider—with possibly 10,000 people turning up. Shocked by the mock sincerity of some of the people leading the funeral, the Reverend Mather Byles turned to a friend and remarked, “They call me a brainless Tory, but tell me, my young friend, which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not one mile away.”

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The size of the funeral procession was so large that authorities were worried about further repercussions, and they withdrew soldiers from the Custom House to Castle Island in Boston Harbor. They had arrested Preston at 3:00 a.m. on March 5, the morning after the shooting, and the eight soldiers involved turned themselves in later that morning. On March 27, Preston and four of the men who were thought to have been involved in the shooting were formally charged with murder. By this time, the incident had become well known throughout the city and further afield. Some anonymous pamphlets circulated, and Henry Pelham, a local artist and the half-brother of John Singleton Copley, the famous local portrait painter (who also painted many of the Bostonian political figures of the period involved in the subsequent trials), produced a picture of the incident, and Paul Revere, a Bostonian silversmith and engraver than produced his famous carton of the “Boston Massacre” as it had become called. Revere’s drawing became famous, and Christian Remick, a local painter, hand-colored some pictures, some of which show Attucks as an African American. They also have Preston standing behind his soldiers and ordering them to open fire. The bright blue sky was also an artistic license as it was dusk at the time. Revere also added a sniper shooting from out of the Custom House (which was labeled in the engraving as “Butcher’s Hall”). However, the most inaccurate part of the drawing was that the soldiers fired at intervals, possibly reloading, and they never fired a volley at the crowd, which would probably have resulted in much higher casualties. At the Suffolk County Court, Captain Preston and the soldiers were put on trial. The government wanted the trial to be fair so that moderates would continue to support them, and to show that justice would be upheld. However, there were not many local attorneys who would represent the soldiers. Eventually John Adams, a leading patriot, agreed to defend them to ensure fairness, and he was assisted by Josiah Quincy II and Robert Auchmuty. The prosecution was led by the solicitor general for Massachusetts, Samuel Quincy, and Robert Treat Paine, an attorney hired by the town of Boston. All the jurors were drawn from outside Boston, and the trial itself was not held until later in the year. The first trial was that of Thomas Preston, who, some claimed, gave the order to shoot. While in custody, Preston had written a number of letters, some of which were published in the local press. Preston’s trial lasted from October 24 to October 30, 1770. Fifteen people testified at the trial, and there were depositions from another 91 people. Some included information of what they actually saw, or believed they had seen, with others citing hearsay and other evidence that was clearly inadmissible. Garrick was the first to give evidence, and Thomas Marshal, a tailor who served in the militia, was the second to speak for the prosecution. It was a witness called William Wyat, who claimed that he had actually heard Preston give the order—but had said that Preston was wearing a neutral-colored

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overcoat, later conceding that the man wearing the overcoat was not Preston. The jury acquitted Preston because they clearly did not believe that he had ordered the soldiers to open fire. The most convincing evidence was that Preston was standing in front of the soldiers, and hence any call by him to open fire would have endangered himself. The trial of the eight soldiers started a month later, on November 27. Their defense, argued by John Adams, was that the soldiers were acting to defend themselves from possible harm. Even if they were provoked, Adams stated that there was no aim to shoot anybody, and they could only be found guilty of manslaughter. A plan of the area of the Boston Massacre, attributed to Paul Revere, is held at the Boston Public Library, and it has been claimed that the diagram was used in the court, although there are some doubts. The claim of self-defense was sustained by the jury in the case of six of the soldiers. However, two of the soldiers—Kilroy and Montgomery—were found guilty of murder as there were statements from many people that they had shot into the crowd. Some of the jurymen were later quoted as saying that they felt that the solders should have held their fire for longer. However, for the two convicted of manslaughter, Adams managed to get the crime reduced to manslaughter by using a part of the British Common Law whereby they could read from the Bible to prove that they could read and therefore had “prayed clergy” protesting their innocence and holding out their right thumbs. This meant that the two privates were punished by being branded on their thumbs by Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf. The Boston Massacre was one of the events that were to engender great anger in the American public against the British authorities. Much of this came from Paul Revere’s engraving which is still used in many school textbooks, although now the problematic nature of the image is highlighted. There remain some disputes—based on the conflicting evidence given at the trials—over whether some of the soldiers reloaded their guns before firing again. The site where the Boston Massacre took place is now marked by a cobblestone circle in the square around what is now the Old State House—and indeed it was from a balcony of the same building that the Declaration of Independence was read to crowds on July 18, 1776. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Tea Party (1773).

Further Reading Bourne, Russell. Cradle of Violence: How Boston’s Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

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Boston Massacre (1770) Burgan, Michael. Boston Massacre. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2005. Langguth, A. J. Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Phelan, Mary Kay. The Story of the Boston Massacre. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. Reid, John Phillip. “A Lawyer Acquitted: John Adams and the Boston Massacre.” American Journal of Legal History 18, no. 3 (1974): 189–207. Zobel, Hiller B. The Boston Massacre. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.

Adams, John (1735–1826) Already a leading patriot in Boston, Massachusetts, John Adams, later the second president of the United States, was a prominent lawyer involved in defending Captain Thomas Preston, who was being charged with ordering soldiers to open fire on civilians in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, and also some of the soldiers charged with opening fire. Adams was born on October 30, 1735, at Braintree, Massachusetts, his father, John Adams, being descended from a Welsh migrant, Ap Adam, who migrated to the Americas in 1636. He was educated at Harvard College, and his father, a Puritan deacon, wanted him to become a minister. However, he taught for a while and then decided to study law. With the emergence of the Patriot movement, Samuel Adams, a second cousin of John, became a leading activist. The two were prominent opponents of the Stamp Act of 1765, and John Adams himself wrote criticisms that appeared in the Boston Gazette and were then republished in the London Chronicle. A well-known attorney in Boston by the time of the Boston Massacre, John Adams was hired to present a defense for Captain Preston and the eight soldiers. Initially, all the British soldiers were unable to find a lawyer, and Preston asked Adams to help. Adams was concerned that defending them might lose friends locally, and he would certainly not be well remunerated for his efforts. As it was, defending Preston earned him 18 guineas (£18, 18 shillings), for what Adams was to describe as “the most exhausting and fatiguing” case he had worked on. However, Adams was keen that the soldiers should have a fair trial, and his work on their behalf certainly showed him a fair person anxious that the legal process should triumph over mob rule of any sort. During the trial, Adams ably defended Preston. Assisted by Josiah Quincy II and Robert Auchmuty, he was able to find discrepancies in some of the arguments raised by the witnesses. Preston’s case was relatively easy as it was quickly proven that he did not give the order to open fire, and as he did not personally fire into the crowd, Adams was able to persuade the jury to acquit him. For the soldiers, the trial was harder as they did fire into the crowd. Two of the eight soldiers—Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery—were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter (the others being entirely acquitted), and Adams was able to make a plea for them by which they had their right thumbs branded. John Adams went on to be a leading political activist, taking part in the Declaration of Independence, and becoming the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands from 1782 to 1788, and to Great Britain from 1785 to 1788. He was the first vice president of the United States, serving under George Washington, from 1789 until

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1797, and was president of the United States from March 4, 1797, until March 4, 1801. He died on July 4, 1826. His son John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States in 1825. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Ferling, John. John Adams: A Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Smith, Page. John Adams. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.

Attucks, Crispus (c. 1723–1770) Crispus Attucks was the first person killed in what became known as the Boston Massacre. Born of an African father and Native American mother, Attucks was a slave for one William Brown of Framingham, Massachusetts, until he escaped in 1750. Although little is known about Attucks’s life, a runaway advertisement in the Boston Gazette (October 2, 1750) described him as “a mulatto Fellow, about 27 years of age . . . 6 feet 2 inches high, short curl’d Hair, his Knees near together than common.” The advertisement offered a reward of “10 pounds” and “cautioned against” seamen who would help him escape. The caution was not heeded. For the next 20 years, Attucks labored on a whaling ship out of Boston Harbor. At other times, he served as a rope maker on Boston’s North End. It was here where Attucks led a mob against British soldiers. On the North End, Attucks and others like him clashed with British soldiers, who were stationed in Boston after the French and Indian War. As a sailor, Attucks felt especially vulnerable to British impressment, which was a standard practice in the 18th century. As a common laborer, he came to resent the competition from British troops who worked during their off hours to supplement their meager wages in the military. On Friday, March 2, 1770, tensions heated up when Attucks and a group of rope makers fought with a British soldier, after which a rope maker insulted a Redcoat. Tensions culminated on the evening of Monday, March 5, 1770, when a group of 30 angry seamen, whom John Adams described as “a motely rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and jack tarrs,” pelted a British guard at the customs house with snowballs and sticks. Seven soldiers came to his aid, immediately opening fire on the angry crowd. Attucks was struck first. Two balls tore through his chest, puncturing his chest and liver. Four others were also killed.

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Newspapers on that fateful day noted that the five men were “barbarously murdered” (New Hampshire Gazette, March 13, 1772), but the trial did not bare that out. The soldiers were acquitted when John Adams, one of the finest legal minds in Boston, won an acquittal for the soldiers, setting off a public uproar throughout the city. Pamphleteers and propagandists called the affair the “Boston Massacre,” and the victims, Attucks included, became immediate heroes. Attucks was buried at Granary Burying Ground in Boston, the same yard that bears the remains of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other notable patriots of the American Revolution. Today he is remembered as a martyr and a symbol of American freedom. In 1998, the U.S. Treasury honored him by putting his image on a silver dollar. —Matthew L. Harris

Further Reading Allison, Robert J. The Boston Massacre. Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2006. Zobel, Hiller B. The Boston Massacre. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970; reissued, 1996.

Broadsides One-sheet documents printed on one side only, broadsides date back to the 15th century as a popular format for quick distribution of official public announcements, commercial advertisements, news, and commentary. Broadsides generally fall in the category of ephemera, since most were considered disposable and tended to address issues of immediate but short-lived relevance. However, historians value broadsides for insights they offer into popular discourse—literally, the views on the street—as opposed to more formal written histories. Broadsides competed for attention in public spaces using graphics, distinctive typography, and provocative language. Broadside ballads, poems intended to be sung to a familiar tune, further helped communicate a message memorably. Often sold at low cost or distributed for free, broadsides have a long history as tools of revolutionary action. In Boston, articles, verse, and cartoons rallying anti-British sentiments were posted on the Liberty Tree, from which an effigy of stampmaster Andrew Oliver was hanged in November 1765. Boston’s literate middle class, including merchants and craftsmen, was a prime audience for propaganda decrying burdensome taxes and encroachments on liberty.

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Printers of dissenting materials, such as Isaiah Thomas and Alexander McDougall, risked a charge of seditious libel, imprisonment, and destruction of their presses if publications were traced back to them. Authors often signed their work with pseudonyms if at all. But Stamp Act duties on newspapers and advertisements severely antagonized colonial publishers, motivating disobedience. In Boston, where Sons of Liberty activities could be violent and vindictive, printers complying with British laws ran risks as well. A broadside published under the banner “No Stamped Paper to Be Had” described Stamp Act protests noting, “We have certain information from Boston that printers there intend to continue their papers, and to risk the penalties . . . and that if any of them were to stop on account of the stamp act, their offices would be in danger from the enraged people.” In the 18th century, graphic elements were typically printed from woodblocks, often generic designs that could be reused. In the Revolutionary era, a boot motif frequently appeared in reference to John Stuart, Lord Bute, First Lord of the Treasury and a favorite counselor of George III, and the devil denoted misdeeds and malign influence of various public figures. The Boston Massacre became the subject of numerous broadsides in the months following the shooting of several belligerent colonists in a confrontation with British soldiers. “In Memory of the (Never to be Forgotten) Fifth of March, 1770” featured coffins and death’s-head graphics common to funeral announcements, as well as an elegiac poem appealing to divine justice for vengeance. A large broadside published by the Boston Gazette included Paul Revere’s famed copperplate print “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Reg’t.” Revere’s depiction of the fatal incident as a wanton act of violence perpetrated against innocent colonists was copied by several printers. Thomas, who printed a woodblock version in 1771, particularly helped keep the Boston Massacre fresh in the public mind, printing annual memorials to the men killed. —Tess Mann

Further Reading Barker, Hannah, and Simon Burrows, eds. Press Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Brigham, Clarence S. Paul Revere’s Engravings. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Lowance, Mason I., and Georgia B. Bumgardner, eds. Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976. “No Stamped Paper to Be Had.” Philadelphia: Printed by Hall & Franklin, 1765. Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection; Portfolio 346, Folder 45. Plakas, Rosemary Fry. “Introduction to Printed Ephemera Collection.” American Memory: American Time Capsule, Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. August 3,

Boston Massacre (1770) 2008: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/pessay.html (accessed August 28, 2008). “A Poem, In Memory of the (Never to be Forgotten) Fifth of March, 1770.” Boston: Printed and sold next to the Writing-School, in Queen-Street, 1770. Massachusetts Historical Society. Schlesinger, Arthur M. “The Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act.” New England Quarterly (March 1935): 63–83.

Preston, Thomas (1722–1798) Captain Thomas Preston was the Officer of the Day from the 29th Regiment of Foot in the British army, and was responsible for ordering the soldiers to open fire leading to the Boston Massacre of 1770. Little is known of his origins. There have been some suggestions that he might have been from Ireland, although there seems to be no real evidence for this except for records of a number of men called Thomas Preston living there, and the 29th Regiment having been based at Kilkenny, Ireland, before it moved to North America. It was in 1768 that the 29th Regiment was sent to Boston, Massachusetts, along with the 14th Regiment. On the night of March 5, 1770, he ordered the British soldiers to form a semicircle to keep back the crowd that was gathering, and told them not to fire, although a soldier, Private Hugh Montgomery, did shout out “fire.” After the Boston Massacre, Preston was arrested at about midnight and taken to the Town Hall, where he was charged before two justices with the shooting. At 3:00 a.m., he was taken to the jail and was held there for seven months until he was put on trial for the shootings, which had lead to the deaths of five people, three at the site, and two afterwards. While in jail, Preston wrote a number of letters that appeared in the Boston Gazette in which he thanked the local people. However, he also wrote letters to people elsewhere, and one of his letters sent to London was published in Boston, in which he complained about Bostonians. Preston hired a local lawyer, John Adams, later U.S. president, as his attorney. In the trial that took place on October 24–30, Preston stated that he felt that some of the crowd were intent on looting the Customs House. After his acquittal, he wrote to General Thomas Gage, “I take the liberty of wishing you joy at the complete victory obtained over the knaves and foolish villains of Boston.” Preston waited until the trial of the soldiers ended and he then left America on the HMS Glasgow. He retired from the army and moved to England, where he received a pension of £200, and he is said to have either settled in London or

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in Ireland, although John Adams did report that he saw him in London in the 1780s. A number of stories have emerged around Thomas Preston who appears in the Revere print of the Boston Massacre. It has variously been stated that Preston was aged 40, or elsewhere that he was born in the same year as Adams, making him 48. A history of the massacre by Michael Burgan states that Preston died in 1798. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Bourne, Russell. Cradle of Violence: How Boston’s Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Zobel, Hiller B. The Boston Massacre. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.

Revere, Paul (1734–1818) Boston artisan, printmaker, businessman, and patriot mythologized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic poem Paul Revere’s Ride, whose print of the Boston Massacre depicted the confrontation between colonists and soldiers as an act of unwarranted aggression.

Paul Revere was a silversmith who became a folk hero of the American Revolution, though his real importance was in publicizing the cause in the years leading up to independence. (Library of Congress)

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A silversmith by profession, Revere learned his craft from his father, Frenchborn Apollos De Revoire (1702–1754). Taking over his father’s silver shop in 1757, Revere struggled to compete in a limited market for fine silverwork. He supplemented his income making and mending common items like buckles and buttons and took up copperplate engraving, printing advertisements, trade cards, and bookplates. Seeing his business further threatened by the 1765 Stamp Act, Revere became increasingly engaged in revolutionary politics. In addition to his involvement with the North End Caucus and the Sons of Liberty, and later service as a courier for the Continental Congress, Revere printed patriotic cartoons. In March 1770, after seven British soldiers fired on an angry mob leaving five dead and six wounded, Revere produced a print titled “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Reg’t.” Below an illustration of the incident liberally skewing the facts, Revere included the names of the dead and a poem claiming the soldiers, “Like fierce barbarians grinning o’er their prey, Approve the carnage and enjoy the day.” First published and sold individually, the picture also appeared on a broadside with a Boston Gazette article describing “the Consequences of Quartering Troops in a populous well-regulated town.” A talented silversmith but an awkward draftsman, Revere generally based his cartoons on pictures by other artists, not an unusual practice in a time before copyright law. For “The Bloody Massacre,” he closely copied a print by artist Henry Pelham, prompting a letter from Pelham protesting Revere’s failure to share credit and profits. The swiftness with which Revere copied and circulated the picture suggests he recognized a potent appeal to moral outrage for the shooting specifically and the state of affairs between Britain and America generally. As in Pelham’s original, Revere depicts a line of eight smiling soldiers in red coats firing into a group of distressed colonists chiefly in blue. Both versions indentify a building behind the soldiers as the Custom House and feature a small dog (a symbol of loyalty) facing the soldiers but siding with the colonists. Unlike Pelham, Revere chose not to show any colonists fleeing and changed the direction of the moon in the corner above the colonists so that it waxes rather than wanes. He also added a building called “Butcher’s Hall” (a pun reading as “Butchers All”) and a gun firing from one of its windows. Though “The Bloody Massacre” was extensively distributed in 1770 and copied in turn by other artists, it did not necessarily inflame the hearts of all colonial Americans, particularly those beyond Boston, or those within Boston who tired of civil unrest. However, through frequent reproduction over ensuing centuries and association with Revere’s folk hero status, the print became the iconic image of the Boston massacre for later generations. —Tess Mann

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Further Reading Agresto, John. “ ‘Art and Historical Truth’: The Boston Massacre.” Journal of Communication (Autumn 1979): 170–174. Brigham, Clarence S. Paul Revere’s Engravings. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Ford, Paul Leicester. “Some Pelham Copley Letters.” Atlantic Monthly, April 1893, 499–510. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Pictorial Assertion.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 257–265. Paul Revere—Artisan, Businessman, and Patriot: The Man behind the Myth. Boston: Paul Revere Memorial Association, 1988. Triber, Jayne E. A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770) In 1833, writer James Hawkes discovered one of the last surviving participants of the American Revolution in Richland Springs, New York. He was 91-year-old George R. T. Hewes, who had witnessed the Boston Massacre, participated in the Boston Tea Party, and served in the American militia during the Revolutionary War. Hawkes wrote a biography of Hewes and published his memoir, in which Hewes describes the events he witnessed. These publications made Hewes famous. Reproduced here is Hewes’s account of the Boston Massacre of March 1770. On my inquiring of Hewes what knowledge he had of that event, he replied, that he knew nothing from history, as he had never read anything relating to it from any publication whatever, and can therefore only give the information which I derived from the event of the day upon which the catastrophe happened. On that day, one of the British officers applied to a barber, to be shaved and dressed; the master of the shop, whose name was Pemont, told his apprentice boy he might serve him, and receive the pay to himself, while Pemont left the shop. The boy accordingly served him, but the officer, for some reason unknown to me, went away from the shop without paying him for his service. After the officer had been gone some time, the boy went to the house where he was, with his account, to demand payment of his bill, but the sentinel, who was before the door, would not give him admittance, nor permit him to see the officer; and as some angry words were interchanged between the sentinel and the boy, a considerable number of the people from the vicinity, soon gathered at the place where they were, which was in King street, and I was soon on the ground among them. The violent agitation of the citizens, not only on account of the abuse offered to the boy, but other causes of excitement, then fresh in the recollection, was such that the sentinel began to be apprehensive of danger, and knocked at the door of the house, where the officers were, and told the servant who came to the door, that he was afraid of his life, and would quit his

Boston Massacre (1770) post unless he was protected. The officers in the house then sent a messenger to the guard-house, to require Captain Preston to come with a sufficient number of his soldiers td defend them from the threatened violence of the people. On receiving the message, he came immediately with a small guard of grenadiers, and paraded them before the custom-house, where the British officers were shut up. Captain Preston then ordered the people to disperse, but they said they would not, they were in the king’s highway, and had as good a right to be there as he had. The captain of the guard then said to them, if you do not disperse, I will fire upon you, and then gave orders to his men to make ready, and immediately after gave them orders to fire. Three of our citizens fell dead on the spot, and two, who were wounded, died the next day; and nine others were also wounded. The persons who were killed I well recollect, said Hewes; they were, Gray, a rope maker, Marverick, a young man, Colwell, who was the mate of Captain Colton; Attuck, a mulatto, and Carr, who was an Irishman. Captain Preston then immediately fled with his grenadiers back to the guard-house. The people who were assembled on that occasion, then immediately chose a committee to report to the governor the result of Captain Preston’s conduct, and to demand of him satisfaction. The governor told the committee, that if the people would be quiet that night h» would give them satisfaction, so far as was in his power; the next morning Captain Preston, and those of his guard who were concerned in the massacre, were, accordingly, by order of the governor, given up, and taken into custody the next morning, and committed to prison. It is not recollected that the offence given to the barber’s boy is mentioned by the historians of the revolution ; yet there can be no doubt of its correctness. The account of this single one of the exciting causes of the massacre, related by Hewes, at this time, was in answer to the question of his personal knowledge of that event. A knowledge of the spirit of those times will easily lead us to conceive, that the manner of the British officers application to the barber, was a little too strongly tinctured with the dictatorial hauteur, to conciliate the views of equality, which at that period were supremely predominant in the minds of those of the Whig party, even in his humble occupation; and that the disrespectful notice of his loyal customer, in consigning him to the attention of his apprentice boy, and abruptly leaving his shop, was intended to be treated by the officer with contempt, by so underrating the services of his apprentice, as to deem any reward for them beneath his attention. The boy too, may be supposed to have imbibed so much of the spirit which distinguished that period of our history, that he was willing to improve any occasion to contribute his share to the public excitement; to add an additional spark to the fire of political dissention which was enkindling. When Hewes arrived at the spot where the Massacre happened, it appears his attention was principally engaged by the clamours of those who were disposed to aid the boy in avenging the insult offered to him by the British officer, and probably heard nothing, at that time, of any other of the many exciting causes which lead to that disastrous event, though it appeared from his general conversation, his knowledge of them was extensive and accurate.

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Boston Massacre (1770) But to pursue the destiny of Captain Preston, and the guard who fired on the citizens; in about a fortnight after, said Hewes, they were brought to trial and indicted for the crime of murder. The soldiers were tried first, and acquitted, on the ground, that in firing upon the citizens of Boston, they only acted in proper obedience to the captain’s orders. When Preston, their captain, was tried, I was called as one of the witnesses, on the part of the government, and testified, that I believed it was the same man, Captain Preston, that ordered his soldiers to make ready, who also ordered them to fire. Mr. John Adams, former president of the United States, was advocate for the prisoners, and denied the fact, that Captain Preston gave orders to his men to fire; and on his cross examination of me. asked whether my position was such, that I could see the captain’s lips in motion when the order to fire was given; to which I answered, that I could not. Although the evidence of Preston’s having given orders to the soldiers to fire, was thought by the jury sufficient to acquit them, it was not thought to be of weight enough to convict him of a capital offence; he also was acquitted. Source: James Hawkes, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, with a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes (New York: S. S. Bliss, Printer, 1834), 28–32.

Richard Palmes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770) Boston resident Richard Palmes, who was an eyewitness to the incident, later gave the following account of the Boston Massacre of March 1770. Palmes claimed to be next to Captain Preston, who had just assured him the soldiers had no intention of firing into the crowd when the solders opened fire into reaction to a piece of ice or ball of snow that was thrown at them. I, Richard Palmes, of Boston, of lawful age, testify and say, that between the hours of nine and ten o’clock of the fifth instant, I heard one of the bells ring, which I supposed was occasioned by fire, and enquiring where the fire was, was answered that the soldiers were abusing the inhabitants; I asked where, was first answered at Murray’s barracks. I went there and spoke to some officers that were standing at the door, I told them I was surprised they suffered the soldiers to go out of the barracks after eight o’clock; I was answered by one . . . pray do you mean to teach us our duty; I answered I did not, only to remind them of it. One of them then said, you see that the soldiers are all in their barracks, and why do you not go to your homes. Mr. James Lamb and I said, Gentlemen, let us go home. . . . I then saw Mr. Pool Spear going towards the townhouse, he asked me if I was going home, I told him I was. . . . But when I got to the town-pump, we were told there was a rumpus at the Custom-house door; Mr. Spear said to me you had better not go, I told him I would go and try to make peace. I immediately went there and saw Capt. Preston at the head of six or eight soldiers in a circular form, with guns breast high and bayonets fixed. . . . I went immediately to Capt. Preston . . . and asked him if their guns were loaded, his answer was they are loaded with powder and ball; I then said to him,

Boston Massacre (1770) I hope you do not intend they shall fire upon the inhabitants, his reply was, by no means. . . . [T]hen . . . I saw a piece of snow or ice fall among the soldiers on which the soldier at the officer’s right hand stepped back and discharged his gun at the space of some seconds the soldier at his left fired next, and the others one after the other. After the first gun was fired, I heard the word “fire,” but who said it I know not. After the first gun was fired the said officer had full time to forbid the other soldiers not to fire, but I did not hear him speak to them at all; then turning myself to the left I saw one man dead, distant about six feet; I having a stick in my hand made a stroke at the soldier who fired, and struck the gun out of his hand. I then made a stroke at the officer, my right foot slipped, that brought me on my knee, the blow falling short; he says I hit his arm; when I was recovering myself from the fall, I saw the soldier that fired the first gun endeavoring to push me through with his bayonet, on which I threw my stick at his head, the soldier starting back, gave me an opportunity to jump from him into Exchange lane, or I must have been inevitably run through the body. I looked back and saw three persons laying on the ground, and perceiving a soldier stepping round the corner as I thought to shoot me, I ran down Exchange lane, and . . . into King Street, and followed Mr. Gridley with several other persons with the body of Capt. Morton’s apprentice, up to the prison house, and saw he had a ball shot through his breast; at my return I found that the officers and soldiers were gone to the main guard. To my best observation there were not seventy people in King Street at the time of the firing, and them very scattering, but in a few minutes after the firing there were upwards of a thousand. Source: Richard Palmes, “A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston” (Boston, 1770).

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Regulator Movement (1771) The Regulator Movement—actually two distinct movements, centered in North and South Carolina, respectively—was a vigilante protest movement launched by backcountry farmers shortly before the American Revolution. In South Carolina, the Regulators sought to impose law and order and gain fuller access to the colonial legislature and colonial courts. In North Carolina, a more radical and militant group of Regulators protested political corruption, taxation, and the imprisonment of debtors. Though they differed in many respects, the two movements shared an emphasis on making colonial governments more responsive to the colonists’ immediate needs. The Regulator Movement was the largest-scale political uprising in British North America between Bacon’s Rebellion and the American Revolution. North and South Carolina were chartered in 1670, but white settlers did not begin to populate the Carolina backcountry until the middle third of the 18th century. Backcountry residents, many of whom were recent immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, lived isolated, hardscrabble lives. Many were religious dissenters, which set them apart from the predominantly Anglican residents of the coastal regions. To some extent, backcountry and coastal settlements enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Coastal planters relied on backcountry settlers to protect them by creating a buffer zone that would keep slaves within the colony and Indians out; backcountry settlers often aspired to emulate coastal leaders by breaking free of subsistence farming, becoming slaveholding planters, and participating in the trans-Atlantic market economy. But in spite of their common aspirations, backcountry farmers and coastal planters differed greatly in lifestyle, wealth, and political power, and their interests often diverged. In fact, the coastal-backcountry axis of conflict was pervasive in 18th-century America; it shaped colonial politics in New England and Pennsylvania as well as the South. In the late 1760s, disaffected Carolina frontiersmen began to organize a protest movement they called “the Regulation.” In South Carolina, the term “Regulation” referred to the protesters’ wish to “regulate” the disordered affairs of the backcountry. In North Carolina, it denoted the protesters’ wish to “regulate” and reform the unfair policies and corrupt administration of the colonial government. The North Carolina Regulator Movement, which was the more radical of the two, originated with the formation of the Sandy Creek Association in Orange

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County in August 1766. The Sandy Creek Association was succeeded in April 1768 by the Regulator Association, from which the Regulator Movement took its name. Though centered in Orange County, the protest also encompassed Anson and Rowan counties and sporadically infected other backcountry districts. The men who joined the North Carolina Regulation reflected the full range of the backcountry’s truncated social hierarchy, from impoverished farmers to moderately affluent planters. Some Regulators owned slaves, sawmills, gristmills, and substantial acreage that was reputed to be among the most fertile farmland in North America. The affluence and upward mobility of many Regulators undercuts any notion that the Regulation was a simple class conflict between rich and poor. Altogether, perhaps three-quarters of the adult men who resided in the North Carolina backcountry participated in the Regulator Movement. The Regulators’ principal grievance was the corruption of North Carolina’s royal provincial government. They protested exorbitant taxes and court fees, the seizure of farmers’ property and livestock to pay taxes, and the widespread practice of imprisonment for debt. They particularly resented the taxes imposed to pay for the construction of a sumptuous governor’s palace in New Bern. The Regulators’ protests sometimes assumed a hysterical tone; in their most radical phase, in the winter of 1770–1771, the Regulators threatened to slay all judges and lawyers in the colony. But the Regulators also advanced several pragmatic and farsighted proposals for improving provincial government. They advocated the implementation of a more equitable tax system, in which each man would pay in proportion to his income. They sought to diminish corruption by limiting attorneys’ fees and providing for clerks to be paid salaries so that they would not have to rely on court fees for income. The Regulators also advocated the use of the secret ballot and sought to make the government more responsive to the people by publishing roll-call votes of the Assembly and allowing voters to instruct their representatives. For many Regulators, these political proposals were infused with a radical Protestant vision of social reform. Although the established Anglican Church had scarcely made inroads in the North Carolina backcountry, both Quakerism and the evangelical preaching of the First Great Awakening transformed the region in the mid-18th century. These movements emphasized individual freedom of conscience and diminished traditional esteem for social and political hierarchies. Herman Husband, one of the intellectual leaders of the Regulator Movement, published two pamphlets in which he argued that Christians were obliged to ensure that the governments under which they lived were just; a man who neglected to defend his civil rights, Husband argued, was flouting the will of God. Husband’s reasoning incorporated elements of Whig country thought, which would later play a pivotal role in the American Revolution.

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It is difficult to construct a coherent account of the Regulators’ actions because the Regulator Movement was truly a popular movement, with an informal leadership structure and fluid tactics and goals. While a few prominent leaders emerged— Herman Husband as theorist and scribe, James Hunter as “general” of physical resistance—these leaders preferred to influence, rather than command, their followers. The Regulators did create a modicum of organizational structure. They bound themselves to a common cause by creating “associations,” drafting resolutions, and, in some cases, swearing oaths (Quaker Regulators, as well as some who were Baptist, abstained from taking oaths). But the Regulation was fundamentally a grassroots movement, characterized by localism, voluntarism, minimal hierarchy, and constant recourse to the dictates of the individual conscience. Violent clashes between the Regulators and the North Carolina government first erupted in 1768. On April 8, a group of 70 to 100 Regulators rioted to protest the seizure of a fellow Regulator’s horse as a tax payment. They fired on the home of Edmund Fanning, a prominent Orange County official, and broke his windowpanes. Fanning attempted to muster the Orange County militia to arrest the ringleaders but found that many militiamen sympathized with the Regulators and refused to turn out. When Fanning arrested Herman Husband and William Butler in May, 700 Regulators gathered to press for the men’s release. On June 20, James Hunter and Rednap Howell presented a Regulator petition to Governor Tryon; in this document, the Regulators repeated their long-standing concerns about political corruption and singled out Fanning as an official who had stymied their efforts to secure redress. Tryon, though long sympathetic to backcountry settlers’ concerns about political corruption, warned the Regulators not to resort to extralegal means. He promised to tour the backcountry, which he did in the summer of 1768. This visit culminated in a narrowly averted clash between nearly 1,500 militiamen, commanded by Tryon, and 800 Regulators, who apparently planned to disrupt the sessions of the Hillsborough Superior Court. The Regulators opted to disperse rather than confront Tryon’s army. The Regulators continued to petition Tryon throughout 1769, but they gradually lost the governor’s goodwill. By early 1770, the Regulators were once again disrupting court sessions and interfering with sheriffs’ efforts to collect taxes. On September 24, Regulators disrupted the Hillsborough Superior Court and severely beat Edmund Fanning. In November, they torched the home and barns of Judge Richard Henderson. Soon afterwards, Tryon heard rumors that the Regulators planned to disrupt the meeting of the North Carolina Assembly in December. The Assembly convened in an atmosphere of mounting anxiety, even hysteria. Governor Tryon denounced the popular protest and asked the Assembly to authorize him to suppress it by military force. The Assembly responded by passing the Johnston Riot Act of January 15, 1771. This law made riotous behavior a felony

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and, in some cases, treason; it also permitted the government to prosecute accused rebels in any of North Carolina’s six superior courts, regardless of where the alleged offense had occurred. Finally, it empowered Tryon to suppress the Regulators by force. Meanwhile, the Assembly expelled Herman Husband on charges of seditious libel. Ironically but predictably, the so-called “Bloody Act” heightened rather than quelled backcountry protest. Angry frontiersmen flocked to join the Regulator cause. They drew up counter-resolutions, forbade courts to meet, and pledged not to pay taxes. In the spring, Tryon, who knew that he would soon be moving on to the provincial governorship of New York, resolved to put down the Regulator Movement briskly and decisively. He marshaled approximately 1,200 to 1,500 militiamen (some under the command of General Hugh Waddell) and marched them west, where they eventually encamped at Great Alamance Creek near Hillsborough. On the evening of May 15, a party of approximately 2,000– 3,000 Regulators petitioned Tryon for an audience. Tryon declined, and around noon on May 16, he ordered the militia to open fire on the assembled Regulators. The poorly armed Regulators, their movements uncoordinated by any commanding officer, were easily defeated in a two-hour battle. Tryon subsequently hanged seven Regulators and required approximately 6,400 others to swear allegiance to the province of North Carolina. The Battle of Alamance marked the collapse of the Regulator Movement. Although disaffection lingered in the backcountry, and many families chose to move westward to distance themselves from the provincial government, the Regulators’ formal protest was at an end. Meanwhile, a more moderate movement, also known as “the Regulation,” took shape in the South Carolina backcountry. Affluent farmers and planters joined forces to suppress the numerous outlaws, squatters, and drifters who had populated the South Carolina backcountry in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. They retaliated against suspected criminals by whipping them, burning their homes, or apprehending them and delivering them directly to the Charleston jail. They also harassed impoverished frontier settlers who lived primarily by hunting and foraging. The sedentary, land-owning Regulators denigrated these hunters as shiftless “white Indians”; they loathed them because the hunters subverted conventional norms of respectability, inconvenienced their neighbors by practices such as firehunting, and stirred up conflicts with local Native Americans by trespassing on their hunting grounds. The South Carolina Regulator Movement may thus be interpreted as a concerted effort by upwardly mobile settlers to push the backcountry out of a rough-and-ready frontier stage of development and bring it within the orbit of commercial plantation agriculture. In spite of their propensity for vigilante justice, the South Carolina Regulators evinced a relatively conservative, law-and-order mind-set. Most were substantial

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landowners who sought to protect private property and make the backcountry safe for agrarian capitalism. In 1767, they presented the South Carolina Assembly with a remonstrance in which they detailed the backcountry’s crime problem and urged quick action. They requested local courts, local jails, a more convenient system for processing land warrants, and fuller backcountry representation in the South Carolina Assembly. (Until 1768, the vast backcountry was treated as a single electoral district.) In 1768 and again in 1769, armed Regulators marched from the backcountry to lowcountry polling places, where they demanded the right to vote. Although election officials did not always comply, the Regulators succeeded in electing several candidates in this fashion. The assemblymen recognized the establishment tone of the Regulators’ remonstrance and promptly acceded to several of the Regulators’ demands. In November 1767, the Assembly established two ranger companies, composed largely of Regulators, and empowered them to suppress banditry and other crimes. In 1768, two new backcountry parishes were created, permitting greater backcountry representation in the colonial legislature. Finally, the Circuit Court Act of 1769 created a much-needed network of courts, jails, and sheriffs to maintain order in the backcountry. Intermittent Regulator violence continued throughout these years, alienating some coastal residents and spawning counterattacks by a rival backcountry group called the Moderators. Nevertheless, the movement dissipated by 1771, when the governor of South Carolina issued a general pardon to all of the colony’s Regulators. The moderate tone of the South Carolina Regulation, the Assembly’s prompt and sympathetic response, and the colony’s strong tradition of consensus government combined to prevent the sort of open warfare between Regulators and colonial officials that occurred in North Carolina. Historians continue to debate the Regulator Movement’s relationship to the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the Regulator Movement was often interpreted as an overt protest against British rule, and thus as a precursor to the American Revolution. This approach, which fell into disfavor in the early 20th century, was succeeded by an interpretation of the Regulator Movement as a class conflict that anticipated the more extensive post-Revolutionary conflict over “who should rule at home.” More recently, historians have noted the recurring pattern of east-west tension in colonial politics, the specific backcountry social and religious context that informed the Regulator Movement, and the complexity and variety of the Regulators’ political aims. In South Carolina, the Regulators clearly sought to participate in, not overthrow, the colonial government. Most joined the coastal elite in supporting American independence, even as they continued to contest the coastal parishes’ domination of South Carolina politics. The North Carolina Regulators, on the other hand, expressed dissatisfaction with both British imperial rule and the political leadership of North Carolina’s resident coastal elite. This dual

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resentment placed them in an awkward position when the Revolutionary War began. Recent scholarship by A. Roger Ekirch and Marjoleine Kars, among others, emphasizes that many North Carolina Regulators supported neither the British nor the patriot cause with any enthusiasm during the Revolutionary War. The former Regulators’ decision to sit out the war was fueled not only by disaffection with both sets of political leaders, but also by evangelical preaching that advocated neutrality and pacifism. In 1775, the Continental Congress, anxious to overcome Piedmont farmers’ disaffection with the patriot cause, hired two Presbyterian ministers to tour the North Carolina backcountry for four months and persuade the region’s residents that opposition to British rule was morally justifiable. Some former Regulators, notably Herman Husband, did espouse the patriot cause. But most seem to have recognized that neither major party to the Revolutionary War was likely to bring about the changes the Regulators had sought. Although the Revolutionary War brought prolonged and violent conflict to the North Carolina backcountry, it did not address the backcountry settlers’ fundamental grievances about the government’s responsiveness to their needs. In the wake of the Revolution, former Regulators sympathized with other backcountry “regulations” such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Lingering backcountry distrust of central government made North Carolina one of the last states to ratify the U.S. Constitution, which heightened the powers of a distant federal government. Nevertheless, state leaders in both North and South Carolina slowly came to terms with the need to secure the loyalty of backcountry residents and improve their access to state institutions. Between 1786 and 1801, the North and South Carolina legislatures sited their new state capitals in Raleigh and Columbia, respectively, and their new state universities in Chapel Hill and Columbia—locations in the very heart of the backcountry. —Darcy R. Fryer See also all entries under Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794).

Further Reading Adams, George R. “The Carolina Regulators: A Note on Changing Interpretations.” North Carolina Historical Review 49 (1972): 345–352. Brown, Richard Maxwell. The South Carolina Regulators. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963. Denson, Andrew C. “Diversity, Religion, and the North Carolina Regulators.” North Carolina Historical Review 72 (1995): 30–53.

Regulator Movement (1771) Ekirch, A. Roger. “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Kars, Marjoleine. Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in PreRevolutionary North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Klein, Rachel. Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Lee, Wayne E. Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Nelson, Paul David. William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Service. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

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Battle of Alamance (1771) The Battle of Alamance, which occurred on May 16, 1771, at Great Alamance Creek near Hillsborough, was a clash between North Carolina Regulators and the North Carolina militia, led by Governor William Tryon. The Regulators’ defeat in this conflict effectively ended the Regulator Movement. On January 15, 1771, in an atmosphere of mounting tension, the North Carolina Assembly passed the Johnston Riot Act, which authorized Tryon to suppress the Regulator Movement by military force. In the spring, Tryon duly summoned the North Carolina militia to the colonial capital, New Bern. He failed to raise as many troops as he hoped, but he nevertheless marched to Hillsborough, the seat of Orange County and a site of past Regulator violence, with an estimated 1,100 men. On May 9, approximately 2,000 Regulators surrounded General Hugh Waddell’s encampment of 250 militiamen in Rowan County. Tryon rushed to join Waddell, and for several days, the two armies eyed each other warily. Many militiamen were reluctant to engage the Regulators, and a few went over to the Regulator side. On May 13, Tryon marched his troops further westward to Great Alamance Creek. There, on the evening of May 15, the Regulators petitioned Tryon for an audience. Tryon refused their request and, on the morning of May 16, positioned his troops to do battle with approximately 2,000 to 3,000 assembled Regulators. A group of Regulators led by Presbyterian minister David Caldwell attempted to negotiate with Tryon to avert an armed confrontation; Tryon responded by issuing an ultimatum that the Regulators lay down their arms within an hour. He also ordered the execution of Regulator Robert Thompson, a member of Caldwell’s party. The Regulators refused to capitulate, although some who were religious pacifists left before Tryon’s one-hour ultimatum expired. Just before noon, Tryon order the militia to open fire. The battle was brief; within two hours, Tryon’s troops had routed their unprepared opponents. Many of the Regulators, not expecting that their confrontation with Tryon would erupt into an open battle, had arrived at Great Alamance Creek unarmed or without adequate ammunition. Nor did the Regulators have a single commanding officer; James Hunter, the obvious choice, declined to assume the command on the grounds that each individual should command himself. The militia suffered 9 dead and 61 wounded. The Regulator losses, never precisely determined, included 10 to 20 dead and approximately 100 wounded. After the battle, the royal government of North Carolina executed seven Regulators. One, James Few, was executed without trial; the others were accorded brief and inadequate trials under the terms of the Johnston Riot Act. Tryon pardoned

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most of the Regulators on the condition that they lay down their arms and swear allegiance to the royal government of North Carolina. More than 6,400 did so. The Regulator Movement collapsed in the aftermath of the Battle of Alamance, although backcountry settlers’ disaffection with the North Carolina government remained. Many former Regulators moved west, settling in Tennessee; others sought solace in pacifism and radical Protestantism. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Kars, Marjoleine. Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in PreRevolutionary North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Lefler, Hugh T., and William S. Powell. Colonial North Carolina: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Dobbs, Arthur (1689–1765) Arthur Dobbs, a Scots-Irish landowner and politician, served as royal governor of North Carolina from 1753 until his death in 1765. He aimed to unite North Carolina settlers against external threats and bring North Carolina within the British cultural mainstream. In practice, his policies antagonized backcountry settlers and failed to resolve North Carolina’s internal conflicts. A scion of Northern Ireland’s affluent Protestant Ascendancy, Dobbs began his career as a British army officer in Scotland. He subsequently returned to Ireland to manage the family estate near Carrickfergus. He was elected to the Irish Parliament in 1727 and was appointed engineer and surveyor general of Ireland in 1733. Dobbs’s involvement in Irish politics led him to reflect deeply on the state of the British Empire. He advocated administrative reform and vigorous policies to promote economic development throughout the empire, particularly in North America. Dobbs believed that these policies would assist Britain in its geopolitical struggle with France. Dobbs invested heavily in private ventures to promote North American development. In the mid-1740s, he purchased 200,000 acres of frontier land in North Carolina and sponsored the immigration of 500 Irish Protestants to settle it. In 1749, he was a founding member of the Ohio Company. He also helped fund two unsuccessful expeditions to find the Northwest Passage. Dobbs’s idealistic interest in imperial reform, combined with his financial investments in North Carolina, inspired to him to seek the colonial governorship through his connections at court. Arriving in North Carolina in October 1753, Dobbs initially sought to root out corruption and resolve regional disputes within

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the colony. He encouraged North Carolinians to present a united front in the face of the French and Native American threat posed by the Seven Years’ War. He also sought to strengthen the Anglican Church within the colony. Wealthy, wellestablished coastal residents recognized the potential benefits of the stabilization Dobbs promoted, but Dobbs’s policies antagonized some frontier settlers. His opposition to the printing of paper money caused considerable hardship on North Carolina’s cash-poor frontier. On his vast land claims in Anson County (later Mecklenburg County), Dobbs skirmished with settlers who exploited a North Carolina–South Carolina border dispute to avoid paying for their plots and intimidated court officials who attempted to serve them papers. Ultimately, Dobbs’s authority floundered among both frontiersmen and North Carolina’s nascent gentry. As early as 1760, Dobbs complained that North Carolina assemblymen equated themselves with members of the British House of Commons and evinced a similar reluctance to submit to the authority of the Crown. The colony’s leadership had grown more united under Dobbs’s tenure, but in opposition to him rather than in cooperation with him. Meanwhile, frontier settlers exploited social disorder and weak government for their own ends, anticipating the Regulator Movement. In 1764, Dobbs requested permission to return home for health reasons. He ceded authority to the newly appointed lieutenant governor, William Tryon, and died while packing for the trip home. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Clarke, Desmond. Arthur Dobbs, Esquire, 1689–1765: Surveyor-General of Ireland, Prospector and Governor of North America. London: Bodley Head, 1958. Ekirch, A. Roger. “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Kars, Marjoleine. Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in PreRevolutionary North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Husband, Herman (1724–1795) Herman Husband, an ex-Quaker millennialist and North Carolina planter, was one of the intellectual and political leaders of the Regulator Movement. An eccentric visionary, Husband exemplified the crucial role that radical Protestantism played in the Regulators’ critique of North Carolina politics. Born into an Anglican planter family in Maryland, Husband experienced a religious conversion after hearing George Whitefield preach in 1739. He left the

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Receipt given to Thomas Sitgreaves for assisting in Herman Husbands' 1771 incarceration. (Courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina)

Anglican Church to join the Presbyterians, then the New Side (evangelical) Presbyterians, and finally, in about 1743, the Quakers. As a young man, Husband managed his family’s properties in Maryland, operated a pig ironworks, and held leadership roles in the local Quaker meeting. He married three times and fathered eight children. Husband first visited North Carolina in 1751, and from the mid1750s on he purchased 10,000 acres of land in Orange and Rowan Counties, where he installed a grist mill and ironworks. In 1762, he settled in Sandy Creek, North Carolina. Soon afterwards, Husband left the Quakers as a result of a dispute about individuals’ freedom to buck the rulings of higher meetings. Husband aimed to redeem society by means of religiously inspired political activism. In 1766, Husband and his neighbors formed the Sandy Creek Association to promote public officials’ accountability to voters. It quickly collapsed. When the Regulator Movement emerged a few years later, Husband assumed the role of intellectual advisor and scribe, drafting resolutions and petitions and incorporating ideas from his extensive reading. In 1770, he wrote two political pamphlets, An Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences in Publick Affairs and A Continuation of the Impartial Relation. These pamphlets fused radical Protestant theology with Whig country thought to argue that Christians were obliged to defend their civil rights and ensure that the government under which they lived was virtuous and just. Meanwhile, Regulators and other backcountry voters elected Husband to the North Carolina Assembly in 1769. The North Carolina government, convinced that Husband was the ringleader of the rebellion, jailed him on libel charges in December 1770; he was released in February. Husband was present at the confrontation that preceded the Battle of Alamance but, as a pacifist, slipped away before the shooting started. Soon

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afterwards, Husband fled the province with a price on his head. His property was confiscated by the government. Husband settled in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, where he became a large landowner, assemblyman (1777–1778), and supporter of American independence. In 1779, Husband experienced a vision of a New Jerusalem rising west of the Allegheny Mountains; he also experienced a revelation that constitutional reform was necessary to pave the way for the millennium. In his later years, Husband wrote extensively on millenarianism. He criticized the U.S. Constitution as too moderate and welcomed the more radical French Revolution. When western Pennsylvania farmers protested the federal excise tax on whiskey in 1794, Husband once again assumed the role of spokesman and scribe for the protesters. He was charged with treason and spent the winter of 1794–1795 in jail, but a grand jury failed to indict him. Husband died soon after his release from prison, a dissident and freethinker to the end. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Jones, Mark H. “Herman Husband: Millennarian, Carolina Regulator, and Whiskey Rebel.” PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1983. Kars, Marjoleine. Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in PreRevolutionary North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Tryon, William (1729–1788) William Tryon, who served as royal governor of North Carolina from 1765 to 1771, was the Regulators’ principal adversary. His decision to build a sumptuous governor’s palace in New Bern became a popular symbol of oppressive and expensive government. Although Tryon sympathized with the Regulators’ complaints about fiscal corruption in North Carolina, he quashed their resistance harshly at the Battle of Alamance. An army officer and son of the English landed gentry, Tryon became a career colonial administrator. In 1764, he secured the lieutenant governorship of North Carolina through the patronage of Lord Hillsborough. He succeeded to the governorship after Arthur Dobbs’s death in March 1765. As governor, Tryon sought to integrate the colony more fully into the British imperial mainstream. He secured the full establishment of the Anglican Church in North Carolina, promoted Anglican education and missionary activities, and established a postal service linking North Carolina to other colonies. Tryon also persuaded the North Carolina

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Assembly to appropriate £15,000 in provincial currency for the construction of an elegant capitol and governor’s palace in New Bern. Tryon believed this project would dignify the colony’s royal government and signal the maturation of the British settlement in North Carolina. An effective though somewhat authoritarian administrator, Tryon was initially popular with the residents of North Carolina. In the early years of his governorship, Tryon was sympathetic to many of the backcountry settlers’ grievances. He attempted to increase the supply of paper money, ameliorate abuses in tax collection, and prevent the embezzlement of public funds. Tryon’s efforts met with limited success and, in some cases, merely fanned public anxiety about political corruption. When the Regulator Movement erupted in physical violence, Tryon took a harsh line. In the spring of 1768, he called up the militia of eight backcountry counties to suppress the rebellion. Tryon himself led the militia in clashes with Regulators at Hillsborough in September 1768 and at the Battle of Alamance in May 1771. Just before and after the Battle of Alamance, Tryon summarily executed two Regulators. Six others were hanged after being convicted of treason. Tryon ultimately pardoned some 6,400 former Regulators who agreed to swear allegiance to North Carolina. Tryon’s response to the Regulator Movement was authoritarian but scarcely vindictive; his paramount goal was to uphold the authority of the royal government of North Carolina. Tryon transferred to the governorship of New York soon after the Battle of Alamance. There, as in North Carolina, he vigorously promoted social stratification and the Anglican Church, both of which he envisioned as anchors of political stability. In the opening salvos of the American Revolution, Tryon took a moderate stance, just as he had done in the Stamp Act Crisis in North Carolina. He favored the repeal of parliamentary taxes on the American colonies, arguing that only massive military force could subdue the protests. Not until 1775 did Tryon reluctantly accede to British efforts to impose parliamentary authority on the colonies. During the Revolutionary War, he organized Loyalist troops and led several raids on Connecticut towns and arsenals. He retired to England in 1780. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Nelson, Paul David. William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Service. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Tryon, William. The Correspondence of William Tryon and Other Selected Papers. Edited by William S. Powell. 2 vols. Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1980–1981.

Pine Tree Riot (1772) The Pine Tree Riot was one of the first acts of rebellion against the authority of Great Britain that would lead to the American War of Independence three years later. Essentially, it had its origins in the use of pine trees in North America to make masts for ships for the (British) Royal Navy, and was an event that in some ways resembled the Boston Tea Party, which took place 20 months later. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) had been won by the British, in large part because of their control of the seas through a massive navy. However, the making of so many warships, as well as merchant vessels, resulted in much demand for white pine trees, which could be used to make masts. In the British Isles, the sheer number of ships being built and repaired had meant that there were few large white pines left—this species was regarded as the best for a single-stick mast. With Britain anxious to keep its naval (and also its trading) advantage, laws had been passed in North America whereby white pine trees were ordered to be preserved until the tree was fully grown. The New Hampshire General Court passed an act in 1722 making it illegal to cut down any white pine that was more than 12 inches in diameter. Cutting down any of them would result in a fine of £5. Any timber found in violation of this was marked with white arrows painted on the wood, signifying that these trees were property of the British Crown. By this time, in the British North America, there had been growing resentment of the British, and some people started to cut down the trees and use them for floorboards. This led to a fashion among anti-British activists to display proudly the width of the boards used in their property, often as much as 12 inches wide. These laws were not heavily enforced until 1766, when John Wentworth was appointed as governor of New Hampshire. Wentworth had originally been born in New Hampshire and educated at Harvard, his uncle, Benning Wentworth, having been his predecessor as governor (and the person who had introduced the 1722 Act). He was generally thought to be sympathetic to some of the grievances of the colonists, but on the issue of the white pine trees, he held firm. Finally the British decided to crack down on this use of timber, and in the winter of 1771–1772, John Sherburn, the deputy surveyor in New Hampshire, ordered a search of sawmills. At six sawmills in Goffstown and Weare, Sherburn’s men

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found logs from large white pine trees that had been marked with the broad arrow. Altogether, there were many logs at the sawmills owned by Richards, Asa Pettee and Dow, and 270 logs, which were between 17 and 36 inches in diameter, were at Clement’s Mill and at the Old Mill Village in South Weare. In the New Hampshire Gazette of February 7, 1772, some of the offenders were named, and the government asked them to show cause why their logs should not be seized by the Crown. Criminal proceedings began against the owners of the mills, and they were arraigned at the Court of Vice Admiralty at Portsmouth. The mill owners engaged a lawyer called Samuel Blodgett from Goffstown, and he started interceding with Governor John Wentworth in the hope that he would spare the loggers. However, Wentworth appointed Blodgett as the Surveyor of the King’s Woods largely so that he would appreciate the nature of the problem. Blodgett urged the sawmill owners to pay for the logs they had cut down, and 3 men from Bedford and 14 from Goffstown did so. However, money was owed from Weare. To enforce the law, Benjamin Whiting, the county sheriff, and his deputy John Quigly, arrived in South Weare on April 13, 1772, with a warrant for the arrest of Ebenezer Mudgett, the leader of the sawmill owners in Weare. They arrested Mudgett, but released him on his own undertaking, agreeing to him bringing suitable bail in the morning. The two officials then decided to spend the night at the appropriately named Pine Tree Tavern of Aaron Quimby. It was not long before news about Mudgett spread around Weare, and many supporters flocked to his house. There, some of them offered to provide the bail for him, but others decided that they could attack the British officials and chase them out of town. At dawn the following day, they struck. Very early in the morning of April 14, 1772, Mudgett went over to the Pine Tree Tavern and woke up Whiting, telling him that he had brought the bail. Whiting was angry that Mudgett had come so early and started to dress. At that point, some 20 men—all with their faces covered in soot—burst into Whiting’s room and attacked the two government officials with canes they had made from nearby trees. They seized the guns of the officials and hit Whiting once for every tree that the sawmill owners were to be fined over, and they left him battered and bruised. The attackers then dragged the two men down to their horses. They cut off the manes and tails—and also the ears—of the horses that Whiting and Quigly had used and forced both men to mount their horses. A jeering mob hissed as the men left town. Whiting then sought help from Colonel Moore in Bedford, and also Edward Goldstone Lutwyche of Merrimack. They assembled a posse, and armed, they rode back to Weare, where they found that the local population had fled. Eventually hunting around, they found one of the culprits involved in the attack on

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Whiting, and the others were all named and ordered to post bail and appear in court in due course. In total, eight men were charged with rioting and disturbing the peace, as well as “making an assault upon the body of Benjamin Whiting,” and Timothy Worthley, Jonathan Worthley, Caleb Atwood, William Dustin, Abraham Johnson, Jotham Tuttle, William Quimby (brother of the tavern owner Abraham Quimby) and Ebenezer Mudgett were arraigned before four judges, Chief Justice Honorable Theodore Atkinson, Meshech Weare, Leverett Hubbard, and William Parker. The hearing finally took place in September 1772 at the Superior Court in Amherst, and there the defendants pleaded guilty and were fined 20 shillings each, plus the cost of the hearing. It is believed that this incident might have been the inspiration for the use of disguises at the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Of the men charged, Timothy Worthley, his brother Jonathan, and William Dustin all fought the British in the American War of Independence, Timothy Worthley and Dustin both holding commissions in the Continental Army. The lawyer Samuel Blodgett also served in the Continental Army for the first year of the war, returning to Goffstown where he worked on the construction of the Amoskeag Canal. Benjamin Whiting supported the British in the war, had his land confiscated, and probably died in Canada. Of the justices, Meshech Weare was one of the people who framed the New Hampshire Constitution, which was adopted in 1776. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Boston Tea Party (1773).

Further Reading Brown, Janice (descendant of Jotham Tuttle). “Weare, NH 1772: Rebellion before the Revolution.” http://cowhampshire.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/3/20/ 1831687.html (accessed November 11, 2008). Daniell, Jere R. Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–1794. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Pine Tree Riot, April 14, 1772. South Weare, NH: Weare Junior Historical Society, 1972. Wood, James Playsted. Colonial New Hampshire. New York: T. Nelson, 1973.

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Royal Authority The Pine Tree Riot of 1772 was a test of royal authority in New Hampshire whereby local people in a relatively isolated settlement—in this case, the village of Weare—rejected the authority of the Crown. Although the riot produced only a short-lived victory, the evident support of the local judiciary in fining the culprits such small amounts, showed that there were many who might challenge royal authority, undoubtedly providing inspiration for the more famous Boston Tea Party in the following year. In Great Britain, King George III was the unquestioned ruler of the country— although the elderly and portly Jacobite claimant Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) maintained a court in Rome—but the British constitution was unwritten, and it gradually changed and adapted to new circumstances. Disputes and other matters that arose were decided by precedent and usage. The king ruled through the houses of Parliament, and laws were passed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, with the king giving royal assent. As such, the king operated to uphold the law of the country, and the dispute over whether the Crown had any right to arbitrary powers had been resolved by the English Civil War of the 1640s, which had resulted in the execution of King Charles I. The accession of King George III’s great-grandfather as George I showed the acceptance of the country for a constitutional monarch who would rule—as he did— through ministers, with Robert Walpole being acknowledged as the first prime minister in the modern sense of the word (although Walpole himself never assumed that title). However, in the colonies, the British government exercised its authority through governors appointed by the prime minister, in consultation with the king, but who acted in the name of the king. These were often British officials and friends or courtiers of the king, and exclusively drawn from the British ruling class. However, many had close connections with the Americas. Indeed, John Wentworth, the governor of New Hampshire during the Pine Tree Riot, was born in New Hampshire, as had his uncle and predecessor Benning Wentworth. Wentworth was a popular governor and did much to reduce possible tension between the government and the people in New Hampshire, but others were not so accommodating. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts Bay from 1769 until 1774, had been born in Boston, and was thoroughly immersed in Massachusetts politics. However, he wanted the British to enforce more control over his colony, helping lead to the confrontation with the Boston Tea Party. His successor, Thomas Gage, was born in England, although he had served extensively in North America. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Harris, R. W. Political Ideas 1760–1792. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. Namier, Sir Lewis. England in the Age of the American Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1961.

Shipbuilding When William of Normandy (later William the Conqueror) prepared his invasion fleet for England in 1066, it is known that tens of thousands of trees were cut down for him to build his invasion fleet, many of the boats being burned after his landing. Subsequent to that, many trees throughout England were cut down for building ships during the Hundred Years’ War, and in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The continual building of ships in Britain—both for the Royal Navy and the merchant navy—resulted in the loss of so many large trees in the British Isles that there were not enough long straight logs to make masts for ships. The strength of the mast became increasingly important with the improvement in naval artillery, with cannonballs, linked with chains, being fired at an enemy’s rigging and masts. During the 17th century, the British had mainly used fir trees for the masts, with each mast being cut from a single tree. However, by the early 18th century, there were not enough large fir trees for main masts, and because of the weight of sails, it soon became necessary to make a mast out of a number of pieces of timber, often causing masts to break under strain. As Britain, France, and Spain quickly used up all suitable trees, mast ships brought wood from the Baltic, satisfying the demand for a while. However the British were keen on their own supply of trees for masts. With the increasing trans-Atlantic trade, and the availability of strong pine trees from New England, it was not long before the establishment of a number of shipbuilding facilities in North America, most notably at Newburyport in New Hampshire. This led to timber being sourced in New Hampshire and then floated down the Amoskeag River to Newburyport, where a shipbuilding industry flourished as it also did in Massachusetts and Maine. The industry involved not only large numbers of carpenters, but also sail makers, rope makers, and people to provision the ships. As much of the food on board ships was kept in barrels and casks, coopers were always needed. The shipbuilding industry resulted in an insatiable demand for wood, and naval architects kept hundreds of carpenters busy sizing and sorting wood, sawing it into planks, and then nailing these into place. Although the workforce could move to a new site, it was the availability of nearby forests and woodland with large numbers of sizeable

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trees that was most essential for any shipbuilding industry. This indeed explains the location of so many shipbuilding settlements including in Australia, which was able to source Norfolk Island pine trees from Norfolk Island, in the Pacific. Certainly the overall design of ships and the nature of making them changed little from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, with the major changes being the ships becoming larger, and having to be fashioned out of smaller and smaller planks of wood. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Morrison, John S. Aspects of the History of Wooden Shipbuilding. London: National Maritime Museum, 1970. Pollock, David. The Shipbuilding Industry: Its History, Practice, Science and Finance. London: Methuen & Co., 1905.

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Boston Tea Party (1773) Few incidents in American history are as well known as the Boston Tea Party. It brings to mind images of colonists dressed as Indians, carrying tomahawks and calling war whoops while traipsing though the cold December air to Griffin’s Wharf. However, there is a reason why the Boston Tea Party is a staple in every American history textbook. It marks the turning point between the American colonists and the British government. It helped to deepen the divide among the patriots and the loyalists. And it brought the colonies one step closer to independence. To understand how the Boston Tea Party came about, one must look back to the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French over the territory of Quebec. For as long as the British had been settled in the “New World” of what is now New England, they had to worry about French forces to their north and west in what is now Quebec, Canada. From 1754 until 1763, the British and French fought over the territory, with Britain finally declaring victory and driving the French out once and for all. Despite a victory and a great deal of new territory gained following the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain found itself mired in debt. Plus, they needed to maintain 10,000 soldiers in the colonies, in case the French tried to take Quebec back by force. In an effort toward fiscal improvement, Parliament looked for new ways to tax its colonies. During the Seven Years’ War, British officials saw closely just how prosperous many American colonists were. There were tidy farms, and neat villages with bustling shops and tradesmen. Compared to the intolerable living conditions back in Great Britain, the American colonists were doing remarkably well for themselves. British authorities also saw how many colonists ignored laws concerning trade and taxes. Many merchants openly flaunted the laws, not paying taxes or duties on goods. Because there was a high turnover rate of British officials in the colonies, it was hard to maintain an effective policy, making it easy for colonists to do as they pleased. To this end, the British Parliament reasoned that since so much bloodshed and money had been spent securing the American continent from the French, the colonists should pay their fair share. In comparison to the average British citizen, who paid 26 shillings a year in taxes, colonists paid an average of one shilling per year in taxes. Plus, living conditions in Great Britain were squalid with little hope of improvement, while in the American colonies, there was always the hope

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Bostonians, dressed as Mohawk Indians, throwing East India Company tea into the harbor in December 1773. (National Archives and Records Administration)

to own your own land and work your own farm. So it seemed completely reasonable to Great Britain that the American colonists pay their share in taxes. After all, they the colonists were doing remarkably well, carving prosperous farms out of the vast wilderness. However, the colonists did not agree. With the French removed from Quebec, the American colonists and British no longer had a common enemy to unite them. The colonists did not feel the need for British soldiers to be stationed in the colonies to protect them. They could take care of themselves, they declared. In an effort to raise much-needed revenue, Parliament passed the Townshend Act in 1767. The act placed new taxes on goods imported from Great Britain, such as tea, paper, lead, and glass. The Townshend Act also used taxes to pay the salaries of certain royal officials in the colonies, removing a considerable amount of leverage from the colonial assemblies, which could withhold official’s salaries if they did not like their actions. The Townshend Act was almost immediately repealed, as colonists boycotted English goods. However, the tax on tea remained. Tea had been imported into the American colonies with regularity, starting in the 1720s. By the passage of the Townshend Act, colonists consumed roughly 1.2 million pounds of tea a year. Tea was not just a beverage; it was an important thread of colonial society. While it was most associated with the women of the upper class, tea parties were social occasions for both men and women, when

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people took a break from the handwork of everyday life to visit with neighbors and friends. Families displayed their precious china or silver tea services, which was a distinct sign of wealth and prestige. The remaining tax on tea, left over from the Townshend Act, made English tea expensive, and soon colonists began drinking smuggled tea from the Netherlands instead. Because there were not enough customs officials to effectively patrol the American coastline, it was easy to smuggle in tea (and other goods) in the many inlets that were hidden along the rocky shores. Although the boycott stemming from the Townshend Act was strong in 1770, by 1773 it had begun to wane. Many people resumed drinking tea, some in private, others in the open. But the boycott had its intended result. Sales of British tea, especially from the East India Company, dropped drastically. By May 1773, the market for colonial tea had collapsed, and the East India Company was on the verge of collapse. There was a great deal of vested interest in the East India Company. Many members of the British Parliament held shares in the shipping company. More importantly, the East India Company was the sole British agent in India. Parliament could not afford for the company to go bankrupt. So they passed the Tea Act, which placed special duties on tea. In Boston, East India tea could be sold only by seven designated tea agents, called consignees. It was no coincidence that all seven consignees were Loyalists. Many of them were related to the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to skirt any middlemen and undersell their competitors, even cheaper smuggled Dutch tea. Parliament reasoned that American colonists would gladly pay a small three-pence tax, to buy such cheap tea. It would be a win-win situation for everyone: the colonists would have their tea, the East India Company would stay in business, and the Crown would have some money in the treasury. However, many American colonists did carry this same view. Many patriots who had helped repeal the Townshend Act, the Stamp Act, and other unwanted taxes saw the new tax on tea as Parliament’s way of exercising their right to tax the colonists without representation. Others saw the Tea Act as the first step toward domination of the marketplace by the East India Company. All in all, the Tea Act was a violation of colonists’ freedom and liberty. It was okay to pay the taxes levied by local assemblies, but Parliament, an alien body far removed from the colonists, had no right to tell them what to do. The Sons of Liberty, who had remained quiet for the past several years, sprang into action to protest the Tea Act. This time, they were joined by the normally conservative merchant class, whose profits were endangered by the act. American-British relations were not helped when secret letters from the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson to British undersecretary Thomas Whatley, were published in the colonies. In his letters, Hutchinson called for sterner measures of discipline for the colonists. He specifically called for “an

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abridgement of what are called English liberties.” He declared that if “nothing more than declatory acts or resolves, it is all over with us. The friends . . . of anarchy will be afraid of nothing be it ever so extravagant.” In other words, if all the British government did was repeal acts that were unpopular with colonists and never punished them for offensive acts, they were all in for a lot of trouble in the future. These letters found their way into the hands of American diplomat Benjamin Franklin, who sent them to Boston to be read only by a few “Men of Worth.” Franklin was an idealist when it came to international diplomacy. He truly felt that a few reasonable men could solve all the problems of the nation by common sense and logic. He thought if his “Men of Worth” read the letters, they would blame Hutchinson for the unpopular policies and taxes rather than the British government. Franklin could not have been more wrong. Instead of being read by a discretionary few, the letters were reprinted into a pamphlet, and by June 1773, they had circulated around the entire colony. Instead of reason and logic, heated anger and simmering suspicions dictated the colonist’s reactions. For many patriots in Massachusetts, their earlier suspicions were confirmed. The British government was looking for ways to suppress their freedoms and their personal liberties. They would do this at first by taxation without representation. The Tea Act gave radical patriots the perfect excuse to protest the government. The act was boycotted not only in Boston, but also in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, where tea agents either resigned or shipments were refused by local merchants. In Charleston, the tea was unloaded and destroyed on the docks. In New York, the shipment did not arrive on time or at all. In Philadelphia, the captain of the ship was persuaded to turn around and head back to England. However, in Boston, Governor Hutchinson was determined that the tea would be unloaded and taxed accordingly. On November 20, 1773, the ship Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor with a load of Darjeeling tea. The Sons of Liberty made every effort to make sure the tea was not unloaded onto the docks. Mobs roamed the streets of Boston, intimidating local Crown authorities and tea consignees. They tried unsuccessfully, through coercion and intimidation, to make the consignees refuse the tea. But the agents ignored the patriots, clinging steadfastly to their loyalty to the Crown. The Boston Sons of Liberty was led by patriot Samuel Adams, whom the British thought of as a “cunning professional politician” who exploited mob rule for his own benefit. On November 29, 1773, thousands of people gathered at Faneuil Hall, but soon the numbers grew even more, and the meeting was moved to the Old South Meeting House. Old South was the largest building in Boston at the time and was a regular meeting place for patriots. The crowd that gathered on that night was a mix of men who could vote (21-year-old landowners) and those who could not. It was called a “body of the people,” and no one was excluded from the meeting.

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Samuel Adams organized the meeting. He declared that “Whether it is the firm resolution of this body that tea shall not only be sent back but that no duty shall be paid thereon?” Twenty-five men were assigned to guard the Dartmouth, making sure that the tea would not be unloaded and taxed, while the consignees considered the situation. The following day, at 9:00 in the morning, groups of Bostonians converged once more at Old South. Portrait painter John Singleton Copley was assigned as moderator of the meeting between the consignees and the patriots. Copley, who was married to a daughter of one of the tea consignees, tried to help the two groups reach an agreement about what should be done with the tea on the three ships idling in Boston Harbor. The consignees offered to store the tea on land, until they received other instructions from London. However, if the tea was removed from the ships, it would be taxed, even if was to be returned, which was unacceptable to the patriots. The assembly at Old South agreed that the tea should never be landed. Future first lady Abigail Adams attended the meeting. She wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren that “The tea that bainfull weed is arrived. Great and effectual opposition has been made to landing of it . . . the proceedings of our citizens have been united, spirited and firm. The flame is kindled and like lightening it catches from soul to soul.” The people were united in their resolve to have their voices heard, and they did not want that tea to be unloaded. In the meantime, two more East India ships arrived in Boston, bearing more tea. The Eleanor arrived on December 2 and was followed by the Beaver on December 7. On December 8, Governor Hutchinson ordered Admiral Mountagu not to let any ships leave Boston Harbor without a special pass. Because the law stated that the tea tax was to be collected within 20 days of a ship’s arrival, the deadline for the Dartmouth was midnight on December 16. If the tax on the tea had not been paid by then, the ship could be confiscated by royal authorities. During the interim, the Sons of Liberty kept the public fervor high with public meetings, some as large as 5,000 people filling the streets around the Old South Meeting House, denouncing the Tea Act. This is especially impressive given that only about 15,000 people lived in Boston at the time. A third of the city’s population turned out to protest the Tea Act. The Sons of Liberty petitioned the captains of the ships to return their cargo to England. While local tea agents flatly refused to return the tea, the owner of the Dartmouth, a Quaker from Nantucket by the name of Francis Rotch, agreed to sail back to England with the tea. However, he needed special permission by the governor, or he risked having his ship fired on by the armed fort that overlooked Boston Harbor, something he could not afford. On the morning of December 16, the day of the deadline for the tea tax to be paid on the Dartmouth, Old South once more filled with thousands of people for the last meeting on how to deal with the unwanted tea. The patriot leaders asked

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Francis Rotch to make a personal request of the governor to allow him to sail his ship back to England safely. This would be the last legal means of preventing the tea from being unloaded. Rotch left the meeting house and traveled to nearby Milton, where Governor Hutchinson was staying. Rotch was gone a good part of the day. Yet the crowd waited, lighting lanterns in the meeting hall as the day turned to night. When he returned to Old South later that evening, he announced that the governor had refused his request to sail safely out of Boston Harbor. At the news that Governor Hutchinson refused to budge on his position, Samuel Adams gave a prearranged signal at Old South, declaring “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” With that, 50 to 60 men of all walks of life abruptly left the meeting house. Among the group of men, dressed as Mohawk Indians with blankets and headdress, were masons, carpenters, barbers, a silversmith, farmers, doctors, and a teacher. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone was dressed as an Indian. Some simply smeared soot on their faces. Along with Adams, other Sons of Liberty joining the group included Paul Revere and John Hancock, whom the English regarded as a rich and vain businessman. They headed to Griffin’s Wharf, where the three ships were anchored. Upon boarding the ships, the men used tomahawks (or hatchets if they were not dressed as Indians) to force open 342 chests of tea (estimated to be around 18.5 million cups of tea) worth £18,000 (about $1 million today) and threw it into the harbor waters below. A crowd on the docks cheered their actions, calling for more “saltwater tea.” “Boston’s a tea pot tonight!” it was declared. The next morning, men rowed out to the harbor to beat what tea remained with oars and paddles, to make sure none of it could be retrieved. The waters of Boston Harbor turned brown and remained so for several days. Patriot John Adams declared that “so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, that I can’t but consider it as an epoch in history.” Only one man was arrested for the Boston Tea Party, Francis Akeley (Ekley). The Boston Tea Party, as it became known, was quickly replicated throughout the other colonies. In Annapolis, New York, and New Jersey, there were incidents of destruction of East India tea. At first, the Boston Tea Party was hardly noticed across the pond in Great Britain. When the news arrived in Parliament on January 20, 1764, the members of the house were more concerned with dealing with Benjamin Franklin, who by that time had confessed to sending the Hutchinson letters to Massachusetts, rather than dealing with the governor himself. In an effort to save face, Franklin even offered to pay for the tea out of his own pocket. However, it was too late, both for his career as a diplomat and for the easygoing relationship between the colonies and the mother country. The Boston Tea Party was soon magnified into an unforgivable insult to Britain herself. Parliament and the king, which had more or less neglected the American colonies up until the Seven Years’ War, saw the Boston Tea Party as

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a deliberate destruction of private property. They viewed the American colonists’ actions as blatant disregard for the law or royal authority, and they would no longer treat the colonists with such leniency. When it was suggested in Parliament that the tea act be repealed, Prime Minister Lord North pointed out that the “Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects [local government agents], plundered your merchants, burnt your ships, denied all obedience to your laws and authority; yet so clement and so long forbearing has our conduct been that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course.” Parliament intended to make an example out of Boston. The people could not act like a petulant child and expect to get away with bad behavior any longer. In retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed the first of four laws that would be known as the Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts. The first act, known as the Boston Port Act, closed the port of Boston until the East India Company and the custom service had been paid in full for the tea that had been thrown overboard during the Boston Tea Party. The total sum was estimated to be around £10,000 in silver. The only exceptions were food and firewood. Then the Massachusetts Government Act was passed, which altered the province’s charter. It appointed a new council to replace the elected one, increasing the power of the royal governor. Special town meetings were forbidden, discouraging political opponents from speaking up publicly, like the meetings that had been held at the Old South Meeting House. The third act was the Justice Act, allowing the royal governor of a colony to move trials to other colonies or even to England, if he thought that the jury would not be impartial. And the last act, the Quartering Act, allowed military commanders to use private houses and empty buildings to quarter soldiers, at the public’s expense. These acts did not just impact Boston, but also all of Massachusetts and the rest of the 13 colonies. They helped unite the colonists against what they viewed as the tyranny of British rule. The rest of the colonies rallied to Boston’s aid during the Coercive Acts. The people of Charleston sent money and rice to Boston citizens, while Connecticut and Long Island sent sheep and New York promised 10 years of food. The Sons of Liberty, which had chapters throughout the 13 colonies, rallied more public support in defiance of the British authority. On April 1, 1774, four new regiments arrived in Massachusetts, and Thomas Hutchinson was replaced by General Thomas Gage. A scant 10 months after the Boston Tea Party, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, to decide how best to deal with unjust taxation and the unfair treatment they felt the colonies were receiving from Great Britain. What started as a simple act of dumping tea overboard had united the colonies under one cause, igniting their passions for liberty and freedom from oppression. The colonists saw the coercive acts as “unjust, illegal and oppressive, and that we and every American are sharers in the insults offered to the town of Boston.”

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All the colonists of the era had grown up with relatively little supervision from the mother country. They were used to freedoms not found anywhere in Europe. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, when Britain finally began to pay closer attention to its American holdings, the colonists chafed under the new restraints. Rather than except their lowered station in life, they rose up and challenged the mother country, claiming their right to representation in Parliament, their right to voice opposition to the Crown, and their right to live as free men. While the official start of the American Revolution was still more than two years away, the Boston Tea Party was a turning point in the resistance of the colonists to British rule. It helped to further polarize sides between Loyalists and patriots, deepening the divide and helping to escalate the oncoming revolution. The Boston Tea Party has become a symbol of the American spirit. Few students leave school without reading an account of the Tea Party, and for good reason. It showcases a moment in history when the American people took a stand for what they believed in. It helped to stir a revolutionary spirit, not only in Boston, but far beyond to the rest of the 13 colonies. The Boston Tea Party was crucial in setting the stage for the fight for American independence. It is a symbol that still endures today. —Lorri Brown See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Pine Tree Riot (1772).

Further Reading Commanger, Henry Steele, and Richard B. Morris. The Spirit of Seventy-six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Its Participants. New York: Castle Books, 2002. Lancaster, Bruce. The American Revolution. New York: Mariner Books, 2001. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Coercive Acts (1774) Following the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party, the British government decided it was time to put American colonists back in their place. Beginning in March 1774, the British government, under Prime Minister Lord North, passed the first of four laws that would be known as the Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts. These acts impacted not just Boston, but all of Massachusetts and the rest of the 13 colonies. The first act, known as the Boston Port Act, closed the port of Boston until the East India Company and the custom service had been paid in full for tea that had been thrown overboard during the Boston Tea Party. While firewood and food could still be delivered to the Boston port, the official port of entry was moved to Marblehead, and the capital of Massachusetts was moved to Salem. Later on that same spring, Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act, which altered the province’s charter. It increased the royal governor’s power by replacing the elected council with an appointed one. It also forbade special town meetings in order to discourage public speaking by political opponents. The third act was the Justice Act. It allowed the royal governor of a colony to move trials to other colonies or even to England, if he thought that the jury would not be impartial. This act protected British officials, who were then encouraged to enforce the new, harsher laws with vigor. For example, any officials who were accused of capital crimes during the suppression of riots or during tax revenue collections could be tried across the Atlantic, in England. The fourth act, the Quartering Act, gave broad authority to military commanders and allowed soldiers to be quartered in private houses and empty buildings, at the public’s expense. The Quebec Act, although not part of the four Coercive Acts, is often grouped with them because it brought the American colonists one step closer to their bid for independence. Quebec was a newly acquired territory by the British. Parliament granted greater religious freedom to the Catholics in Quebec. This alarmed American Protestants, who linked Catholicism with despotism. If Catholics were given favored status in Quebec, who was to say they would not get favored status in Massachusetts, New York, or Pennsylvania? The Quebec Act gave civil government and religious freedom to the people of Quebec that had been denied to the colonists. It also extended the territory of Quebec to the Ohio River, voiding the sea-to-sea boundaries of charters in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act reached far beyond Massachusetts. Together, all these acts confirmed fears of many colonists that Parliament would oppress all their rights. After all, if Parliament could close a port in Boston, what was to stop them from closing a port in New York, South Carolina, or Virginia?

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If they could change the charter of Massachusetts, what would prevent them from changing the charters of the other 12 colonies? In the quest to keep colonists in their place, the British government inadvertently stirred up revolutionary spirit and set them on the road to independence. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage. Out of Many: A History of the American People. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. Norton, Mary Beth, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Scott, Howard P. Chudacoff, and Thomas G. Patterson. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. USHistory.org. “The Intolerable Acts.” http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/ intolerable.htm (accessed August 23, 2008).

First Continental Congress (1774) Following the Boston Tea Party and the Coercive Acts, American colonists began to realize that their interests differed from those of Great Britain, both culturally and economically. By the summer of 1774, concerns and unrest grew so much among the colonists that they decided hold a meeting to figure out the best way to deal with the unjust laws and taxation imposed upon them by King George III and Parliament. Fifty-five delegates from 12 colonies (Georgia did not send anyone) convened on September 5, 1774, at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, to discuss the needs and concerns of their respective colonies. The delegates who gathered in Philadelphia were mainly merchants, lawyers, or planters. Among them were some of the future leaders of the American cause, including Boston cousins John and Samuel Adams, and Virginia planters George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. These men represented a wide spectrum of political attitudes, from conservatives such as John Jay of New York, to revolutionaries such as Patrick Henry of Virginia. Most of the delegates fell somewhere in between. They were looking for greater political independence, but not ready to make a final break with Great Britain through war. The delegates had three main points that they needed to address during their meeting. First, they needed to define American grievances with Great Britain. Second, they had to develop a plan of resistance. Third, they needed to outline their

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future relationship with Great Britain. The first point was easy to define. The delegates declared that all colonists sprang from a common tradition, and that they all enjoyed the same rights guaranteed by the English constitution as well as by their individual colony charters. For the second point, the delegates decided that the best course of action was to continue an unofficial boycott of British goods and therefore silently resist the unfair taxation placed upon them. The Continental Congress set about placing sanctions against the British. There would be no importation of British goods, and no colonial exports to Britain. While this boycott against Great Britain continued, the colonists would petition King George directly, for relief. The last point was the hardest to define. Some men, such as Patrick Henry denounced any loyalty to the British Parliament, instead claiming they only needed to show allegiance to King George. Conservatives like Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania wanted to establish a new legislative branch, which could decide American laws together with Parliament. In the end, the delegates settled on a compromise drafted by Thomas Jefferson, entitled the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. In the document, the delegates deemed the 13 acts that the British Parliament had passed since the end of the French and Indian War void, since they violated the basic rights of the colonists. Out of the Continental Congress several committees were formed, including one for observation and safety, which took over the role of local government throughout the 13 colonies. This committee helped organize a militia, extralegal of course, and combined to form a colony-wide congress. The committee was also responsible for suppressing Loyalist views in newspapers as well as in general society, when the need arose. These committees helped bridge the gap between old ways and new and marked the beginning of the term “state” rather than colony. American independence was already being won at local levels, without formal acknowledgement and without bloodshed, six months before the first battles of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage. Out of Many: A History of the American People. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. Norton, Mary Beth, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Scott, Howard P. Chudacoff, and Thomas G. Patterson. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. USHistory.org. “Proceedings of the First Continental Congress.” http://www.ushistory.org/ declaration/related/congress.htm (accessed August 28, 2008).

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Sons of Liberty In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which called for a special tax stamp on all printed paper, such as newspapers. Though it affected nearly every American colonist, merchants and printers were the most heavily affected. The Stamp Act ignited protests throughout the 13 colonies, as well as in Nova Scotia and the Caribbean. On August 14, 1765, an effigy of the Massachusetts stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, was hung in a tree in Newbury Street in Boston. The effigy was burned and Oliver’s house on Kilby Street was stoned and looted of any valuable contents. The British militia did not dare interfere with the rioting. The gentry class, while glad of the protests, was afraid of mob action and sought a way to keep control of resistance acts. As a way to control the rebellions brewing over the Stamp Act, these men formed an intercolonial association called the Sons of Liberty. At first it was made up of merchants, lawyers, and craftsmen. Branches spread quickly through the rest of the colonies and soon included many workingclass men. By early 1766, these groups formed a common bond throughout the colonies, from New Hampshire to South Carolina. The main goal of the Sons of Liberty was a repeal of the Stamp Act, viewing it as a violation of the people’s liberties by corrupt and self-serving rulers. They published pamphlets and circulated petitions that stressed passive means of resistance, such as boycotting English goods. The Sons of Liberty helped spread their messages through local newspapers as well. Many members of the Sons of Liberty were in the printing trade, and even those printers who were not part of the group sympathized with the cause. After all, the Stamp Act affected printers more than anyone. Crowd action, such as riots and other violence, was used only a last resort. While some imposters used the Sons of Liberty for personal revenge and gain, the group policed itself to keep corruption to a minimum. It did not take long before the Stamp Act was repealed in March 1766. The Sons of Liberty helped to organize joyful celebrations at what they perceived as a victory. Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, the Sons of Liberty chapters dissolved. However, just two years later, chapters took up arms once again, in the face of more unfair taxes passed by the British Parliament. In 1768, the Townshend Revenue Act was passed, placing special taxes on common goods such as lead, paint, glass, paper, and tea. The Townshend Act garnered an even quicker response from colonists than the Stamp Act. The newly revived Sons of Liberty embarked on a two-year campaign against the Townshend Acts, playing a vital role in spreading rebellion throughout the colonies. In Boston, the Sons of Liberty invited hundreds of citizens to dine with them each August 14 to commemorate the first Stamp Act uprising. In Charleston, the Sons of Liberty

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held their meetings in public, so that all could attend and listen. This helped spread the word of resistance to ordinary folks, including the illiterate who could not read pamphlets, newspapers, or petitions. Even as they advocated passive resistance to the British Parliament through boycotts and petitions, the Sons of Liberty unwittingly helped bring the colonies one step closer to a bid for independence. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage. Out of Many: A History of the American People. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. Norton, Mary Beth, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Scott, Howard P. Chudacoff, and Thomas G. Patterson. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. USHistory.org. “Sons of Liberty.” http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/related/sons.htm (accessed September 23, 2008).

Townshend Acts (1767) During the 1760s British government officials in the American colonies came and went with regularity. This made it very difficult for Britain to form, let alone enforce, a consistent American policy. In 1766, a new prime minister replaced William Pitt, who had been very popular with colonists. Charles Townshend had been the chancellor of the exchequer and was a great believer in colonial taxation. With a high national debt and soaring unemployment, Townshend decided that it was better to please the people of Britain than to worry about colonists, thousands of miles away. While the largest landowners in Britain had forced a 25 percent tax cut for themselves, Townshend levied a series of taxes on the colonies, which would ultimately bring them one step closer to revolution and independence. The Townshend Acts placed a new tax on goods such as tea, paper, lead, and glass. However, it was placed only on items imported from Great Britain, which directly contradicted mercantile theory. The Townshend Act also used taxes to pay the salaries of certain royal officials in the colonies. This took a great deal of power away from the colonial assemblies, which could withhold officials’ salaries if they did not like their actions. The Townshend Act also created an American board of customs commissioners and vice-admiralty courts at Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. This angered merchants further, because rigorous enforcement of taxes, which had been loosely followed, would cut into their profits. As part of the new laws, Townshend also suspended the New York legislature for refusing to comply with the

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Quartering Act of 1765, in which firewood and candles, as well as housing, should be given to British soldiers who were stationed permanently in the colonies. The Townshend Acts revived colonial hostility that had died down following the repeal of the Stamp Act. This time, the new laws drew a much quicker and angrier response by the people. Protest and rebellion sprang up throughout the colonies. One of the most influential pieces of rebellion propaganda was written by John Dickinson, a lawyer from Pennsylvania. He posed as a humble farmer when he penned “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” His basic argument was that Parliament could regulate colonial trade, but it could not exercise that power just to raise revenue. In other words, Parliament did not have the authority to impose new taxes on the colonies just to make more money for Britain. The Massachusetts Assembly circulated a letter to other colonial legislatures calling for unity and a joint petition of protest of the Townshend Acts. Parliament acted swiftly to dissolve the Massachusetts legislature. This gave the other colonies a reason to unite in protest. After all, if Parliament could disband the governing body of Massachusetts and New York, what was to stop them from doing so in the rest of the colonies? The Sons of Liberty helped to establish and enforce a boycott of British goods, causing trade to dry up. It was not long before the British merchants stepped in on behalf of the colonies and the Townshend Acts were repealed in 1770, except for the tax on tea. This would lead to one of the most infamous chapters of American history, the Boston Tea Party. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage. Out of Many: A History of the American People. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. Norton, Mary Beth, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Scott, Howard P. Chudacoff, and Thomas G. Patterson. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. USHistory.org. “Townshend Acts.” http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/related/ townshend.htm (accessed September 23, 2008).

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Tea Party (1773) In December 1773, when the British Parliament attempted to confer a monopoly on the importation of tea into America on the East India Company, angry colonists in Boston dressed as Indians, boarded the tea ships, and threw over 300 chests of tea into the harbor. This incident became famous in American history as the Boston Tea Party. Sixty years later, in 1833, 91-year-old George R. T. Hewes, the last surviving member of the group of colonists who boarded the tea ships in 1773, gave the following account of the Boston Tea Party.

Boston Tea Party (1773) The tea destroyed was contained in three ships, laying near each other, at what was called at that time Griffin’s wharf, and were surrounded by armed ships of war; the commanders of which had publicly declared, that if the rebels, as they were pleased to style the Bostonians, should not withdraw their opposition to the landing of the tea before a certain day, the 17th day of December, 1773, they should on that day force it on shore, under the cover of their cannon’s mouth. On the day preceding the seventeenth, there was a meeting of the citizens of the county of Suffolk, convened at one of the churches in Boston, for the purpose of consulting on what measures might be considered expedient to prevent the landing of the tea, or secure the people from the collection of the duty. At that meeting a committee was appointed to wait on Governor Hutchinson, and request him to inform them whether he would take any measures to satisfy the people on the object of the meeting. To the first application of this committee, the governor told them he would give them a definite answer by five o’clock in the afternoon. At the hour appointed, the committee again repaired to the governor’s house, and on inquiry found he had gone to his country seat at Milton, a distance of about six miles. When the committee returned and informed the meeting of the absence of the governor, there was a confused murmur among the members, and the meeting was immediately dissolved, many of them crying out, Let every man do his duty, and be true to his country; and there was a general huzza for Griffin’s wharf. It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea. When! first appeared in the street, after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me, and marched in order to the place of our destination. When we arrived at the wharf, there were three of our number who assumed an authority to direct our operations, to which we readily submitted. They divided us into three parties, for the purpose of boarding the three ships which contained the tea at the same time. The name of him who commanded the division to which I was assigned, was Leonard Pitt. The names of the other commanders I never knew. We were immediately, ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed. The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board the ship, appointed me boatswain, and ordered me to go to the captain and demand of him the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles. I made the demand accordingly, and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging. We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches, and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders; first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water. In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thusbroken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship; while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us. We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other,

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Boston Tea Party (1773) or taking any measures to discover who were our associates; nor do I recollect of our having had the knowledge of the name of a single individual concerned in that affair, except that of Leonard Pitt, the commander of my division, who I have mentioned. There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequences for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time, that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months. During the time we were throwing the tea overboard, there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity, to carry off small quantities of it for their family use. To effect that object, they would watch their opportunity to snatch up a handful from the deck, where it became plentifully scattered, and put it into their pockets. One Captain O’Conner, whom I well knew, came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him, and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but springing forward, by a rapid effort, he made his escape. He had however to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf; each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke. The next day we nailed the skin of his coat, which I had pulled off, to the whipping post in Charlestown, the place of his residence, with a label upon it, commemorative of the occasion which had thus subjected the proprietor to the popular indignation. Another attempt was made to save a little tea from, the ruins of the cargo, by a tall aged man, who wore a large cocked hat and white wig, which was fashionable at that time. He had slightly slipped a little into his pocket, but being detected, they seized him, and taking his hat and wig from his head, threw them, together with the tea, of which they had emptied his pockets, into the water. In consideration of his advanced age, he was permitted to escape, with now and then a slight kick. The next morning, after we had cleared the ships of the tea, it was discovered that very considerable quantities of it was floating upon the surface of the water; and to prevent the possibility of any of its being saved for use, a number of small boats were manned by sailors and citizens, who rowed them into those parts of the harbour wherever the tea was visible, and by beating it with oars and paddles, so thoroughly drenched it, as to render its entire destruction inevitable. Source: James Hawkes, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, with a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes (New York: S. S. Bliss, Printer, 1834), 38–41.

Shays’ Rebellion (1787) On a blustery cold day in January 1787, a force of 1,500 men descended on the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, in hopes of procuring muskets and gunpowder. These men came from all over central and western Massachusetts, a majority of them farmers. Led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, these men gathered in protest of high taxes and unfair debt collection. Hidden within the armory was General William Shepard, who commanded 1,000 militiamen. Shepard, not wanting bloodshed over the armory, sent two aides to warn the rebels of the impending attack. Undeterred, the farmers, who called themselves the New England Regulation, advanced on the armory, urged on by one of their leaders, Daniel Shays. Shepard fired two cannons above the farmer’s heads as a warning, and still they advanced. Reluctantly, Shepard ordered his men to fire directly at the rebels. Four men died, 20 were wounded, and the farmers scattered to the surrounding fields, woods, and hills. Just six years earlier, these two opposing groups had been comrades during the American Revolution. What caused this rift in Massachusetts? The incident, which would go down in history as Shays’ Rebellion, was brought on by social divisions and economic hardships that followed the end of the American Revolution. High taxes and debt-ridden farmers in the west clashed with wealthy eastern merchants. Though it was only a small event and virtually bloodless, this backcountry rebellion proved a pivotal turning point for the fledging American republic. The rebellion highlighted the many weaknesses the central government suffered when faced with a crisis. In response to Shays’ Rebellion, the newly established democracy of the former colonies was put to the test and brought about many changes that helped establish the Constitution of the United States of America. To understand the causes of Shays’ Rebellion, one must first look back to the American Revolution. During the Revolution, there was a great business boom for East Coast merchants. Goods were scarce, since a majority of imports into America came from Great Britain, who maintained a blockade on American seaports. Therefore, all goods were in high demand and fetched high prices. Anyone with something to sell, from equipment to textiles to livestock, was sure to make a tidy profit. The economy flourished, with people buying goods with paper money or through bartering goods. Like all boom-and-bust cycles, the war profits came to an abrupt end following the peace at Yorktown. The stark changes to the American

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A creditor is attacked while a mob cheers during Shays' Rebellion, an insurgent movement led by Daniel Shays during 1786–1787. During the financial depression following the American Revolution, farmers in western Massachusetts rose up to force the government to decrease taxes and issue paper money. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

economy would play a vital role in Shays’ Rebellion and the effects it had on government policies, both at the state and federal levels. Even before the end of the Revolution, the new federation suffered its first growing pains in the form of massive inflation. During the war with Great Britain, Congress and the 13 states (formerly colonies) flooded paper currency into the economy, in an effort to meet the needs for supplies for the army and militia. In addition, each state issued its own paper currency. There was no way to determine the value of all this different paper money. What was the value of a New York dollar versus a Rhode Island dollar or a Pennsylvania dollar? No one had a definitive

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answer. By 1779, this paper currency was worth a fraction of its face value. For example, a Continental dollar compared to a Spanish dollar was 146 to 1. After the end of the Revolution in 1783, an economic depression settled in over the economy. Causes included inflation during the war and the United States’ role as primary producer of raw materials. Until the United States could produce finished goods, it would still import a majority of finished goods from Europe, especially from Great Britain, who was still its most vital trading partner. Due to a lack of exports and too many imports, from 1784 to 1786, the trade deficit with Great Britain increased to £5 million. This deficit drew hard currency (gold and silver) out of the American economy. This in turn caused commercial banks to insist on immediate repayment of old loans and refusal to issue any new loans. By 1786, prices for goods fell to their lowest level, dropping 25 percent. With hard money disappearing from the economy and paper money viewed as worthless, consumers stopped spending on goods and land. At the same time Congress, who lacked the power to raise taxes, petitioned each of the states to do so instead. Many citizens, especially farmers already burdened with debts and low prices for crops, could not pay higher taxes. The depression would last until 1788, at which time the central government would be called upon to act in new ways. The depression hit those already in debt the hardest, particularly the New England states. With no gold or silver available, many families could not repay debts or their taxes. This was especially true for rural farmers throughout New England, as well as other states. During the prosperous war years, many farmers took out loans to improve their farms, purchasing equipment, livestock, and land. When the depression brought about sharply low prices for crops and other goods, farmers found themselves struggling to feed and house their families. There was no money left for repayments of debt or taxes. In western Massachusetts, the depression was keenly felt by many farmers. According to state records, in 1784 in Worcester County, 2,000 lawsuits were brought about by debt alone. If a man could not pay his debt, he could be thrown into debtors’ prison, until it was paid off or he could even sold into servitude to work off his debt. Debtors’ prisons were often small, cramped cells, filled with mold and mildew. Those incarcerated for a long period of time suffered health problems, ranging from malnutrition to boils and putrid sores. Once in prison, there was no way to work off one’s debt. Throughout Massachusetts, men, many of whom had fought for American independence, were being thrown into debtors’ prison over the smallest of debts. In 1785, in Worcester County, 94 of the 104 people jailed were jailed for debt. Massachusetts was considerably harsher on residents than other New England states. Rhode Island, for example, passed a law making it illegal for creditors to refuse the state’s paper money. In 1785, Massachusetts levied the heaviest poll tax of the period—£1 per poll, versus £1.4 in other states. A poll tax was a flat

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tax levied on any male, age 16 or over. Since it was not based on income, the poll tax was much more difficult for those already in debt to pay. Governor James Bowdoin and the local legislature refused to shape taxes to realistically mirror the economy. Other states were far more lenient than Massachusetts. In Connecticut, for example, tax collection was abated over time, as needed. In Virginia, sheriffs either did not or could not follow through with foreclosure sales. But Massachusetts remained firm about its taxation policies. The hopelessness of the situation in western Massachusetts, as well as the rest of New England, caused a flood of immigration to the newly opened-up Northwest Territory. People from Portland and Salem in New England left their families and friends behind to travel thousands of miles to set up new homes and farms in outlying areas. The result of emigration caused land prices to plummet, further worsening the economic situation in New England. Farmers in Massachusetts petitioned against what they saw as unfair debt collection practices and high lawyer and court fees. Many of them had fought valiantly in the American Revolution, without pay, only to return home to be hauled into court for debts. The men appealed to Governor Bowdoin and the council of Massachusetts, proclaiming their loyalty to the nation, but opposing the state’s policies around debt and taxes. The governor and the council, which was made up in large part of eastern merchants, rejected the farmers’ pleas. Bowdoin did not think it fair to punish those who lent the money (mainly merchants) just because those who borrowed could not repay their debts. In the case of Massachusetts, a bulk of the debt was owned by merchants and creditor groups who had a firm grasp on local government. It was these groups who put in place high poll taxes, which affected farmers more than any other group, shifting the debt burden onto those who could least afford it. It is estimated that one-third of a farmer’s income went to taxes after 1780. Bowdoin and the rest of the government ignored the political discontent and opted to ride out the storm, believing it would soon subside. The state’s indifference to the plight of rural residents angered farmers throughout central and western Massachusetts. They began meeting in places such as Conkey’s Tavern in Pelham, where fiery speakers like Daniel Shays, Samuel Ely, and Luke Days preached for more paper money, tax relief, relief for debtors, and the end of debtors’ prisons. Shays, a former captain in the Revolutionary War, admitted to crowds gathered at the tavern that even though he had not lost his farm to foreclosure, he doubted he would be able to hold onto it much longer. He railed against lawyers and their high fees and how to the courts worked only for the wealthy. Shays further emphasized the line between eastern and western Massachusetts. The division between farmers and merchants within the state had existed since its earliest colonial days. The farmers formed the New England Regulation, though they would go down in history as Shaysites, as their opponents called

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them. At first, they modeled their tactics after those used during the American Revolution. They used liberty poles and liberty trees and believed they were acting in the spirit of the Revolution. For his part, Daniel Shays always denied being the chief leader of the group. He pointed out that decisions were made collectively by the regulators. Shays, the poor son of Irish immigrants, was reluctant to lead any of his fellow farmers into battle. He believed, however, that he could help maintain peace, while still convincing the government to revise its policies on debt collection and taxation. One farmer described Shays as “a firm leader and a man that is capable of keeping his head in case of emergency.” Other men who helped lead Shays’ Rebellion included Luke Days, Moses Sash, Job Shattuck, Henry Gale, and William Whiting, who was a judge from Berkshire County. These men all fought in the Revolutionary War, some achieving heroic honors. Shays himself was commended for his bravery at Stony Point in New York by General Lafayette. But in the eyes of the Massachusetts government, they would all be branded traitors and charged with treason and other crimes. The earliest actions taken by the New England Regulation took place in the summer of 1786. In August, the regulators stormed the Northampton courthouse, where they successfully stopped the trial and imprisonment of many debtors. Even though Shays refused to head up the Pelham contingent of Regulators for the Northampton courthouse, he reluctantly agreed to head up the group one month later, as they marched on the Springfield courthouse. He hoped to keep the men’s tempers at bay and keep the situation from getting out of hand. Shays negotiated with General William Shepard, who commanded the militia troops stationed in front of the courthouse. In the end, Shepard agreed that the judges and militia would peaceably abandon the courthouse and that the Regulators would march and demonstrate outside of it, rather than by taking it by force. The New England Regulators traveled to Berkshire, Hampshire, Middlesex, and Worcester counties, where they met little to no resistance. All over central and western Massachusetts, legal proceedings were halted. Through the summer and fall of 1786, Shaysites traveled around Massachusetts preventing foreclosures on farms and keeping courts from opening, thereby spurning the collection debts. They fought to keep honest men from going to jail and opened debtors’ prisons to free those incarcerated. Encouraged by their easy early victories, in which no blood was shed nor a bullet fired, the Shaysites continued their own brand of justice, throwing caution to the wind. However, as winter approached, confrontations grew angrier. Governor Bowdoin and the merchants and creditors of Boston, grew frustrated with the central government’s apparent lack of ability to deal with the rabble-rousers. So they funded a special private militia of 4,400 men, led by General Benjamin Lincoln. Shaysites heard rumors of brutal conduct by militia, particularly to innocent

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bystanders including women and children. They decided that stronger measures were needed, and to do that, they needed weapons. Despite early victories, the Shaysites were badly organized, poorly armed, and not up to fight a real militia. They had yet to encounter armed forces of any real size, and when they set off for the Springfield armory, they did not expect to be fired upon. In an effort to reason with Shays, whom they perceived as the head of the insurrection, the government sent General Rufus Putnam, Shays’ former commander during the Revolution, to speak with Shays about surrender. After a series of talks with Putnam, Shays, still confident with his early victories, refused to submit, proving to be just as stubborn as Bowdoin and his Boston merchants. On January 25, 1787, Shays led a group of 1,500 farmers and other citizens to Springfield Armory, which housed 7,000 muskets and 1,300 barrels of gunpowder. Fellow New England Regulator Luke Days was to lead a force of men from West Springfield to the armory to meet up with Shays’ men. However a message that Days would be delayed by one day was intercepted by Shepard, who stationed a group of 1,000 men within the armory. Even after they learned that the armory was filled with militia, Shays and his men continued to advance. From inside the armory, Shepard warned Shays and his men, “come any nearer at your peril” and fired two warming shots, still wanting to avoid bloodshed. However, as the Regulators continued to advance, Shepard ordered his men to fire into the crowd. Four Regulators were killed, and 20 were wounded. The shocked Regulators could not believe Shepard and his men had actually fired on them. There were cries of “Murder!” before Shays’ men dispersed, and the rebellions leaders scattered to other states. General Benjamin Lincoln and his forces captured Luke Day in West Springfield. Shays retreated to Pelham, Massachusetts, and then on to Vermont, which was not part of the Union. Lincoln marched through subzero temperatures and a snowstorm to Petersham, where many insurgents fled. He and his men covered an impressive 30 miles in 13 hours on foot. The surprised rebels were captured. After a monthlong pursuit, many Shaysites were captured and sentenced to death, though they would eventually be granted general amnesty in 1788. Following the uprising at the Springfield Armory, Bowdoin offered amnesty for those involved in the New England Regulation. He passed the Disqualifying Act on February 16, 1787, which set forth conditions for granting pardons to the participants of Shays’ Rebellion. Rebels were required to turn in their guns and pledge an oath of allegiance to the government. Their names would then be sent to their town clerks, and they would then be prevented from holding public office or voting. Even positions such as schoolmaster or tavern keeper were forbidden. Attorney General Robert Treat Paine was put in charge of prosecuting offenders, and he started a blacklist of those he believed to be in cahoots with Shays and his ilk. This harsh measure did not please the public, who saw the Disqualifying

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Act as a smokescreen for Bowdoin and his supporters to keep power. Even Benjamin Lincoln, who was a foe of Shays right from the start, believed the governor and his advisors were going too far. Popular support for the Shaysites was apparent immediately following their capture, not just in Massachusetts, but in all of the New England states as well as New York. During the hunt for Shaysites, the government tried to intimidate the women of many of the men involved. These women, hardened already from the Revolution, did not give in to the harassment. In fact, the women of central and western Massachusetts were instrumental in organizing a campaign for leniency once their husbands, sons, fathers, or brothers were captured, traveling many miles to Boston to plead for their release. Bowdoin, always a friend of eastern merchants, remained firm that the rebels be dealt with in the harshest of terms, and he offered up warrants and rewards for the Shaysites. Two rebels were executed before Bowdoin lost the 1787 gubernatorial election to federalist John Hancock. In fact, political unhappiness with the administration in Massachusetts was painfully clear in the 1787 election. Voter turnout was three times larger that year than the previous year, despite hundreds of men not being able to vote because of the Disqualifying Act. Not only was James Bowdoin ousted from office as governor, half of the state’s legislature was replaced as well. New Governor Hancock proved to be much more sympathetic to the plights of poor prisoners. Lincoln was put in charge of a commission to pardon the Shaysites, extending pardons to 790 men who did take the oath of the Disqualifying Act. He pardoned all but one of the condemned men, including Daniel Shays. The one man who did hang had been found guilty of theft, and so went to the gallows for criminal activities rather than for debt or unpaid taxes. The effects of Shays’ Rebellion were felt both immediately and in the long term. It revealed the ineffectuality of the new government in dealing with political stress, such as economic unrest, and it brought to many people’s attention how well—or in this case, poorly—the central government was operating. The rebellion convinced a powerful group of Americans that the national government needed more power so that it could strengthen economic policies and protect property owners from attacks by local majorities, like merchant creditors. It came down to private liberty versus public liberty, or keeping unrestrained power in the hands of all citizens, not just the wealthy, landed ones. James Madison pointed out that “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.” While the wealthy classes saw Shays’ Rebellion as an attack on them, believing paper currency to be as bad as taxation without representation, many others, like the Federalists, saw a need for reforms. Shays’ Rebellion reached across all 13 states, evoking similar movements in New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. After

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all, the men who participated in Shays’ Rebellion were, just a few years prior, ardent patriots, fighting the British for American independence. These were not rabblerousers or layabouts, as their opponents would have everyone believe. Many of the men who fought in the New England Regulation were decorated war heroes and gentlemen in their own right. In response to the public outcry for Shays’ Rebellion, new laws were put in place to allow the debtor freedom if he pledged a pauper’s oath, stating he had no means of repayment. This early form of bankruptcy allowed hundreds of Massachusetts citizens to start over financially and freed them from the fear of debtors’ prisons or forced servitude. Other laws passed in Massachusetts included a new fee bill, which reduced court charges. Clothing, household goods, and tools of trade were all exempt from the debt process. Taxes were also considerably lighter under John Hancock, who voluntarily cut his own salary by 300 pounds. Outside of New England, Shays’ Rebellion inspired other rural communities to stand up against urban aggression. In Virginia, farmers boycotted sales of property. The King William County Courthouse in Virginia was burned to the ground in May 1787, destroying all legal records. In Maryland, the Charles County courthouse was closed, and in South Carolina, the Camden County Courthouse was closed, preventing any legal proceedings from taking place. Shays also brought the country one giant step closer to revising the Articles of Confederation and the establishment of the constitution. Before Shays’ Rebellion, Congress lacked the power to intervene in state problems “to ensure domestic tranquility.” Article IV, Section Four, which gave protection to the states, was inspired by the combined threats of civil unrest and fears of splitting the new Union. The article required the government to protect each state against the invasion of domestic abuse, and establishing a stronger central government would provide more power to intervene in domestic affairs. The Shays movement and its repression had mobilized both Anti-Federalists and Federalists. In the end, Federalists won the debate about the role of the central government in state affairs, garnering Massachusetts support for the newly drafted Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention in September 1787. The preamble of the Constitution very clearly alludes to Shays’ Rebellion and the concern lawmakers felt over the insurgency. It is a result of the uprising in Massachusetts, when social classes collided and the nation’s newly established government was put through its first stress test. Even Massachusetts, which had staunchly avoided softening debt laws or taxation policies, gave its approval to the constitution. This is important to note, because if Massachusetts had withheld its approval, it is very likely that New York, Virginia, or any of the other states would have followed suit, thus reducing the Constitution to a well-crafted dead letter, soon forgotten. There is no question that Shays’ Rebellion was a class dispute. Unlike the Revolution, in which all the classes joined together in one cause against the British, Shays

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represented the first crack in the ideology of democracy on which American independence was based. Political leaders knew they had to act swiftly to end the rebellion before general anarchy became the rule rather than the exception. Thanks to Shays’ Rebellion, attendance at the Philadelphia Convention was high. George Washington cited Shays’ Rebellion as the very reason he made the trip from Virginia to the Convention. People in western and central Massachusetts were divided in their feelings about the rebellion. On one hand, they had great sympathy for the men who fought in Shays’ Rebellion. After all, these men were neighbors who were being unfairly treated by the government. However, high taxes and debt collection did not justify taking up arms against the government. What would become of the country if every person who was discontented decided to take matters into his own hands? Many of the most influential men of the American Revolution sneered at Shays’ Rebellion. Samuel Adams, Revolutionary War leader and president of the Massachusetts Senate, and the new Secretary of War Henry Knox both saw the rebellion as one step closer to total anarchy. Adams declared that “Rebellion against a king may be pardoned, or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” Other lawmakers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, viewed the insurrection as a growth opportunity for the new republic. A young Jefferson calmly wrote from his post in France that those who governed were “[i]nattentive to public affairs.” He went on to say that “Congress and assemblies, judges and conventions, shall all become wolves. . . . For I can apply no milder term . . . to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” James Madison believed that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. . . . It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” As for Daniel Shays, whose name has been committed to history for the rebellion, following his pardon by Governor Hancock, he moved to upstate New York, where he farmed until his death at the age of 84 in 1825. Today tourists can visit the Springfield Amory in Springfield, Massachusetts, and see where the last battle of the American Revolution was fought, and where the basis of the United States Constitution was inspired. —Lorri Brown See also all entries under Whiskey Rebellion (1794).

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter III. Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

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Shays’ Rebellion (1787) Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781–1789. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Morris, Richard B. The Forging of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Morris, Richard B. Witness at the Creation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. St. John, Jeffery. Forge of Union, Anvil of Liberty. Ottawa: Jameson Books, Inc., 1992. Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Bowdoin, James (1726–1790) The second governor of Massachusetts, James Bowdoin was born into a privileged life as the son of a wealthy merchant. A political and intellectual leader before, during, and after the Revolution, James Bowdoin helped shaped the fledging nation’s politics and played an integral part of ratifying the U.S. Constitution. His term as governor coincided with the first economic crisis for the new republic. James Bowdoin II was born on August 7, 1726, to James and Hannah (Portage) Bowdoin. His grandfather, Pierre Boudouin, was a French Huguenot in exile following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Pierre Boudouin fled to Dublin, Ireland, then on to Portland, Maine, and finally settling in Boston in 1690. Pierre accumulated a small estate as a merchant and ship’s captain. James Bowdoin’s father built on his father’s modest success and was one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston. James Bowdoin attended the Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard in 1745. When his father died in 1747, James inherited a large fortune. He had political aspirations early in his career, being elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1753 and serving until 1756. In 1785, James Bowdoin was elected governor of Massachusetts. His term was marred by a deepening economic depression and unhappy citizens throughout the state, due to high taxes and debt collections. When disgruntled farmers petitioned Bowdoin and the rest of the legislature for some debt relief and a change in the tax laws, Bowdoin remained unsympathetic. When the farmers banded together, under the direction of Revolutionary veterans like Daniel Shays, and began shutting down courthouses throughout western and central Massachusetts, Bowdoin took action. He was, after all, a grandson and son of a merchant, and a merchant himself. He viewed the uprising by farmers as a direct threat to the newly established government. Even when popular opinion called for compromise with the disgruntled farmers, Bowdoin refused to budge in his position. Bowdoin believed that any tampering with the courts would “frustrate the great end of government, the security of life, liberty and property.” Following the closing of the Springfield courthouse in September 1786, Bowdoin helped form a special militia of 4,000 men, paid for by himself and his merchant friends in Boston, since the state treasury could not afford it. In an effort to end the rebellion peaceably, he enacted the Disqualifying Act, in which rebels could take an oath of allegiance to the government and prevent them from holding any type of public office or voting in elections for three years. When this failed, Bowdoin persecuted the rebels, sentencing 11 of them to death, despite public cries for leniency. Undoubtedly, the harshness with which he handled Shaysites was a main cause for his losing the 1787 gubernatorial election to John Hancock.

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James Bowdoin’s reaction to Shays’ Rebellion was not so much out of disdain for the poor or farmers, but more about the preservation of liberty and the sanctity of government. Despite his short term as governor, James Bowdoin remained active in politics and Boston society for the rest of his life. He helped ratify the U.S. Constitution. He was a founder and the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, even leaving his library to the foundation. He also helped found the Massachusetts Humane Society. Bowdoin College in Maine was named in his honor, by his son, James Bowdoin III. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Massachusetts General Court During the post–Revolutionary War period, an uprising in western Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion brought national attention to the weaknesses of the federal government. The rebellion also brought about big changes in the political landscape of Massachusetts. The governing body of the state, the Massachusetts General Court, had existed long before the United States won its independence from Great Britain. Known as the Great and General Court in colonial days, during the Revolution and the years immediately following, the Massachusetts General Court played a crucial role in the shaping of the nations government and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Immediately following the end of the American Revolution, an economic depression settled over the country. Massachusetts farmers in particular felt the pinch of the depression. As more and more farmers, many of whom had fought in the Revolution without any kind of compensation, lost their farms to unpaid debts and soaring taxes, they petitioned Governor James Bowdoin and the Massachusetts General Court for some kind of assistance or debt relief. The Massachusetts General Court was made up largely of wealthy merchants and traders from the coastal areas. They were completely unsympathetic to the plight of poor farmers and saw no reason why those who loaned the money (merchants, like themselves) should have to take a loss because those who borrowed could not repay their loans.

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Farmers in the western and central portions of the state decided to take action against the government and what they viewed as unfair laws. They formed a group known as the New England Regulation and marched peaceably on a courthouse in Northampton, stopping foreclosure sales and preventing people from going to debtors’ prison. The men who served on the Massachusetts General Court, along with Governor Bowdoin, were outraged by these actions. A month later, at the Springfield courthouse, war veteran Daniel Shays led a force of 700 farmers to stop the trials of 11 farmers who helped close the Northampton courthouse. Shays negotiated with the militia to let them have the courthouse peacefully. Despite the fact that the Shaysites, as the court called them, protested with little to no force and had a great deal of popular support, the court’s attitude could not be swayed. Shays, the perceived ringleader of the group, became public enemy number one, and those who supported him were branded traitors to the Union and charged with treason. Through the fall and winter of 1786–1787, Shaysites shut down courthouse after courthouse, preventing any legal action from being taken against fellow farmers. Bowdoin and the Massachusetts General Court offered amnesty to those who were willing to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Those who did use the Disqualify Act, as it was called, were unable to vote or hold any type of public office (including tavern keeper or schoolmaster) for three years. People in Massachusetts saw the act as a way for Bowdoin and the rest of the court to keep power out of the hands of dissenters. This attitude was reflected in the 1787 election, when a third of the court was replaced by more moderate politicians. Following Shays’ Rebellion, the Massachusetts General Court, under the guidance of the new governor, John Hancock, reduced taxes and court fees and allowed taxes to be paid in goods other than hard cash. They also helped push through the newly drafted U.S. Constitution, ratifying it by a narrow margin of 187 to 168 votes. With the support of the state of Massachusetts, other states followed suit, ratifying the Constitution and laying the foundation for the modern day government. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781–1789. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Morris, Richard B. The Forging of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Morris, Richard B. Witness at the Creation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. St. John, Jeffery. Forge of Union, Anvil of Liberty. Ottawa: Jameson Books, Inc., 1992.

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Shays, Daniel (1747–1825) A pivotal turning point in the early history of the United States was a small revolt known as Shays’ Rebellion. Though the rebellion was short and virtually bloodless, it brought attention to the weaknesses of the confederation and promoted lawmakers to draft a new constitution, strengthening the power of the federal government. The man credited with leading the rebellion, Daniel Shays, was a reluctant leader. A Revolutionary War veteran, his role in the “last battle of the American Revolution” earned him a place in history. Daniel Shays was born to Irish immigrants Patrick and Margaret (Dempsey) Shays in 1747 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. He was the second of six children. As a young man without land of his own, Shays spent his early adult years hired out as a farmhand. Shays married Abigail Gilbert in 1772. The couple settled in Brookfield, Massachusetts, moving to Shutesbury between 1774 and 1775. When the American Revolution broke out, Shays was an ardent patriot. Thanks to previous drilling instruction with the Brookfield militia, he entered the militia at Shutesbury as a sergeant, soon being promoted to lieutenant. By 1777, he was promoted to captain in the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army. Shays had a reputation as a strong, competent, and courageous officer. He fought in several notable battles, including the battles of Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga. At Stony Point in New York, Shays was commanded for heroics by General Lafayette and awarded a special sword for his services. He was promoted to

Daniel Shays was one of the leaders of an uprising of farmers in western Massachusetts in 1786–1787. Shays' Rebellion, as it was called, added momentum to the drive for a stronger central government that led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. (North Wind Picture Archives)

Shays’ Rebellion (1787)

the rank of captain before being wounded in battle and retiring from the military in 1780. Upon returning to civilian life, he went back to his main occupation of farming in western Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife and children. At the age of 39, following the Revolutionary War, Shays found himself in debt and facing high taxes. Having received no compensation for his military service, he was brought before a court for unpaid debts. He was not alone; thousands of farmers across central and western Massachusetts were in similar situations. The disgruntled farmers gathered in places such as Conkey’s Tavern in Pelham, Massachusetts, where they shared their unhappy situations. They petitioned the government for help, but their pleas went unanswered. As more and more farmers were thrown into debtors’ jail, veterans such as Shays saw the need for more decisive action. In the autumn of 1786, Shays and his fellow veteran-farmers organized into militia-like squads, known as the New England Regulation. The Regulators, as they called themselves, began shutting down courthouses throughout western and central Massachusetts, preventing foreclosure sales and imprisonment of debts. Even though he always denied being the chief leader of the group, Shays’ name became a battle cry for 9,000 men. Opponents of Shays and his men referred to the rebels as Shaysites. Through the fall and early winter of 1786–1787, Shays led his men into peaceable protests at courthouses throughout the state. However, when they decided to take over the Springfield Armory, to gather ammunition and other provisions, they were fired upon by a special militia, waiting inside the armory, killing four Shaysites. Shocked that they were actually fired on, Shays and the other men broke rank and fled to surrounding towns. Shays headed to Pelham before going on to Vermont. The Shaysites were charged with treason, and rewards were offered for their capture by Governor James Bowdoin. Following a pardon by new Governor John Hancock in 1787, Shays was cleared of any wrongdoing, though his name would always be linked with the rebellion. He moved to upstate New York, where he died at the age of 78 in 1825. Before his death, Shays was granted a petition from the government for a pension for the five years of war service he gave without pay. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter III. Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781–1789. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Morris, Richard B. The Forging of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Morris, Richard B. Witness at the Creation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.

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Taxes The United States was still in its infancy when its first real economic crisis hit, following the end of the Revolutionary War. Brought on by a combination of high taxes, inflation, and aggressive debt collection, the depression of the 1780s instigated an uprising in western Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion. This rebellion became the United States’ first call at tax reform. Politicians serving on the Massachusetts General Court consisted in large part of the wealthy merchant and trading classes surrounding Boston. Many of these men had lent money to the government during the Revolution. When the government could not pay back its debt, Congress petitioned the states to raise taxes. These same men worked hard following the end of the war to resume trade with Europe, particularly Great Britain, who was their most important trading partner. Congress lacked the power to tax directly, so when it needed money to pay back war loans, it turned to the states to raise the needed revenue. The Massachusetts General Court was overly enthusiastic about raising taxes, since many of the legislators had a direct interest in government repayment of loans. They levied the heaviest tax in New England in 1785 of approximately one pound per poll, while other states’ taxes were about a quarter of that amount. While other states modified or abated tax collection altogether, the government of Massachusetts never shaped their taxes to the economic reality of the time. The taxes that the legislature passed hit farmers the hardest and coincided with the depression brought on by lack of hard currency. Throughout western and central Massachusetts, farmers were losing lands and property or being thrown into debtors’ prison by the hundreds. Roughly a third of a farmer’s income in 1785 went to pay taxes. That left precious little to feed, house, and maintain a family and farm. Despite pleas for debt relief from farmers, the government continued to push high taxes and support confiscation of property for failure to pay. They also adamantly refused to issue paper money, which the farmers requested, believing that paper money would lead to massive inflation and further economic problems. During the autumn and winter of 1786–1787, the government began to pass some token tax reforms. In November 1786, they allowed all back taxes to be paid with goods such as beef, pork, leather, iron, or whale oil, rather than with hard currency of gold or silver. But the act came too late to save many farmers from

Shays’ Rebellion (1787)

destitution. When John Hancock was elected governor in June 1787, ousting merchant-friendly James Bowdoin, he reduced taxes and also reduced court fees, which were a hinder to debt-ridden farmers. The tax policies of Massachusetts at the time of Shays’ Rebellion helped bring about a shift in both local and federal government policies. At the local level, a powerful group of creditors lost government control to moderates. At the federal level, there was a movement to strengthen the power of the central government, allowing it to raise taxes, rather than delegating the task to states, which, in the case of Massachusetts, provoked rebellion. —Lorri Brown

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781–1789. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Morris, Richard B. The Forging of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Morris, Richard B. Witness at the Creation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. St. John, Jeffery. Forge of Union, Anvil of Liberty. Ottawa: Jameson Books, Inc., 1992.

An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion (1786) In 1786, the newly independent United States fell into an economic depression as businesses failed, prices fell, and currency became scarce and unstable. With no power to levy or collect taxes, the central government under the Articles of Confederation could do little to bring the situation under control. In the autumn of 1786, Captain Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran, became one of the leaders of an insurrection of impoverished former solders and farmers that erupted in western Massachusetts. Later known as Shays’ Rebellion, the uprising sought to end court foreclosures on farms and properties whose owners could not afford to pay their taxes. Declared traitors by the state, the rebels attacked the government arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, but were defeated and dispersed by state militia forces. In 1788, all participants in Shays’ Rebellion were pardoned. The following document describes some of the rebels’ grievances, many of which were later remedied by the Massachusetts legislature, and protests against rumors that the insurrection had been instigated by the British. Gentlemen, We have thought proper to inform you of some of the principal causes of the late risings of the people, and also of their present movement, viz. 1st. The present expensive mode of collecting debts, which by reason of the great scarcity of cash, will of necessity fill our gaols with unhappy debtors; and thereby a

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Shays’ Rebellion (1787) reputable body of people rendered incapable of being serviceable either to themselves or the community. 2nd. The monies raised by impost and excise being appropriated to discharge the interest of governmental securities, and not the foreign debt, when these securities are not subject to taxation. 3rd. A suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus, by which those persons who have stepped forth to assert and maintain the rights of the people, are liable to be taken and conveyed even to the most distant part of the Commonwealth, and thereby subjected to an unjust punishment. 4th. The unlimited power granted to Justices of the Peace and Sheriffs, Deputy Sheriffs, and Constables, by the Riot Act, indemnifying them to the prosecution thereof; when perhaps, wholly actuated from a principle of revenge, hatred, and envy. Furthermore, be assured, that this body, now at arms, despise the idea of being instigated by British emissaries, which is so strenuously propagated by the enemies of our liberties: And also wish the most proper and speedy measures may be taken, to discharge both our foreign and domestic debt. Per Order, Daniel Gray, Chairman of the Committee Source: G. R. Minot, History of the Insurrection in Massachusetts (Boston: James W. Burditt, 1810), 82.

A Letter to the Hampshire Herald Listing the Grievances of the Rebels (1786) In the following letter sent to the Hampshire Herald in December 1786, Thomas Grover, after referring to the list of grievances in the previous document, further elaborates on the reforms that the Shays’ rebels wished to see implemented. Among those changes are removal of the Massachusetts state capital from Boston, the sale of state lands to pay the foreign debt, and the revision of the state constitution. Many of these measures were passed by the Massachusetts General Court in the years after Shays’ Rebellion. Sir, It has some how or other fallen to my lot to be employed in a more conspicuous manner than some others of my fellow citizens, in stepping forth on defense of the rights and privileges of the people, more especially of the county of Hampshire. Therefore, upon the desire of the people now at arms, I take this method to publish to the world of mankind in general, particularly the people of this Commonwealth, some of the principal grievances we complain of. . . .

Shays’ Rebellion (1787) In this first place, I must refer you to a draught of grievances drawn up by a committee of the people, now at arms, under the signature of Daniel Gray, chairman, which is heartily approved of; some others also are here added, viz. 1st. The General court, for certain obvious reasons, must be removed out of the town of Boston. 2nd. A revision of the constitution is absolutely necessary. 3rd. All kinds of governmental securities, now on interest, that have been bought of the original owners for two shillings, and the highest for six shillings and eight pence on the pound, and have received more interest than the principal cost the speculator who purchased them—that if justice be done, we verily believe, nay positively know, it would save this Commonwealth thousands of pounds. 4th. Let the lands belonging to this Commonwealth, at the eastward, be sold at the best advantage to pay the remainder of our domestic debt. 5th. Lest the monies arising from impost and excise be appropriated to discharge the foreign debt. 6th. Let the act, passed by the General Court last June by a small majority of only seven, called the Supplementary Act, for twenty-five years to come, be repealed. 7th. The total abolition of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions of the Peace. 8th. Deputy Sheriffs totally set aside, as a useless set of officers in the community; and Constables who are really necessary, be empowered to do the duty, by which means a large swarm of lawyers will be banished from their wonted haunts, who have been more damage to the people at large, especially the common farmers, than the savage beasts of prey. To this I boldly sign my proper name, as a hearty well-wisher to the real rights of the people. Thomas Grover Worcester, December 7, 1786 Source: G. R. Minot, History of the Insurrection in Massachusetts (Boston: James W. Burditt, 1810), 82.

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Whiskey Rebellion (1794) The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791–1794 in western Pennsylvania was an organized resistance to a tax on whiskey imposed by the new federal government. In many ways, it was a replay of the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, Shays’ Rebellion of 1786, and the American Revolution itself. Ideologically, internal taxes created by a distant central government were seen as fundamental violations of the rights of individuals to tax themselves. The Stamp Act had united the colonists against the common enemy, King-in-Parliament. The Whiskey Tax, enacted in March 1791, united westerners against the new federal government they had distrusted from the beginning. Opposition to the excise tax, which had deep roots in the ideology of English “Country” radicals and their predecessors, had less to do with the tax than in the means that might be employed to collect it. “Country” radicals like Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon had warned that this was one of the most egregious uses of a “standing army”—the intrusion on one’s personal property of a permanent military force created to enforce unpopular measures, like the excise tax. Local control of affairs was seen by many in this school of thought to be essential to liberty. Power overly concentrated in a distant and centralized national government could be expected to use a standing army for tyrannical purposes. West of the Appalachian Mountains, settlers who had come to the region hoping for some measure of autonomy suddenly found themselves subjected to the kind of thing they had sought to defeat in the war. The country around “the Forks,” shorthand for the headwaters of the Ohio at Pittsburgh, had long suffered from the resistance of Indian peoples to EuroAmerican expansion as well as what they perceived as indifference from the state legislature in Philadelphia. At the front lines of empire, Indian war was their chief concern, and neither the state government nor the new federal government in New York had given them much help. Indeed, help with the conquest of the Indians and acquiring navigation rights on the Mississippi River—at that point prohibited by the Spanish—were the only reasons for having a federal government at all that they could see. Since they did not have access to the port of New Orleans and the Atlantic market economy, western farmers found that distilling their corn into whiskey and transporting it over the mountains to Philadelphia or other port towns was the most cost-effective way to market their crop. Now, that was in jeopardy

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President George Washington and his advisers send Confederation Army troops to pacify western counties of Pennsylvania during the Whiskey Rebellion, October 1794. (National Guard)

from a federal government that threatened to take what little profit they made from their year’s labor. As bad as that seemed to these western subsistence farmers, it was their more wealthy neighbors and economic competitors who not only gained an advantage from the whiskey tax, but who also volunteered to collect it. Moreover, the tax was created, in part, to pay debts-plus-interest incurred to wealthy Americans during the war—individuals like the wealthy Philadelphia banker and land speculator Robert Morris. It was no secret that Morris was a friend of Alexander Hamilton, the author of the hated excise that would pay dividends on the war debt held by Morris and other wealthy Americans. These financiers had welcomed the young Hamilton into their circle as the drive for a federal government gelled in the late 1780s. With the Federalist victory in the battle over the ratification of a new constitution, President George Washington had appointed Hamilton to be the first secretary of the treasury. It appeared that Morris and company would be paid a handsome profit on their investment in the American Revolution and its aftermath. When the war was going badly for the Continentals in 1776, Congress had offered bonds to investors at 4 percent interest payable in paper money. Morris and company were not interested; continental paper would depreciate rapidly,

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and indeed, when Congress stopped printing it in 1780, the value ratio between paper and coin was 125 to 1. But Morris was a member of the Continental Congress, and as a successful merchant with a far-flung commercial empire of his own, he was able to coax the French into loaning Congress the cash to cover interest on the bonds in so-called bills of exchange. These bills were exchangeable on the European market for hard currency—silver and gold. This arrangement made the bonds an attractive investment, and Morris and his associates soon bought them up—and they bought them up with Continental paper money. Much of this paper money had been bought up at pennies on the dollar, yet the bondholders would be paid back with interest in hard money. Robert Morris wielded great power in the Continental Congress. He and his cronies headed the committees of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and War. He routinely used congressional money for his own investments, and the fact that they were often profitable kept him in power instead of getting him imprisoned. But now that the Morris faction held these bonds, issued at 6 percent interest and backed by the bills of exchange, meant that real wealth was needed to pay for them. This real wealth would be provided through taxation. State governments in the 1780s had been hesitant to impose an unpopular excise tax and whether a state militia would even enforce its collection was open to question. With the advent of the new Constitution, which concentrated power in the federal government, an army ostensibly led by President Washington could enforce the payment of an excise tax. The new secretary of the treasury Hamilton, following a long British tradition of taxing “vices” to minimize popular opposition, proposed a tax on whiskey. It was passed by the new Congress on March 3, 1791. One-third of the whiskey distillers in the United States lived at the Forks. Many of these individuals had fought the British and their Indian allies on the battlefield without receiving the pay that was still owed them. Some were paid in the lands west of the mountains, where Indians clung tenaciously to their land base and had no intention of being driven away. Now these people were being ordered to pay a crippling tax so that, as they saw it, Bob Morris and friends could reap a windfall. The majority had no intention of paying it or of countenancing the presence of its collectors. As with the rationalization of excise taxes in England, there was a long history of resistance to such taxes in folk culture. The majority of westerners were Scots-Irish, a group that had long struggled against the encroachment of imperial Britain. Peasant and artisan communities in the pre-modern, English-speaking world had enforced their standards traditionally through the folk methods of “skimmington” or “rough music.” When someone repeatedly violated the norms of the community, a “committee” of self-appointed enforcers, often with faces blackened and dressed in bizarre clothing, perhaps in drag, would arrive at the offender’s home, shave his head, strip him naked, ride him around town on a rail

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while beating on pots and pans and chanting the party’s offenses, finally depositing him on the outskirts of the community where he was likely beaten and/or tarred and feathered. This “home remedy” was applied to tax collectors at the Forks as well. In September 1791, such a committee accosted a recently appointed federal tax collector named Robert Johnson on a lonely road near Pigeon Creek, southwest of Pittsburgh. Johnson had either ignored or failed to see the notice in the Pittsburgh Gazette announcing a resolution adopted at a meeting in the nearby town of Washington to treat tax collectors as public enemies. This group of men, about 15 to 20 in number, faces blacked, many wearing dresses, stripped Johnson naked and tarred and feathered him. This occurred the same week that many of the perpetrators were attending a conference in Pittsburgh at the Sign of the Green Tree, a tavern on the Monongahela River side of town. The conference was the culmination of efforts begun that summer to resist the whiskey excise. The first meeting was at Redstone–Old Fort (present-day Brownsville) on July 27, 1791. Two factions were emerging in the resistance that overlapped at the Green Tree conference, those bent on tarring and feathering, and those who insisted on following the rule of law and democratic-republican principles. The moderates were led by three notable individuals who were involved in state and national politics. William Findlay was one, a future governor of the state. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who had teamed with Philip Freneau to provide some of the more radical war propaganda during the revolution, had come to Pittsburgh after the war to find elbow room and seek his fortune. Also living in the area was Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant pursuing a land speculation scheme aimed at French e´migre´s from that revolution. In 1795, he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he expanded his reputation as a formidable opponent of the Hamilton wing of the Federalist Party. Gallatin would go on to serve as secretary of the treasury in the Jefferson administration. Although Findlay, Brackenridge, and Gallatin had a moderating effect on the Whiskey Rebellion, at its height, opposing the outbreak of violence while protesting the excise was not for the feint of heart. In Kentucky, North Carolina, and northwestern Virginia, the federal government could find no one to collect the tax. News of this phenomenon was somewhat suppressed by the Federalist-dominated newspapers to prevent further rebellion. After all, this was the same kind of protest that Britain had felt in 1765 and 1776. Untaxed spirits from southwestern Pennsylvania flowed southward to markets in that region, frustrating those desiring to collect revenue on it. Hamilton was anxious to deploy troops to enforce the excise, but President Washington and Attorney General Edmund Randolph opposed the move. As the boycott of the excise stretched into its second year, the question became less whether or not to deploy troops, but where to deploy them. Washington and

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Hamilton knew that they did not have the manpower to enforce the excise at all points in the West. While the treasury secretary pondered troop deployments, Washington wrote to the governor of North Carolina, and Randolph stated that he could find no hard evidence to warrant the prosecution of the frontiersmen. Supreme Court chief justice John Jay aptly summarized the predicament: the worst thing that could happen would be for a federal military force to be humiliated on the frontier. Frontiersmen were veteran warriors, having served in the Revolution and often having fought the formidable Native Americans to take and keep the homesteads they now possessed. By late 1792, Hamilton began to strategize that putting down this “rebellion” might be accomplished by focusing on one area rather than the entire western frontier. Western Pennsylvania was the closest and most easily reached by a military force. Hamilton had allies in the region, most notably John Neville, who had accepted an appointment as the regional inspector of the excise tax. Neville was among the wealthiest men in the Forks region. While most of his neighbors were losing their land, he was buying it. Neville owned a compound known as Bower Hill that included 1,000 acres of land, 18 slaves, 16 head of cattle, 23 sheep, and 10 horses—an extensive holding in southwestern Pennsylvania. His son-in-law supplied the local militia with needed goods through government contracts. Hamilton’s information about the area largely came from Neville, who did not bother to distinguish the peaceful resistance movement from the violent one. Neville, with a still that produced up to 600 gallons of whiskey a year, was the kind of man who benefited from the whiskey tax. Being more acclimated to the realm of business, people like Neville were favored by Hamilton and taken more seriously than their lower-class counterparts. Small distillers were at a distinct disadvantage, operating more on a traditional folk culture level than on that of international business and empire that to Hamiltonians was the coin of the realm. Unlike pre-modern society, where the affairs of the common folk were largely left alone, market economics dictated that they be competitive or fall by the wayside. Small-time operators who were not interested in obtaining large sums of material wealth represented unwanted competition that needed to be squelched and, in the Forks region, Neville was happy to oblige. By 1793, violent opposition to the excise in Pennsylvania had coalesced with the formation of the Mingo Creek Association. Originating southwest of Pittsburgh near the village of Washington, their plan was to use the democratic process to infiltrate the local militia and deprive the Federalists of the use of that entity to enforce the tax. The more radical among them even considered independence, designing their own flag and entertaining the notion of aid from Britain or Spain. Other individuals were accosted and tarred and feathered. William Faulkner, a newcomer to the Forks, rented office space to Neville and had his building

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vandalized for his trouble. The Whiskey Rebels forced Faulkner to eject Neville and publish a notice saying the tax would not be collected on his property. During a meeting of the Washington County militia in June, an effigy of “General Neville the excise man” was displayed and burned. Benjamin Wells, a tax collector residing in Fayette County, had his life threatened on a couple of occasions and was forced to turn over his account books and commission to a blackfaced, handkerchiefed “committee” of anti-excise men. He was also compelled to publish his resignation as collector in the Pittsburgh Gazette. This resistance brought the attention of Hamilton and Washington to the Forks, but the difference between Pennsylvania and other regions of the West was not the resistance, but the presence of Neville and his allies—willing collectors of the excise. As the seeming headquarters of the tax collector, the compound at Bower Hill was a symbol of oppression. This view intensified as the events of 1794 unfolded in southwestern Pennsylvania. In June, U.S. marshal David Lenox was sent to the area to begin distributing summonses to over 60 distillers who had refused to comply with the excise law. Lenox distributed a large number of these in three of the western counties, remaining unmolested apparently because of his position as a lawman. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a moderate tax protester who had and would continue to reign in the violent faction to the best of his ability, entertained Lenox at his home in Pittsburgh. He told Lenox that it was likely because of his non-association with Neville and other pro-excise residents that he had escaped attack. Nevertheless, when John Neville offered to guide Lenox to serve one last summons in July, Lenox accepted. This proved to be one of the decisive moments in the Whiskey Rebellion. Lenox and Neville made their way to the home of William Miller to serve a summons. Miller was outraged that he should have to interrupt his seasonal schedule to go to Philadelphia and likely pay a ruinous $250 fine. The presence of Neville “made my blood boil” he reported, and Miller refused to accept the summons. As this was transpiring, men working in the summer hayfields nearby heard that individuals were being arrested, with the help of the hated Neville, and taken to Philadelphia. While this was hyperbole, the 30 to 40 men who subsequently confronted Lenox and Neville were frustrated and outraged. The presence of a U.S. marshal and the obvious misinformation confused the group, facilitating the exit of the two excise enforcers. Lenox returned to Pittsburgh and Neville to his lair at Bower Hill. Meanwhile, the Mingo Creek militia had gathered that same day to answer President Washington’s call for volunteers to supplement General “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s army engaging the Indians in the Ohio country. When the rumors of enforcement action reached these men, it was decided to confront the enforcers, both thought to have gone to Bower Hill. The militia’s plan was to capture Marshal Lenox. When they arrived, with “37 guns,” they surrounded the house. Neville

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heard them around daybreak and stepped outside to confront them. He warned them off and fired a shot into the crowd, killing militiaman Oliver Miller. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, Neville blew a horn, and his slaves opened fire from their quarters behind the militia, wounding several of them. The militia retreated to a place known as Couche’s Fort, where they met with reinforcements and considered their alternatives. With the ante upped by Neville’s fatal shot at Miller, the militia felt they had new rationale for their resistance. For his part, Neville applied for protection from the local judges but received none, although Major James Kirkpatrick and 10 volunteers from Fort Fayette came to help Neville defend Bower Hill. On July 17, two days after the original confrontation near William Miller’s farm, about 600 men accompanied by drums and riding in formation arrived at Neville’s residence. The leader of the militia, James McFarlane, a Revolutionary War veteran, sent a notice demanding that Neville surrender, resign his commission, and decline all further offices related to the excise. Unbeknownst to the militia, Kirkpatrick had smuggled Neville into a thicketed ravine where he lay in hiding. The major refused to leave, arguing that if he did, the militia would burn the property. The militia responded by surrounding the compound, lighting fire to a slave cabin and a barn. The military managed to get the Neville family out of the house, and a pitched battle ensued. At one point, McFarlane thought someone had called out from the house and ordered a cease-fire, thinking the soldiers wanted to negotiate. When he stepped into the open, a shot fired from the house struck him down, killing him instantly. The militia continued to set fire to the buildings at Bower Hill, with the exception of a few that the slaves talked them into sparing. Soon the heat became too intense for the soldiers inside, and they surrendered. The prisoners, along with Lenox, who had been retrieved from Pittsburgh, were brought to Couche’s Fort and threatened extensively, although no serious harm was done. The soldiers were released and Lenox escaped, taking his leave from the area by floating on a barge down the Ohio River. In the end, the number of casualties was not clear; several were seriously wounded, and there were reportedly a few deaths on each side. This was the bloodiest day of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the blame for it falls at the feet of John Neville, whose patrician attitude and killing of Oliver Miller caused the escalation of events in July 1794. The Whiskey Rebellion threatened to expand southward and even eastward after these events. Liberty poles were raised, and rumors of militias forming as far east as Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Hagerstown, Maryland, were rampant. If the West was to rise up against federalism, now was the time to do it while even rural people east of the mountains were supportive of their cause. The response of people in central and eastern Pennsylvania was the catalyst that spurred the federal government into action.

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By September, a federal army composed of nearly 13,000 troops was on its way to the far side of the mountains. Known as the “Watermelon Army” because of its inexperience, the president lent his enormous credibility to the enterprise, rendezvousing with them at Carlisle. As it traveled through increasingly hostile territory, circumstances were exacerbated by the behavior of the army. They had few or no provisions and were authorized by Hamilton to confiscate food and fodder from often impoverished farmers just before the onset of winter. By November, the army was ensconced at Fort Fayette and the roundup of noncompliers in the Forks region was underway. Their punishment began with their treatment by the soldiers and officers. Many were marched in their nightclothes through rain and sleet, forced to spend the night in the open, and prodded with bayonets if they got too close to the fire. If they were fed at all, it was uncooked dough and raw meat tossed to them on the ground. Discipline at Fort Fayette was lax as the army’s stay stretched into the winter. Even officers got into brawls with the local population. Property was looted and destroyed, and the soldiers gained a reputation as an army of occupation having their way with the locals. Fear of the standing army utilized to collect the excise tax proved well founded. The legacy of the Whiskey Rebellion, above all, was to further instill into a populace already phobic about taxes the distrust of arbitrary rule from a distant center of power. To many, there was now little difference between King-inParliament and the federal government in Philadelphia. The democraticrepublican societies that the dissenting Jeffersonians had formed, and which President Washington condemned, swelled in number. The Jacobin radicals of the French Revolution were viewed sympathetically by many in America, and Edmund Genet had been welcomed by the Jeffersonians with open arms. The polarizing effects of Hamilton’s economic policies were heightened, and an open political struggle for power between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans would characterize the remainder of the decade. While the Jeffersonians won out in the short term, winning the election of 1800, Hamiltonian policies favoring the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes returned with a vengeance. Some argue that they never really left, given the favoritism shown first to land speculators and bankers, and later railroad men, industrialists, and bankers. The Whiskey Rebellion was both a last gasp of the American Revolution and a defining moment in setting the parameters of American politics to the present day. —Douglas S. Harvey See also all entries under Shays’ Rebellion (1787).

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Further Reading Baldwin, Leland B. Whiskey Rebels: A Story of a Frontier Uprising. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939. Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Boyd, Steven R., ed. The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Cooke, Jacob E. “The Whiskey Insurrection: A Re-evaluation.” Pennsylvania History 30 (July 1963). DeMay, John A. The Settlers’ Forts of Western Pennsylvania. Apollo, PA: Clossen Press, 1997. Eckert, Allan W. That Dark and Bloody River: Chronicles of the Ohio River Valley. New York: Bantam, 1995. Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006. Kohn, Richard H. “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion.” Journal of American History 59 (December 1972). Mainwaring, W. Thomas, ed. “The Whiskey Rebellion and the Trans-Appalachian Frontier.” Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts 45 (Fall 1994). Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Federal Supremacy Federal supremacy was the concept enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, ratified in June 1788, in which the individual states, hoping for increased security, sacrificed much of their sovereignty to a newly created federal government. The effort to establish federalism had begun with a nationalist movement in 1781 as the Continental forces were scoring a key victory against Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. The finances of the Continental Congress as well as those of most states were in dismal shape and, beginning among economic elites, the movement for a strong central government with the power of taxation was increasingly seen as a solution to the new republic’s economic woes. To some, federal supremacy was a betrayal of the Revolution. The bottom-up nature of the rebellion of the 1760s and 1770s ran into serious financial trouble as the fighting wore on. Profiteering by some members of Congress and their appointees led some to wonder what the point of the war was if British “placemen” were to simply be replaced by their American equivalents. Issuance of paper money and various certificates of loan created state and national debts that were astronomic for the period. Typically, in the colonial period, such loans and paper issuances would be reabsorbed into the economy as raw materials were traded for finished goods. But that arrangement was dependent on the reputation of British financiers and the power of the British Empire. The struggling new republic had no such reputation or unbridled trade with an economic powerhouse like the Empire. Financial elites in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia— people like Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—argued for a stronger central government and, in some cases, forced punitive state taxes through state legislatures to pay interest on debts. Often, these debts were owed to the very people who were pushing this legislation through at the state level. Even before federal supremacy was hatched in Philadelphia in 1787, Daniel Shays and others led a revolt against such punitive taxes in Massachusetts. These reflected similar discontent that had occurred in the western lands of Carolina and Virginia in the 1760s. When Madison and Hamilton called for a convention to “rework” the Articles of Confederation, supporters of state sovereignty—people like Patrick Henry of Virginia—said they “smelled a rat.” But by the late 1780s, the economic situation of the United States had reached a point where many people of middling economic status supported the concept of a stronger central power that could tax the citizenry and encourage foreign investment. However, westerners, like their predecessors the Regulators of the 1760s in Carolina, the Sons of Liberty after the Stamp Act, and Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in the 1780s, saw this as an attempt by the rich to usurp power and enslave the citizenry.

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Indeed, it is unlikely that the new Constitution would have been ratified had its supporters not promised a Bill of Rights guaranteeing that the new federal government would not usurp certain individual rights. Federal supremacy was enshrined in Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the new Constitution. Almost immediately, the new secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, began implementing a plan to tax westerners to pay interest and principal on the United States’ war debt. This tax, placed on whiskey, created a great hue and cry in places like western Pennsylvania, where whiskey was the lifeblood of the economy. This led to the “Whiskey Rebellion,” which was considered the greatest rebellion against federal policy until the Civil War. Federalism continued to be a bone of contention even after the whiskey rebels gave up their struggle. Fries’ Rebellion among ethnic Germans in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1790s was a protest against the property taxes instituted by the federal government. The election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 quieted some of this protest, but the proponents of centralized power and rule by an economic elite persisted. The rise of the issue of slavery impacted the federalism–states’ rights dilemma in the mid-19th century. Southerners feared that a northern-controlled federal government might, like the British and French, abolish slavery. As emancipation gained steam in the Atlantic world, proslavery forces in the American South dug in their heels. When a northern president was elected in 1860—Abraham Lincoln— the deep South seceded from the Union, ostensibly to prevent a federal intrusion into their states’ economies. After the Civil War, violent repercussions manifested in southern “Redeemers” who set out to terrorize freed blacks into “keeping their place” in a white-supremacist society. Redeemers were successful in curbing efforts by the federal government to “reconstruct” southern society. Other localist movements have expressed disdain for federalism, from separatist movements in such disparate locations as western Kansas and Vermont. Often, resistance to federal supremacy has found expression in rural southern and western groups who feel controlled from afar by those who do not have their interests at heart. It is an old dichotomy that shows no signs of permanently dissipating. —Douglas S. Harvey

Further Reading Boyd, Steven R., ed. The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006. Kohn, Richard H. “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion.” Journal of American History 59 (December 1972).

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Hamilton, Alexander (1755–1804) Alexander Hamilton was something of a lightning rod in the opening years of the American republic. His policies regarding debt assumption and taxation incited the so-called “Whiskey Rebellion,” one of the most serious insurgencies in the United States before the secession of the South in 1860. Hamilton sought to tie the welfare of the federal government to the interests of the financier class— bankers, merchants, and manufacturers—much as Sir Robert Walpole had done with the British Parliament earlier in the 18th century. Alexander Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755, on the British sugar island of Nevis, to a French Huguenot mother and a Scottish merchant father. When Hamilton’s parents moved to the Danish island of St. Croix, they learned that their marriage was invalid because Danish law did not permit a divorce´e to remarry. This is the source of the well-known “illegitimacy” of Hamilton’s birth, something that haunted his adult life. The elder Hamilton’s business ultimately failed, and he returned to England. Shortly after, Alexander’s mother died of a fever at the age of 32 in 1768. Young Alexander was entrusted to his employers at the counting house of Nicholas Cruger and David Beekman. Alexander showed great aptitude in business finance, and at age 17, with the support of his employer Cruger and Hugh Knox, he immigrated to New York. Friends of his St. Croix benefactors, William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, as well as his cousin Ann Lytton Mitchell, aided him once he was on the continent. Hamilton rose through the ranks of the Continental army, and married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of the well-connected General Philip Schuyler. He was soon invited into the inner circle of the revolutionary power structure with his appointment as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. After the war, moneyed and propertied interests in the new United States felt increasingly threatened by rural soldier-farmers who were shouldered with state tax burdens they often found unreasonable. James Bowdoin of Massachusetts and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania were among those whom Hamilton joined in an effort to create a strong central government with the power to tax. These men supported a system of taxation that would make payments on the debts incurred during the course of the war and afterward. Some of this debt was owed to people like Bowdoin and Morris, and the taxes that working people and farmers would

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pay included interest payments on these debts. Hamilton and his allies also hoped that some of these taxes would go toward subsidizing manufactures that would bring handsome profits for the owners. His “Economic Plan,” proposed as soon as the new federal Constitution allowed him to be sworn in as the secretary of the treasury, included creating a bank that would be controlled by the wealthy and would serve to collect taxes and pay down debt. Protests such as the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and others were responses to Hamilton’s economic proposals. In the case of the Whiskey Rebellion, Hamilton pushed a tax through the new federal Congress on the production of whiskey, most of which was produced in the country in and over the Appalachian Mountains. Westerners resented the tax because it was intentionally designed to be more punitive to small distillers. These were typically farmers who could not afford to bring their corn to eastern markets in its raw form, so they turned it into whiskey to make it more valuable and easier to transport. The larger producers were better funded, had access to capital, and could afford to pay the yearly assessment as opposed to the more laborious and expensive per-gallon rate the smaller distillers paid. The only options many of the smaller distillers had, in their minds, was to quit and go to work for the bigger distillers, or protest and work toward either a repeal of the tax or secession from the federal government. To many of them, this was the same reason why they had just fought a long and costly war against the British. On top of this, Hamilton and Morris countenanced the collection of tax by those who both benefited from the tax as large distillers, and received a commission on taxes collected. All in all, Hamilton’s heavy-handed policies followed the model of the British Empire and the Bank of London, both of which had been on the opposing side in the Revolution. Since the advent of federalism, supporters of rule by a wealthy few have looked back to Hamilton as their progenitor and inspiration. Alexander Hamilton was a champion of big finance and centralized power in the United States, which is why he was a lightning rod for those whose power is restricted to protest, riot, and rebellion. —Douglas S. Harvey

Further Reading Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Boyd, Steven R., ed. The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin, 2004. Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Kohn, Richard H. “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion.” Journal of American History 59 (December 1972). Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Martial Law Martial law is, by most definitions, the suspension of civil law and its replacement by military law. The origins of martial law, like most American legal doctrines, are found in the English tradition. One thread in the history is that martial law comes from the medieval Court of the Marshall and Constable of England. This court system dealt with offenses occurring within the military, and began to be suppressed by common-law courts during the 17th century. Another thread argues for its origins in the early modern period with jurisdiction over British soldiers and alien enemies. Known as “military law” and eventually as “martial law,” it came to be accepted as legitimate by parliamentary common law barristers. Thus, whether “Marshall” or “martial” law, both of these pedigrees seem to be applicable. In the North American colonies, colonial governors were warned against using it. During the period of colonial unrest prior to full-blown revolution, Lord Dunmore of Virginia was instructed, “You shall not upon any occasion whatever establish or put into execution any articles of War or other Law Martial upon any of Our Subjects, Inhabitants of Our said Colony of Virginia, without advice and consent of Our Council there.” By the end of 1775 however, both Dunmore and General Thomas Gage in Boston had declared martial law. In the early republic, New Orleans was the scene of two martial-law declarations. One was a largely trumped-up affair initiated by General James Wilkinson seeking to distance himself from Aaron Burr. The two men had conspired with numerous others to launch a filibustering trip to Spanish territory in Mexico and perhaps Florida after the acquisition by the United States of the Louisiana Purchase. The political enemies of Burr, who were many, set out to discredit this expedition and have the instigators arrested. In 1806, Wilkinson declared martial law in New Orleans, allegedly to protect it from the very militia force he had recently hoped to organize—a force that he in fact invented to separate himself from Burr. Writs of habeas corpus were issued by New Orleans judge James Workman, but Wilkinson ignored them and arrested the judge. Territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne protested that only the legislature could declare martial law, but Wilkinson ignored Clairborne as well, arresting others thought to be

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associated with Burr’s filibustering plans. This episode culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Ex parte Bollman and Swartwout, which pointed to the second paragraph of Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution in declaring that only the federal legislature could declare martial law. New Orleans was also the scene of the next instance of martial law in the United States, this time during the War of 1812. Colonel Andrew Jackson had brought an army to the city to defend against British invasion. New Orleans was a multinational, multiethnic city, and was thought to be rife with British spies. To secure control, Jackson issued a proclamation of martial law on December 16, 1814. Anyone entering or exiting the city had to check in at the adjutant general’s office or face arrest and interrogation. A passport was required for all watercraft leaving the city, obtainable only from Jackson, his staff, or Commodore Daniel T. Patterson. Street lamps were ordered extinguished at 9:00 p.m., and anyone aboard after that time was arrested and held as a spy. The conflict culminated in the British defeat on January 8, 1815. But Jackson maintained martial law for weeks after the battle, and the French population became increasingly restless with the situation. A letter written anonymously by state senator Louis Louiaillier calling for an end to martial law brought out Jackson’s well-known vindictive side. Louiaillier was arrested and subsequently applied for and received a writ of habeas corpus from Judge Dominick Hall. Jackson responded by arresting Hall. Both men were released when martial law was suspended, when Jackson was fined $1,000 by Judge Hall, a fine that Jackson paid. However, near the end of his life, the now-former president Jackson appealed to Congress to pay him back his $1,000 fine, generating a debate over the constitutionality of his declaration of martial law. Because of the effect on the popular sentiment of the subsequent Battle of New Orleans, in which the nation felt a restored sense of dignity after a thrashing by the British in the Chesapeake, the legality of Jackson’s declaration of martial law was largely overlooked by the Madison administration. In 1841, a Democratic-dominated Congress, Jackson’s party, granted the reimbursement, but the process left a cloud over the legality of Jackson’s martial law proclamation of 1814. The most widely known example of a martial law case is that of Lambdin P. Milligan and the declaration of martial law by President Lincoln in Indiana during the Civil War. Milligan was a southern sympathizer living in Indiana and reportedly involved with a secret society called “The Order of American Knights.” The group was reportedly working toward the overthrow of the federal government. Milligan was arrested by the general of the military district of Indiana, tried, and sentenced to death by a military commission. Milligan applied for a writ of habeas corpus from the Circuit Court of Indiana. The Circuit Court judges were in disagreement over the legality of the request and certified the case, now known as

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Ex parte Milligan, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the military trial of Milligan was unconstitutional. But it was split on the question of whether the president or Congress can institute military courts. Other examples of martial law exist, but they are mainly occurrences at the state level and are typically of the “qualified” or limited variety. Curiously, these examples consist mainly of the use of troops in labor disputes almost universally against striking and protesting workers. Legal scholars differ on the legitimacy of martial law as a tool of the executive branch; but the Constitution clearly allows the suspension of habeas corpus rights in Article I, Section 9, paragraph 2, in the event of “Rebellion or Invasion.” Whether this means only in the event of a dysfunctional civil law, or whether the power can be used by the executive, are still legal bones of contention. —Douglas S. Harvey

Further Reading Baldwin, Leland B. Whiskey Rebels: A Story of a Frontier Uprising. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939. Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Higham, Robin, ed., Bayonets in the Streets: The Use of Troops in Civil Disturbances, Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1969. Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006. Kohn, Richard H. “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion.” Journal of American History 59 (December 1972). Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Tom the Tinker The early years of the American republic saw numerous protests against the tax policies of the new federal government. Many citizens saw the excise tax on whiskey as a repeat of King-in-Parliament’s Stamp Act they had rebelled against in 1765. The whiskey tax, instituted by the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton in 1791, led to outright rebellion in western Pennsylvania. During the height of this “Whiskey Rebellion,” opponents of the tax used the threat of physical

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violence against tax collectors and tax abettors. The written warnings they sent to individuals and the public were often signed, “Tom the Tinker.” The use of this appellation grew out of the early resistance movements against the whiskey tax, especially those seen in the activities of the Mingo Creek Association. This was a loose collection of small farmers and landless workers who were struggling with Indian conflicts and the harsh Allegheny climate, as well as the whiskey tax. Hugh Henry Brackenridge was a Pittsburgh resident who witnessed and, to a degree, participated as a moderate in the Whiskey Rebellion. He remembered the name “Tom the Tinker” first being used by John Holcroft after a masked attack on William Cochran. Cochran had registered his still as per the new excise law, an act considered a violation of the rebels’ solidarity against the tax and therefore punishable. “Tom the Tinker’s men” cut Cochran’s still to pieces, saying they had “repaired” it as good tinkers were expected to do. This became a kind of standard operating procedure for them. Advertisements were posted in the Pittsburgh Gazette and on trees in the roadways of southwestern Pennsylvania warning residents and potential tax collectors of the consequences of enforcing and collaborating in the hated excise. Such postings warned that Tom the Tinker would not suffer any “class or set of men . . . of this my district” from obstructing any actions that would hasten the repeal of the whiskey tax. Anyone assisting the collection of the tax in any way was deemed an enemy of republican liberty and punished in accordance with the offense. This was a strong sentiment that carried over from the revolutionary rhetoric of the recent war. Tom, so the postings went, was sorry to have been driven to destruction of property and tar-and-featherings by the wayward, but no one could be exempted from the republican cause of whiskey tax repeal. In short, Tom the Tinker was a western Pennsylvania version of the Sons of Liberty. Opposition was not tolerated as Tom the Tinker’s men attempted to enforce solidarity. At their peak, Tom the Tinker’s men could be said to have numbered upwards of 6,000 strong when they gathered at Braddock’s Field near Pittsburgh at the height of the Whiskey Rebellion. Liberty poles were erected, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were hoisted displaying the unity of western Pennsylvania townships. Tom the Tinker possessed the same spirit as the American revolutionaries in 1776 or, for that matter, 1765. As with the enforcement of the Stamp Act boycotts by the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s, Tom the Tinker’s men were radicals bent on keeping the machinations of distant power centers at bay. —Douglas S. Harvey

Further Reading Baldwin, Leland B. Whiskey Rebels: A Story of a Frontier Uprising. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939.

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Boyd, Steven R., ed. The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Cooke, Jacob E. “The Whiskey Insurrection: A Re-evaluation.” Pennsylvania History 30 (July 1963). Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006. Mainwaring, W. Thomas, ed. “The Whiskey Rebellion and the Trans-Appalachian Frontier.” Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts 45 (Fall 1994). Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.

President George Washington’s Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) In 1791, the federal government imposed an excise tax on whiskey. In western Pennsylvania, whiskey was a medium of barter and an important source of income. The tax, by virtually eliminating any profit to be derived from the sale or trade of whiskey, threatened the very livelihood of many western farmers, who quickly showed their displeasure by rioting, assaulting tax collectors, and destroying the homes and property of federal officials. When a federal marshal was attacked in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in July 1794, President George Washington responded to the growing disorder on August 7 by issuing the following proclamation, which imposed martial law, ordered all rioters to return to their homes, and called out the militia to suppress the insurrection. The Whiskey Rebellion was the first real test of the power of the new federal government to maintain law and order within the states. BY AUTHORITY By the president of the United States of America A Proclamation Whereas, combinations to defeat the execution of the laws laying duties upon spirits distilled within the United States and upon stills have from the time of the commencement of those laws existed in some of the western parts of Pennsylvania. And whereas, the said combinations, proceeding in a manner subversive equally of the just authority of government and of the rights of individuals, have hitherto effected their dangerous and criminal purpose by the influence of certain irregular meetings whose proceedings have tended to encourage and uphold the spirit of opposition by misrepresentations of the laws calculated to render them odious; by endeavors to deter those who might be so disposed from accepting offices under them through fear of public

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Whiskey Rebellion (1794) resentment and of injury to person and property, and to compel those who had accepted such offices by actual violence to surrender or forbear the execution of them; by circulation vindictive menaces against all those who should otherwise, directly or indirectly, aid in the execution of the said laws, or who, yielding to the dictates of conscience and to a sense of obligation, should themselves comply therewith; by actually injuring and destroying the property of persons who were understood to have so complied; by inflicting cruel and humiliating punishments upon private citizens for no other cause than that of appearing to be the friends of the laws; by intercepting the public officers on the highways, abusing, assaulting, and otherwise ill treating them; by going into their houses in the night, gaining admittance by force, taking away their papers, and committing other outrages, employing for these unwarrantable purposes the agency of armed banditti disguised in such manner as for the most part to escape discovery; And whereas, the endeavors of the legislature to obviate objections to the said laws by lowering the duties and by other alterations conducive to the convenience of those whom they immediately affect (though they have given satisfaction in other quarters), and the endeavors of the executive officers to conciliate a compliance with the laws by explanations, by forbearance, and even by particular accommodations founded on the suggestion of local considerations, have been disappointed of their effect by the machinations of persons whose industry to excite resistance has increased with every appearance of a disposition among the people to relax in their opposition and to acquiesce in the laws, insomuch that many persons in the said western parts of Pennsylvania have at length been hardy enough to perpetrate acts, which I am advised amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the United States, the said persons having on the 16th and 17th of July last past proceeded in arms (on the second day amounting to several hundreds) to the house of John Neville, inspector of the revenue for the fourth survey of the district of Pennsylvania; having repeatedly attacked the said house with the persons therein, wounding some of them; having seized David Lenox, marshal of the district of Pennsylvania, who previous thereto had been fired upon while in the execution of his duty by a party of armed men, detaining him for some time prisoner, till, for the preservation of his life and the obtaining of his liberty, he found it necessary to enter into stipulations to forbear the execution of certain official duties touching processes issuing out of a court of the United States; and having finally obliged the said inspector of the revenue and the said marshal from considerations of personal safety to fly from that part of the country, in order, by a circuitous route, to proceed to the seat of government, avowing as the motives of these outrageous proceedings an intention to prevent by force of arms the execution of the said laws, to oblige the said inspector of the revenue to renounce his said office, to withstand by open violence the lawful authority of the government of the United States, and to compel thereby an alteration in the measures of the legislature and a repeal of the laws aforesaid; And whereas, by a law of the United States entitled “An act to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions,”

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) it is enacted that whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed in any state by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by that act, the same being notified by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed. And if the militia of a state, when such combinations may happen, shall refuse or be insufficient to suppress the same, it shall be lawful for the President, if the legislature of the United States shall not be in session, to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto as may be necessary; and the use of the militia so to be called forth may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the of the ensuing session; Provided always, that, whenever it may be necessary in the judgment of the President to use the military force hereby directed to be called forth, the President shall forthwith, and previous thereto, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within a limited time; And whereas, James Wilson, an associate justice, on the 4th instant, by writing under his hand, did from evidence which had been laid before him notify to me that “in the counties of Washington and Allegany, in Pennsylvania, laws of the United States are opposed and the execution thereof obstructed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshal of that district”; And whereas, it is in my judgment necessary under the circumstances of the case to take measures for calling forth the militia in order to suppress the combinations aforesaid, and to cause the laws to be duly executed; and I have accordingly determined so to do, feeling the deepest regret for the occasion, but withal the most solemn conviction that the essential interests of the Union demand it, that the very existence of government and the fundamental principles of social order are materially involved in the issue, and that the patriotism and firmness of all good citizens are seriously called upon, as occasions may require, to aid in the effectual suppression of so fatal a spirit; Therefore, and in pursuance of the proviso above recited, I, George Washington, President of the United States, do hereby command all persons, being insurgents, as aforesaid, and all others whom it may concern, on or before the 1st day of September next to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes. And I do moreover warn all persons whomsoever against aiding, abetting, or comforting the perpetrators of the aforesaid treasonable acts; and do require all officers and other citizens, according to their respective duties and the laws of the land, to exert their utmost endeavors to prevent and suppress such dangerous proceedings. In testimony whereof I have caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed to these presents, and signed the same with my hand. Done at the city of Philadelphia the seventh day of August, one thousand seven hundred and ninety- four, and of the independence of the United States of America the nineteenth.

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Whiskey Rebellion (1794) G. WASHINGTON, By the President, Edm. Randolph Source: Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, August 11, 1794. Reprinted in J. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 150–152.

President George Washington’s Second Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Issued on September 25, 1794, President Washington’s second proclamation against the Whiskey rebels of western Pennsylvania is reproduced here. In this proclamation, the president deplores the failure of the rebels to fully comply with the first proclamation and confirms that the military force of the United States will be used to suppress those who do not immediately cease their rebellion and return quietly to their homes. Whereas from the hope that the combinations against the Constitution and the laws of the United States in certain of the western counties of Pennsylvania would yield to time and reflection I thought it sufficient in the first instance rather to take measures for calling forth the militia than immediately to embody them, but the moment is now come when the overtures of forgiveness, with no other condition than a submission to law, have been only partially accepted; when every form of conciliation not inconsistent with the being of Government has been adopted without effect; . . . when the opportunity of examining the serious consequences of a treasonable opposition has been employed in propagating principles of anarchy, . . . and inviting similar acts of insurrection; when it is manifest that violence would at defiance, the contest being whether a small portion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union, and, at the expense of those who desire peace, indulge a desperate ambition: Now, therefore, I, George Washington, President of the United States, in obedience to that high and irresistible duty consigned to me by the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” deploring that the American name should be sullied by the outrages of citizens on their own Government, . . . resolved to reduce the refractory to a due subordination to the law, do hereby declare and make known that, . . . a force which, according to every reasonable expectation, is adequate to the exigency is already in motion to the scene of disaffection; that those who have confided or shall confide in the protection of Government shall meet full succor under the standard and from the arms of the United States; that those who, having offended against the laws, have since entitled themselves to indemnity will be treated with the most liberal good faith if they shall not have forfeited their claim by any subsequent conduct, and that the instructions are given accordingly. And I do moreover exhort all individuals, officers, and bodies of men to contemplate with abhorrence the measures leading directly or indirectly to those crimes which

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) produce this resort to military coercion; to check in their respective spheres the efforts of misguided or designing men to substitute their misrepresentation in the place of truth and their discontents in the place of stable government, and to call to mind that, as the people of the United States have been permitted, under Divine favor, in perfect freedom, after solemn deliberation, and in an enlightened age, to elect their own government, so will their gratitude for this inestimable blessing be best distinguished by firm exertions to maintain the Constitution and the laws. And, lastly, I again warn all persons whomsoever and wheresoever not to abet, aid, or comfort the insurgents aforesaid, as they will answer the contrary at their peril, and I do also require all the officers and other citizens, according to their several duties, as far as may be in their power, to bring under the cognizance of the laws all offenders. G. Washington Source: J. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 153–154.

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Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) There is a popular fiction in American history that slaves who lived on plantations in the years before the outbreak of the Civil War were somehow better off than their counterparts working in factories up north—and that many slaves, in fact, were quite content to live on plantations under the watchful and caring eyes of their masters. To be sure, this is not a fiction supported by the historical record. Although it may be fair to say that some slaveholding elites treated their slaves with better care than others, and while it may be true that workers in northern cities suffered many of the same indignities faced by slaves in the South, little else connects the “wage slaves” of the North to those held in bondage in the South. Those subjected to slavery were systematically dehumanized in ways that not even the poor denizens of northern cities could have imagined. That this fiction was given any credence whatsoever either before the Civil War or after is a testament to the enduring power of words to shape peoples’ perceptions of the experiences of others, especially when it is not possible to witness those experiences firsthand. It was perpetuated by southern intellectuals like George Fitzhugh, who attempted to justify slavery as a more humane system of labor division than the system devised in the industrialized North in an effort to derail attempts to abolish the “peculiar institution.” Lost in this rationalization of slavery, however, was the reality that neither system was especially humane. Whether suffering the indignity of working for a pittance in the North to build an industrialized economy, or toiling for no compensation whatsoever in the South to enrich the planter elite and build an entire economy on uncompensated labor, workers in the 18th and 19th centuries shared a common experience of alienation and despair that engendered various forms of resistance against the status quo. Occasionally, this resistance resulted in violence against white slave owners and their families, which then resulted in state-sanctioned revenge against anyone deemed to have participated in that violence. As a result, both whites and blacks in the South lived in constant fear of violent revolt against the system of slavery. Plantation owners cringed at the thought of slaves murdering them in their sleep, while slaves were well aware of the carnage that would inevitably follow even the threat of an uprising. Nevertheless, from the 17th century through the 19th century, slavery

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became more firmly ensconced in the cultural and political institutions of the South, and as it did, the system gradually pushed various people to undertake desperate measures to undermine it. Not all of these rebels were slaves, nor were all of them men: some were white abolitionists, some were free blacks, some were women, and some were former slave owners themselves. The most successful slave revolts had as their masterminds men of remarkable intelligence and resolve: men such as Charles Deslondes, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey. These revolts were also suppressed with ruthlessness by the planter class. For their part, slave owners found themselves increasingly caught between their own boundless greed and an overwhelming desire for security. As slave populations increased (slaves outnumbered whites in many places around the South, sometimes by margins as large as two-to-one or more), whites tried ever harder to prevent revolts from occurring. Well aware that they were outnumbered, but also aware of how reliant their own wealth and lifestyles were on maintaining the system of slavery, whites in the South reacted with increasing paranoia to even the whispered possibility of rebellion, placing ever-tighter restriction on what little freedom their slaves may have had. On the other hand, slaves also paid the price for rebellion—not only were conspirators often caught, but anyone accused of consorting with the conspirators (many of whom were no doubt wrongfully accused and denied due process in kangaroo courts) faced almost certain death in the aftermath of failed attempts at rebellion. The circle of paranoid behavior left a legacy of mutual distrust and fear on the relationship between white and black southerners, a legacy that continues to mar relationships between people today.

Patterns of Slave Resistance Despite the overwhelming odds working against them, slaves did attempt to undermine the system of slavery in various ways. Some slave uprisings in the years before the Civil War were the result of careful planning on the part of conspirators with grand designs to burn down or capture entire cities, but often the uprisings were extemporaneous affairs that involved large numbers of slaves joining others as they marched from plantation to plantation. Much more common were ongoing and more subtle forms of resistance that slaves employed to undermine the system as much as they could. Slaves resisted the institution of slavery by stealing from their masters, attacking and even killing overseers, and destroying property. Some simply refused to work as hard as they possibly could for their masters, reducing productivity and bravely enduring inhuman punishment to maintain what little dignity the slave system afforded them. Many slaves attempted to escape their captivity by running away, hoping to make it to the “promised land” of the North. Such desperation was uncommon but not altogether rare; historian

Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s)

Eugene Genovese has argued that patterns of hostility toward slavery, whether they took the form of accommodation of the system or outright resistance to it, were as common as slavery itself in the years before the Civil War. Thus, another common misconception of slaves as docile and content with their lives—a misconception given voice by planters intent on defending the entrenched system—has been rendered largely untrue by historical scholars. Nevertheless, the planter class tried desperately to keep slaves in their place as slaveholding became more common and more prosperous. Estimates suggest that the number of slaves held in the United States ballooned from 500,000 in 1790 to nearly four million by 1860, and the owners of slaves worked hard to establish a system that would not only make slaves productive, but would also exercise control over every aspect of their lives. Julius Lester, author of To Be a Slave, a book that combines analysis of slavery with the words of slaves themselves, made this point well when he asserted that a man can be enslaved in one of two ways: either through violence and force, or by teaching him that he can achieve “freedom” only by doing what his master tells him to do. As Lester points out, slave owners in the antebellum period attempted to do both—but with each additional crack of the whip, slaves were pushed closer to rebellion against the system. Many slaves may well have internalized their masters’ efforts to make them feel inferior, but others used their own intelligence and cunning to concoct schemes that would undermine the authority of slave owners. One technique used by planters to control slaves involved hiring poor white men to act as overseers of the slave population. These overseers, who were paid to “keep the slaves in line,” employed all manner of cruel and brutal behavior to do their jobs. Historian Howard Zinn, citing evidence collected by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, concludes that at least one slave endured a whipping every four or five days on the Barrow plantation in Louisiana between 1840 and 1842. Such behavior was common on plantations around the South, and the violence only increased the likelihood of slave rebellion. In the case of a slave named Gabriel, who attempted to lead an insurrection in Virginia in 1800 (“Gabriel’s Rebellion”), such violence may have been critical in turning him toward open rebellion. After being apprehended by an overseer named Absalom Johnson for stealing a pig with his brother Solomon and another slave named Jupiter, Gabriel managed to avoid execution by invoking the “benefit of clergy”; after reciting a verse from the Bible, his life was spared, and he was instead branded on his left hand. The branding may well have been the last straw for Gabriel, who soon began to organize an insurrection that would require the attention of Governor James Monroe and the state militia. In addition to outright resistance, slaves had other ways of opposing the system as well. Slaves built an entire culture around the experience of living in bondage

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and adapted in ingenious ways to the indignity and pain wrought by the slaveholding system. For instance, slave families were often disrupted by auctions that split family units apart, separating parents from their children and from one another. Slaves in many places adapted to this cruelty by establishing a form of communal family life wherein children became the responsibility of all the adult slaves on a plantation, not just the responsibility of their own parents (if, indeed, those parents even still lived on the plantation). This, in turn, strengthened the bonds between and among slaves across the South and provided a sense of solidarity that would become an integral part of slave resistance, whether it was organized or not. Slaves also found comfort in religion and took advantage of their owners’ attempts to “Christianize” them by forming churches of their own and carefully securing time and space for worship beyond the watchful eyes of overseers and plantation owners. Religion could also be used as a powerful antidote to the cruelty of slave owners and overseers. Slave preachers walked a fine line between inspiring their flocks with uplifting language about freedom and liberation, while at the same time encouraging passive resistance to slavery that would undermine the system but not place too many slaves in danger. Often, slaves themselves were their own worst enemies once insurrection plots were revealed. In Gabriel’s case, his own brother Solomon testified against him in a vain effort to have his own life spared. In the case of George Boxley’s alleged attempt to incite a revolt in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, around 1815, a slave named Lucy notified her master that something was afoot and thus helped thwart the plot before it could gather steam. Sometimes, such slaves were motivated by specious offers of cash reward to anyone who would inform authorities about potential armed rebellions, but other times, they were motivated simply by fear. Thus, even as preachers stirred the passions of some slaves, they may have stirred the fears of others. Above all, many preachers counseled patience in the face of the inhumanity of slavery and encouraged the men and women to whom they preached to look forward to an afterlife of freedom and justice. Attempts to carve a sense of community out of life in slavery demonstrated the remarkable resilience of the human spirit in the face of despair. Yet, nearly every form of resistance employed by slaves was made in response to an equally strong effort to control slaves on the part of their owners. When slave owners attempted to control their slaves through religion, slaves took advantage of the opportunity provided to gather together and provide inspirational visions of life outside of the shackles of bondage. Some, like Nat Turner in Virginia, took advantage of their masters’ attempts to teach them the Bible to become literate themselves— an idea that frightened some slave owners to the core. When owners attempted to control their slaves through violence, some slaves bravely accepted that violence and permitted it to steel their determination to seek freedom for themselves and

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their families. Slaves took advantage of their proximity to one another on plantations to develop an entire culture than expressed itself in music, art, religion, and storytelling. In this way, they managed to pass stories of their plight from one generation to another, even despite being denied the opportunity to become literate themselves.

Armed Rebellion and Its Suppression Still, these efforts were sometimes not enough. Although historian James Oakes observes that armed slave rebellion was a relatively uncommon phenomenon, occasionally such insurrections did occur. Certainly the hyper-militarization of white societies around the South in the antebellum period, coupled with the clear willingness of slave owners to use violence in extraordinarily vicious ways against anyone accused of leading a rebellion, prevented many insurrections from happening. Oakes has argued that one reason slave rebellions in the South were uncommon was because slaves simply had nowhere to go—even if they secured their freedom, slaves could hardly expect to be welcomed with open arms into a society that had previously accepted them, since American society in the 18th and 19th centuries had never really accepted African slaves at all. Nevertheless, as slave culture developed, some slaves began to envision the possibility of constructing a “society within society” consisting of those formerly held in bondage. Gabriel, for instance (he is sometimes known as “Gabriel Prosser” but was known in his time simply as Gabriel, without his master’s surname added), envisioned installing himself as “king” of Virginia after burning Richmond to the ground. George Boxley, though a white former slave owner himself, was the alleged mastermind of a plot involving several slaves that would also entail destroying Richmond as well as the city of Fredericksburg and, thus, creating space for former slaves to live in. Denmark Vesey, on the other hand, planned in 1822 to seize the city of Charleston, South Carolina, then escape to Haiti to avoid retaliation by whites. In each case, the conspirators envisioned movement out of slavery into a more sympathetic social and cultural environment where former slaves could live and even prosper. The slaves who led the most prominent rebellions of the antebellum period— Gabriel, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner—were also inspired by external events that galvanized them. Oakes describes the rebellion in Saint Domingue (now known as Haiti) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture as the only successful slave rebellion in all of human history, but it had a profound effect on Gabriel, Deslondes, Vesey, and even Turner (though Turner attributed his inspiration to visions he saw encouraging him to lead a revolt). Deslondes was himself a native of Saint Domingue, and Gabriel had extensive contact with people who hailed

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from various places by virtue of the fact that he was a skilled blacksmith and was loaned by his owner, Thomas Prosser, to work in various industrial capacities in Richmond. These contacts enabled Gabriel to hear of the events in Saint Domingue and almost certainly influenced his actions later. Thus, a web of interpersonal relationships enabled slaves to hear inspiring tales of rebellion occurring in other places and provided an impetus for the insurrections led by these men. Slave owners were also aware of another potential instigator of slave insurrection: the very liberal ideology upon which the American system had presumably been founded. Although, as Oakes notes, slaves had no ability to exercise any political influence through such sanctioned means as voting or petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, slaves did exercise an enormous amount of influence on the political system by imposing themselves on it through their status as runaways and as witnesses in courts of law. In the first place, runaway slaves imposed a certain burden on the communities to which they fled—psychological, moral, economic, and otherwise. As more slaves fled to areas in the North where slavery was outlawed, their presence resulted in growing awareness of the inhumanity of slavery that would eventually contribute to its demise. Likewise, even as slaves were systematically denied the right to fair trials in the antebellum period (and beyond), the basic principles upon which such trials were based—the idea, for instance, that a man could not be convicted of a crime if no witnesses came forward to testify that he had actually committed it—became ingrained in the collective consciousness of slaves. Ironically, then, even as slave owners spread their own culture to their slaves, they helped sow the seeds of the institution’s ultimate demise. As Oakes has put it, the political institutions of government did not depend on slavery for their existence—but slavery itself did depend on those institutions to survive. Once slave owners lost control of those structures and institutions—control they fought violently to maintain through the regular admission of additional slave states to the Union in the first half of the 19th century—the existence of slavery as a legally sanctioned system would become significantly more precarious. So while the slave insurrections led by Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Charles Deslondes, and Nat Turner may have been suppressed with overwhelming force by slave owners, they still served an important purpose in helping to hasten the demise of the system of slavery. By ratcheting up the level of force used to suppress slave rebellions, slave owners unwittingly insisted on thrusting the “slave problem” into the collective awareness of a wider range of Americans—and into the institutions that formed the legal fabric of American society in the 19th century. Many in the political class were well aware of the contradictions implicit in the slave system and the impending difficulty of extricating the country from it. (These sentiments were expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he famously wrote,

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discussing the question of whether to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave state, that “we have a wolf by the ear and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” He added, “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”) Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia occasioned an extraordinary discussion among white elites in 1831–1832 about the system of slavery in which multiple options were considered for finding a way out of that system. In the end, Virginia’s political leaders chose to endorse and justify the use of violence against slave insurgents, turning their backs on any possibility that slavery could be peaceably dismantled there. Historian Susan Dunn asserts that 1832 marks the point at which Virginia transitioned from a state where the slave system was widely viewed as a “necessary evil” that should eventually be destroyed, to a radicalized state where approximately 10 percent of its whole population—including men, women, children, and even slaves—was active in the state militia. Such overwhelming shows of force were complemented by inhuman responses to slave rebellion that included gibbeting, public hanging, and decapitation of conspirators so their heads could be displayed publicly to warn against future agitation. If slave owning itself had not dehumanized slave masters, their collective response to attempts by slaves to extricate themselves from the system almost certainly did. The Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner was by far the bloodiest of the antebellum period, and Turner’s ruthlessness can almost certainly be traced to his and his fellow insurgents’ awareness of earlier responses to similar insurrections. In the end, the increasing paranoia of slave owners—manifested in shocking brutality against anyone accused of fomenting rebellion—did as much as anything to hasten the demise of the slave system. Gabriel, Deslondes, Vesey, and Turner all were executed for their opposition to slavery, but their efforts were not undertaken in vain.

The Legacy of Slave Rebellion in the Antebellum Period If anything had become clear by the 1850s, it was that neither slave owners nor abolitionists were willing to give ground to one another in the fight over slavery. As security tightened across the South in the wake of Nat Turner’s Southampton Rebellion, slave-led uprisings became virtually nonexistent. In 1859, a final antebellum revolt was suppressed when John Brown attempted to rally slaves to seize a federal armory located at Harper’s Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Brown’s plan was to encourage slaves in Virginia to join him and cause a ripple effect throughout the South that would result in an end to the slave system. Brown was hanged for his actions and the raid was a failure, but it represented an inexorable step toward the Civil War: as a white abolitionist, Brown was the very personification of the things the slave-owning class feared the most. Portrayed as a martyr by

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abolitionists in the North, Brown was reviled just as passionately in the South as a religious fanatic and murderer. Frederick Douglass paid tribute to Brown after Brown’s death, crediting him with beginning the war that ended American slavery. “I could live for the slave,” Douglass famously said of Brown; “but he could die for him.” In the final analysis, the constant friction slaves and abolitionist sympathizers brought to bear on the slave system in the South helped contribute immeasurably to its collapse. Over the course of several generations, slaves built a culture that wreaked havoc on their owners’ ability to keep them in line, occasionally lashing out in violence against the oppression they endured. Though it took a civil war to finally end legally sanctioned slavery in the United States, it seems unlikely that the war could even have taken place without the efforts of thousands of unnamed slaves who rebelled against the system. Their efforts laid the groundwork for the bloodiest conflict in American history to that point, but also helped end the most persistent, and philosophically inconsistent, system of slavery in the world. —Dave Powell See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Dunn, Susan. Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: Vintage, 1947. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Genovese, Eugene D. The World the Slaveholders Made. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. Higginson, Thomas W. Black Rebellion: A Selection from Travellers and Outlaws. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lester, Julius. To Be a Slave. New York: Scholastic, 1968.

Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) Oakes, James. Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. WGBH Educational Foundation and the Public Broadcasting System, “Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/ home.html (accessed October 1, 2008). Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

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Boxley, George (c. 1779–1865) George Boxley was born around 1779 or 1780 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. By the time of his death in 1865, Boxley had led a colorful life on the frontier— and on the run. He was, at turns, a Methodist preacher, a social agitator, a fugitive from the law, and a pioneer. Boxley is remembered for allegedly attempting to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1815–1816. He was accused of encouraging slaves from Spotsylvania, Orange, and Louisa counties to collect ammunition and proceed to seize the town of Fredericksburg before assaulting the state capital in Richmond. Boxley was arrested, along with 27 slaves, and charged with conspiracy and insurrection. Five slaves were executed, and six more were transported out of Virginia. Boxley escaped capture when his wife, Hannah, smuggled a saw into his jail cell, and he freed himself and headed for Ohio and, later, Indiana. Despite numerous attempts to return him to Virginia, Boxley lived the remainder of his life on the Indiana frontier. “Boxley’s Plot,” as it came to be known, is shrouded in mystery, and Boxley’s own role in it is difficult to know. What is known is that Boxley was not popular among the local elites in Spotsylvania County in the first decades of the 19th century, nor were they popular with him. Boxley was described by local magistrates as “a man of restless and aspiring mind; wild and visionary in his theories, and ardent in the pursuit of his designs,” and seen as the very personification of the slaveholding class’s greatest fear: a white man willing to subordinate his own self-interest to the cause of freedom. Yet Boxley’s motives may have been less selfless than they appeared. His own history as the slave-owning son of a slaveowner and as a slave patroller himself suggests that Boxley saw his attempted rebellion as much as a fight against local elites as one to be undertaken on behalf of slaves. He was vilified in Virginia as a man desperate to raise his own profile, as a religious fanatic, and as a dangerous rebel intent on upending the status quo. But, ironically, Boxley ended his life as the head of a reasonably well-respected pioneer family on the American frontier. Boxley’s curious life raises a number of interesting questions about the role slavery played in the lives of lower-class whites in the 19th century. When he discovered that he could not attain the status he sought in Virginia’s slave society, Boxley took advantage of the frontier safety valve (an idea popularized by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner) to find a place where he could be among the local elite. Along the way, he became accused of stirring up social tension in various places and appears to have actually befriended many of the slaves and former slaves he met in his travels. Boxley was, like many of his fellow citizens in the

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19th century, a complicated figure: equal parts firebrand and pragmatist, apparently driven most of all by a desire to improve his own lot in life. —Dave Powell

Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Schwarz, Philip J. Migrants against Slavery: Virginians and the Nation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt and Company, 1962.

Deslondes, Charles (d. 1811) Charles Deslondes was the leader of one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history. A native of Saint Domingue (known today as Haiti), Deslondes organized a group of about fellow slaves in St. Charles Parish, south of New Orleans, on January 8, 1811. Deslondes and his fellow insurgents wounded his master, Manuel Andry, and killed Andry’s son, then began marching toward New Orleans, gathering additional insurgents from plantations along the way. Deslondes may have recruited as many as 500 slaves to join his march to New Orleans. Along the way, the army of slaves burned and pillaged several plantations and killed two white people. As they approached New Orleans, the slaves were met by General Wade Hampton and a detachment of U.S. regular troops, along with two companies of the Louisiana militia. The strong show of force stopped the insurgency abruptly; 66 slaves were killed, and 17 were counted missing and presumed dead. Several others were captured. In the ensuing days, a local judge appointed a jury of plantation owners (some of whom had been directly affected by the uprising) to determine the guilt or innocence of approximately 30 slaves involved in the uprising. Twenty-one slaves, including Deslondes, were convicted between January 12 and January 18 and sent to the plantations from whence they had come to be executed by their masters; another was executed on February 20. The murdered slaves were decapitated and had their heads placed on poles to discourage future uprisings. Once the insurrection had been successfully halted, recriminations began to fly among the planter elite. Governor William C. C. Claiborne and many native New Orleanians argued that the slaves who had led the uprising were “foreign slaves,” not from Louisiana; as such, they said, the solution to the problem of preventing future uprisings was to stop the importation of slaves from other places. Affronted by the governor’s suggestion that the uprising was their fault, planters responded by

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blaming Claiborne himself and demanded that a full regiment of federal troops be placed in New Orleans immediately. They also moved to reform existing laws that had permitted some slaves to provide commercial services in New Orleans, and even to rent quarters and earn income there, out of view of their masters. Others believed that the revolt had been planned by Spanish or French agitators intent on reclaiming Louisiana for themselves. Overlooked by the white elite was another possibility: that Deslondes and his fellow insurgents had been inspired by a recent battle in Saint Domingue won by Henri Petion, a former black slave and heir to the political legacy of Toussaint L’Ouverture. To acknowledge the inspiration of L’Ouverture or Christophe would have been tantamount to acknowledging that the slaves had the sense and capability to desire and demand their own freedom. This was an idea that whites in Louisiana simply were not capable of entertaining. The immediate impact of the 1811 insurrection was that slave laws were strengthened, and the paranoia of slave owners increased. The insurrection also nearly derailed attempts to bring Louisiana into the Union as many in Congress worried about admitting a state with such a large slave population. In response to the rebellion, slave owners in Louisiana did what slave owners did elsewhere: they doubled-down on their attempts to prevent revolts and made conditions even more inhumane for slaves. For his part, Deslondes lives on as one of the most courageous—and, in some ways, successful—slave insurgents in American history. —Dave Powell

Further Reading Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. “The Louisiana Purchase: A Heritage Explored.” Online Educational Resource from the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections. http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/purchase/ history.html (accessed September 4, 2008). Smith, Jessie Carney. Black Firsts: 2,000 Years of Extraordinary Achievement. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1994. Thompson, Thomas Marshall. “National Newspaper and Legislative Reactions to Louisiana’s Deslondes Slave Revolt of 1811.” Louisiana History 33 (1992): 5–29.

Gabriel (d. 1800) The revolt planned and nearly consummated by a blacksmith named Gabriel, in 1800 in Virginia, was very different from the stereotypical image of slave revolts. By the laws of Virginia, Gabriel was the property of Thomas Prosser.

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Commonly referred to as “Prosser’s Gabriel,” he himself never took Prosser’s name. Gabriel organized a predominantly urban insurrection, planning to conclude it by “drinking and dining with the merchants of the city when our freedom has been agreed to.” The plan was to seize the state capital, Richmond, secure the person of Governor James Monroe, then bargain for abolition of slavery. At least two other leaders of the conspiracy were blacksmiths, like Gabriel; most of those convicted in court for their participation were also skilled artisans. Many were literate, and Gabriel was well acquainted with published news and political events in the United States and the Atlantic world. In rural areas, support was recruited not only among agricultural laborers, but enslaved workers in nearby coal mines, and the river boatmen who were essential to Virginia’s transportation and trade. It is probable that a number of people classified as “white” were at least sympathetic to, if not actively assisting the rebellion. Whatever records that may have shed light on that question were forwarded to Governor James Monroe, never produced in court, and never found again. Gabriel ordered that Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen were not to be killed, the first two because both churches had taken strong antislavery positions at the time, the latter because revolutionary France had abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1794. Slaves comprised 48 percent of Virginia’s population, as recorded in the 1800 census, the highest proportion in the state’s history. With a substantial free African American population, residents of African descent may have been a majority. In the state capital itself, one-half of the population was African American, and one-fifth of those were free. Virginia agriculture was in a difficult transition, with tobacco production sharply declining and cotton not yet a large-scale cash crop. Farmland was being planted in wheat and corn, which did not require intensive field labor, leaving plantations with little work to assign to large numbers of slaves. A common practice was to instruct slaves to hire their time—which meant, go find a job, and bring your master the money when you get paid. It appears that the enslaved and free African American communities held skilled crafts and literacy in high regard. Organizers for the army Gabriel planned to assemble made a point of displaying such skills to potential recruits. Hiring out was also considered a desirable status, if only because it permitted more freedom of movement, without obtaining a written pass for each trip off an owner’s property. The ability to write, of course, meant the ability to forge a pass for oneself, or for others. Planned for the night of August 30, 1800, the insurrection was delayed by torrential rains, which blocked roads into Richmond. On either the day of or the day after the storm, at least four enslaved persons betrayed the plan. Forty-four men were convicted of participation, 26 or 27 were hanged, and the rest either pardoned or sold outside of the United States. —Charles Rosenberg

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Further Reading Egerton, Douglas. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Sidbury, James. Plowshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Vesey, Denmark (c. 1767–1822) Denmark Vesey, leader of the largest and perhaps the most tightly organized slave conspiracy in American history, was a free carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina, when he began the work that has made his name so well known. The first record of his existence was in 1781, when he was purchased, at the port of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas Island, by Captain Joseph Vesey, at the age of approximately 14. Resold among a cargo of 390 enslaved persons in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the young man either suffered, or contrived, fits of epilepsy, so that on a return voyage, the purchaser demanded that Captain Vesey buy him back as unfit for work. Vesey named him Telemaque, assigning him as a cabin boy during subsequent voyages. At the end of 1782, Captain Vesey sailed into Charles Town (later Charleston), South Carolina, newly evacuated by a British fleet, and Telemaque became a chandler’s man—helping to receive and catalog imported merchandise in the captain’s business office. By 1800, his given name had evolved to Denmark, when he won a lottery prize of $1,500. He purchased his liberty for $600, and opened his own carpentry shop, at some point adopting the surname of his former owner. Greatly admired in both the free colored community and the enslaved African community—which were quite separate from each other—Denmark Vesey was also respected for the quality of his work by customers designated as “white” who were the city’s elite. Roughly seven years before 1822, when his plans were discovered, Vesey decided to “see what I could do for my fellow creatures.” He recruited Peter Poyas, Rolla Bennett, Ned Bennett, Monday Gell, and Gullah Jack, who helped him assemble some 9,000 prepared to rise at his command. Vesey took careful notice of the cultural identities within the enslaved communities of South Carolina at the time, including a substantial number of Ibo, about 10 percent Muslim, as well as the Gullah community, which had blended African and British cultures. Vesey intended to kill every “white” person in Charles Town, at that time no more than one-fifth of the population; load all enslaved persons onto ships in the harbor, with every valuable they could take from the city; and sail to Haiti, the only nation in the world forged in a successful uprising by enslaved people. Vesey scheduled

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Sunday, July 22, 1822, as the day to mobilize. Many Africans from surrounding plantations would be in Charleston on a Sunday, and many of the city’s elite would be escaping from the summer heat at northern resorts. Like most conspiracies, the plan was betrayed not once, but twice. The first informant knew only a little, so that Poyas, Harth, and Bennett were able to boldly deny that anything was amiss. Vesey moved up the date to strike to Sunday, June 16, but a second betrayal was taken more seriously. A lower-level recruiter spoke to Peter Prioleau, who promptly informed his owner, Colonel J. C. Prioleau. With militia mobilized to secure the previously unguarded armory—a key point Vesey planned to seize— and patrols in the street, there was no hope of success. The leadership was swiftly arrested, 35 hanged, and 37 banished from the state. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Robertson, David. Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Description of Denmark Vesey (1822) Denmark Vesey (c. 1767–1822) was an African American slave who was brought to Charleston, South Carolina, from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in the early 1780s. In 1799, he purchased his freedom from his master, Captain Joseph Vesey, and worked in Charleston as a carpenter. Angered by the forced closing of an African Methodist Episcopal Church he had helped found, Vesey began planning a slave insurrection that soon encompassed many slaves in Charleston and along the Carolina coast. Betrayed to the authorities by two slaves who opposed his plan, Vesey and many of his supporters were arrested and convicted of conspiracy. Thirty-five men, including Vesey, were hanged. The following is a 19th-century description of Vesey. As Denmark Vesey has occupied so large a place in the conspiracy, a brief notice of him will, perhaps, be not devoid of interest. The following anecdote will show how near he was to the chance of being distinguished in the bloody events of San Domingo. During the revolutionary war, Captain Vesey, now an old resident of this city, commanded a ship that traded between St. Thomas and Cape Francais (San Domingo). He was engaged in supplying the French of that Island with Slaves. In the year 1781, he took on board at St. Thomas 390 slaves and sailed for the Cape; on the passage, he and his officers were struck with the beauty, alertness and intelligence of a boy about 14 years of age, whom they made a pet of, by taking him into the cabin, changing his apparel, and calling him by way of distinction Telemaque, (which appellation has since, by gradual corruption, among the negroes, been changed to Denmark, or sometimes Tebaak). On the arrival, however, of the ship at the Cape, Captain Vesey, having no use for the boy, sold him among his

Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) other slaves, and returned to St. Thomas. On his next voyage to the Cape, he was surprised to learn from his consignee that Telemaque would be returned on his hands, as the planter, who had purchased him, represented him unsound, and subject to epileptic fits. According to the custom of trade in that place, the boy was placed in the hands of the king’s physician, who decided that he was unsound, and Captain Vesey was compelled to take him back, of which he had no occasion to repent, as Denmark proved, for 20 years, a most faithful slave. In 1800, Denmark drew a prize of $1500 in the East-BayStreet Lottery, with which he purchased his freedom from his master, at six hundred dollars, much less than his real value. From that period to day of his apprehension he has been working as a carpenter in this city, distinguished for great strength and activity. Among his colour he was always looked up to with awe and respect. His temper was impetuous and domineering in the extreme, qualifying him for the despotic rule, of which he was ambitious. All his passions were ungovernable and, savage; and to his numerous wives and children, he displayed the haughty and capricious cruelty of Eastern Bashaw. He had nearly effected his escape, after information had been lodged against him. For three days the town was searched for him without success. As early as Monday, the 17th, he had concealed himself. It was not until the night of the 22d of June, during a perfect tempest, that he was found secreted in the house of one of his wives. It is to the uncommon efforts and vigilance of Mr. Wesner, and Capt. Dove, of the City Guard, (the latter of whom seized him) that public justice received its necessary tribute, in the execution of this man. If the party had been one moment later, he would, in all probability, have effected his escape the next day in some outward bound vessel. Source: Joshua Coffin, An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and Others, which Have Occurred, or Been Attempted, in the United States and Elsewhere, during the Last Two Centuries, with Various Remarks (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860).

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Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) Nat Turner’s Rebellion, also known as the Southampton County rebellion, began on August 21, 1831, in Virginia, about 70 miles southeast of Richmond. It is remembered as one of a handful of antebellum slave revolts that profoundly changed the attitudes of white Americans toward slavery, and may, in fact, have had the most significant lasting impact on the politics of slavery and on the way slavery is remembered as an institution in American cultural memory. The insurrection’s apparent mastermind, Nat Turner, is a man with multiple identities in the historical record, his personality and motives endlessly shaped by the legions of historians who have attempted to place the rebellion in the wider context of American history and, for that matter, in the context of human social relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries. Turner is remembered as a hero, a villain, a remorseless monster, a brave and bold visionary, a crazed madman, and a liberator—all depending on the perspective of the person remembering Turner and his exploits. He has been lionized as a hero of the abolitionist movement and condemned as a mass murderer of innocent women and children. His personality, and the insurrection he led, suffuses American popular culture, at once representing both the tragic consequences of humans holding other humans in bondage while at the same time symbolizing principled resistance to inhuman suffering through cunning, ingenuity, and guile. While certain incontrovertible facts of the rebellion remain, little is actually known of Nat Turner and the motives that caused him to undertake his mission, leaving historians to piece together incomplete accounts of what Turner did and why he did it.

Who Was Nat Turner? Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia. He soon found himself identified as a person with unusual gifts of intelligence when, at the age of three or four, he allegedly was overheard by his mother telling some other children about events that had occurred before he was born. Since almost no record exists either of Nat Turner’s personal life or events that occurred within it, let alone any record written in his own hand, it is difficult to say if such stories reflect the legend of the plot Turner eventually consummated as an adult, or are

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A newspaper cartoon depicts the violent slave uprising led by Nat Turner that began on August 22, 1831, when Turner killed his master and his master's family. The revolt only lasted about a week but Turner eluded capture until October of that year. He was later tried and hanged for the crime. (Library of Congress)

accurate representations of things that happened in his life. Indeed, the predominant caricature of Nat Turner as an astutely intelligent and deeply religious slave has served cross-purposes for historians and cultural commentators since even before Turner was hanged for his role in the Southampton rebellion. On the one hand, his intelligence was used in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection to justify the imposition of even harsher regulations on the education of slaves in Virginia and across the South. On the other hand, Turner’s remarkable intelligence is also often cited as evidence of the enormous fissures in the proslavery worldview, much of which was based on the idea that Africans were inherently inferior to white people. What little historians do know about Turner and his life comes largely from a conversation Turner had with a white lawyer named Thomas Ruffin Gray while Turner was awaiting execution. This conversation was, of course,

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recorded and recounted by Gray, who, for better or worse, filtered Turner’s words to publish them in the newspaper. Whatever Nat Turner’s experiences were as a boy, he was encouraged to become a preacher by both his master and his grandmother, who noted in Turner “uncommon intelligence for a child” and, according to Gray’s report of Turner’s confession, believed that his intelligence would result in him never being “of any service to anyone as a slave.” As a young man, Turner began to see visions. He ran away from slavery in 1821, only to return—“to the astonishment of the Negroes on the plantation,” he later said—30 days later when he said he was told in a vision to return to the service of his “earthly master.” Turner also described seeing, in the same vision, “white and black spirits engaged in battle” as “blood flowed in the streams,” while a voice warned him: “Such is your luck, such you are called to see; and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.” In 1825, after Turner had been sold following the death of his previous owner, he experienced another vision. This time, he said he saw “lights in the sky” that were “the lights of the Saviour’s hands” and said that he “wondered greatly” about the visions he saw “and prayed to be informed of a certainty of the meaning thereof.” Later, while working in a cornfield, Turner claimed to have seen “drops of blood dripping on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven.” Turner shared his strange experience with others, along with an interpretation of them. In his view, “the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew.” Turner took this to mean that “the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men,” signaling that “the great day of judgment was at hand.” Turner also reported sharing his visions with a white man named Etheldred T. Brantley, who, upon hearing them, was attacked with a “cutaneous eruption” that could only be healed by nine days of fasting and prayer. This apparently only strengthened Turner’s conviction that he had become a messenger of God and had been called to undertake a revolution. Nearly three years after that, on May 12, 1828, Turner had a third vision. On this occasion, Turner claimed that he was visited by a spirit from heaven that instructed him to “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” When he was asked, in his jail cell after the rebellion (where Turner recounted these events to Thomas Ruffin Gray), if he found himself mistaken about what he had seen, Turner replied curtly: “Was not Christ crucified?” Turner expected to receive a sign indicating when he should “commence the great work,” and when it did, he would know the time had come: “I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons,” as he put it. In February 1831, an eclipse of the sun occurred, and Turner took it to be a sign that he should begin his insurrection. He began to share his plans with four other

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slaves whom he identified as Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam, and together they planned to carry out their attack on July 4. When Turner fell ill at the appointed time, the insurrection was abruptly postponed, but not canceled. A little over a month later, on August 13, another atmospheric disturbance occurred. This time, Turner and his men were ready. They went into the woods a week later, on August 21, to eat and drink and make their plans. At the rendezvous point, the men were joined by two other slaves named Will and Jack. Suspicious of their motives for being there, Turner asked Will what had made him want to join the group of rebels. “He answered,” Turner said, that “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him.” When Turner asked Will if he hoped to obtain his freedom, Turner said that Will replied “he would, or lose his life.”

The Rebellion The group emerged from the woods at two o’clock the following morning to make their way to the home of Joseph Travis, whom Turner described as “a kind master” who had “placed the greatest confidence” in him. In fact, at the time, Turner was technically owned by Travis’s stepson, a child named Putnam Moore, whose mother was the widow of Turner’s previous owner, Thomas Moore. It was at the Travis home that the insurrection began. The plan was set: “until we had armed and equipped ourselves and gathered sufficient force,” Turner later said, “neither age nor sex was to be spared”—in other words, not even women and children would be spared by the insurrectionists. Turner reported that he “placed fifteen or twenty of the best armed and most to be relied on in front” after the first attacks to strike terror into the inhabitants of the homes the slaves attacked and to prevent the escape of any of their victims. Turner positioned himself at the rear of the phalanx of attacking slaves, where, as he put it, he sometimes “got in sight in time to see the work of death completed,” and to have “viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction.” Turner described the murders committed by the slaves in gruesome detail. He described the murder of men and women who were still in their beds, said many times that victims barely had time to utter a word before being clubbed to death, and even described how two members of the group returned to the Travis home to complete their grisly work there after realizing that they had left a sleeping baby untouched. Turner described murdering a woman named Mrs. Waller and 10 children, then proceeding to the home of William Williams, where Williams and two young boys were killed while their mother fled. According to Turner, she was returned to the home and instructed to lay beside her dead husband, “where she was shot dead.” He described being unable to kill one woman because his sword blade was too dull; she was finally killed by Will. At the home of a Mrs. Whitehead, Turner found the woman’s daughter, Margaret, hiding near the cellar

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outside. “On my approach, she fled,” Turner reported, “but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with a sword I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.” Before it was all over, nearly 60 white men, women, and children had been murdered by Turner and the slaves who had joined him. “ ’Twas my object to carry terror and devastation wherever we went,” Turner allegedly told Thomas Gray, and in this respect, the rebellion was a very successful one indeed.

Retribution Response to word of the insurrection was swift and extensive: the state of Virginia dispatched local militia, three companies of artillery, and even detachments of men who were stationed aboard naval vessels at Norfolk to suppress the rebellion. Whites from neighboring North Carolina also joined the assembling force. In the immediate aftermath of the killings perpetrated by Turner and the slaves who had joined him, information was limited, and rumors spread quickly. Needless to say, rural Virginia in the 1830s lacked such modern amenities as telephones and other modes of communication. The discoveries made by whites investigating and hoping to suppress the rebellion were undoubtedly augmented and embellished by those who recounted them to others, only adding to the panic that had engulfed white Virginians. One Richmond newspaper reported that the Southampton insurrection was part of a larger group of rebellions carried out as far away as Alabama. As a result, the paper’s editor reported, hundreds of slaves and perhaps even some free blacks were slaughtered without trial and with a level of malice and barbarity that rivaled the murders committed by Turner and his cohorts. The murders continued for several days, even weeks, after the rebellion had been put down. A Lynchburg newspaper reported that a regiment of troops had been commanded to carry out the murders of more than 90 blacks. They had also killed the slaves’ presumed leader, then cut off his limbs and hung them separately to inspire terror in the remaining slaves in the area. A minister writing in the New York Post reported correctly that the number of blacks killed in the aftermath of the rebellion would never be known. Meanwhile, Nat Turner evaded capture for over two months while his coconspirators were rounded up, one by one. This, as historian Scot French has noted, only raised Turner’s stature. He was finally captured on October 30, when a dog found him hiding in a cave near the Travis plantation where he had been held as a slave. While he was in jail awaiting his trial and eventual execution, Turner was visited by Thomas Ruffin Gray, a white lawyer determined to capture Turner’s story and have it published so that white people in Virginia and elsewhere could begin to understand what had happened. Describing Turner, Gray wrote: “The calm,

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deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm; still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven; with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man, I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.” Turner was convicted of leading the uprising and sentenced to death, He was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, on November 11, 1831. After his death, Turner’s body was dismembered and actually distributed as souvenirs to white people desperate for some form of revenge; as recently as 2003, his skull was reported to have been found in Indiana, where it was to be the centerpiece of a new museum located there. All told, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed 56 blacks accused of participating in the insurrection.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion in History and Memory The instant celebrity of Nat Turner, who came to be known as the mastermind of the Southampton rebellion, led the Virginia General Assembly to begin discussing long-term plans for addressing the problem of slavery. The fact that the insurrection is commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and was even then, indicates that the myth of Nat Turner continues to drive interpretations of what caused it and what it means in the larger context of American history and the history of slavery. Horrified by the symbolism of Turner’s rebellion—the fact that the original plan had been to execute the insurrection on July 4, and the overtly religious and militaristic tone used by Turner to explain the event in his “confession”—and aware of Gray’s depiction of Turner as a literate and highly intelligent slave, the General Assembly passed a series of laws that forbade the education of slaves and restricted their ability to hold religious meetings without white people present. The Virginia General Assembly’s session of 1831–1832 was a remarkable one, for it helped cement the response of white southerners to the issue of slavery and slave rebellion. Thomas Jefferson had warned in 1820, during the crisis brought about by Missouri’s application for admission to the Union, that the slavery issue would eventually explode into something terrifying politically. “We have a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go,” he wrote to his friend John Holmes. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Jefferson’s prescient words did little to advance the arguments of the small cadre of abolitionists and moderates in Virginia in the 1820s. Even Virginia’s governor, John Floyd, had supported resettlement of slaves outside of Virginia (a position also favored by former president James Monroe, for whom the capital of Liberia, a country on the west coast of Africa established as a potential landing place for exported slaves, was named), but these plans were abruptly halted in the aftermath

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of the Southampton insurrection. It is unclear whether the insurrection put the southern states on an inexorable collision course with the federal government over the issue of slavery—the issue itself was much larger than a single uprising in Virginia, no matter how significant that uprising was—but the Southampton revolt almost certainly hardened the views of slave owners across the South and likewise changed the positions of white moderates in the region. It also resulted in yet more harsh restrictions being placed on the black populations of southern states. In the end, faced with a decision on how to handle the future of slavery in Virginia, the General Assembly decided to up the ante rather than search for a viable long-term solution. The state’s elite would tighten its hold on the slave population. The tightening grip of the state on slaves did not just represent the growing paranoia of whites about the nature of the slave population, however. Just as other states and cities had responded to slave uprisings by cracking down on the movements of free blacks and limiting the educational and cultural opportunities afforded to slaves, Virginia chose to make slavery even less defensible and tolerable as an institution, if such a thing was possible. Ironically, the “positive good” arguments made to justify slavery during the Missouri crisis and later given new voice by the social theorist George Fitzhugh in his books Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) were crippled immensely by the responses of various government entities to slave uprisings. In a simple sense, it was reasonable for abolitionists in the North to ask why slaves had to be treated so poorly if the institution itself was good for them. Despite careful attempts to classify slave insurrections as isolated events engineered by charismatic madmen like Nat Turner, it became increasingly clear to many in both the North and South after 1830 that the moral concerns expressed about slavery by abolitionists should be taken very seriously. Social commentators began to wonder how the denial of basic rights to slaves by their owners could result in anything but violence and resentment. Moreover, decisions to tighten black codes in the South after the Southampton rebellion paved the way for the harsh Fugitive Slave Law that was passed as part of the controversial Compromise of 1850, which was necessitated by the acquisition of new territory following the U.S. war with Mexico. Southern congressmen demanded such a law be included in the Compromise, perhaps only delaying the inevitable: a full-scale war between the states to settle the question of whether slavery should be legal once and for all. To say that Nat Turner’s decisions set in motion this extraordinary series of events is not entirely correct—it is not difficult to imagine the Civil War happening even without Turner’s rebellion having ever taken place, after all—but certainly the insurrection itself and its aftermath helped sharpen the lines that separated those who supported slavery from those who opposed it.

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Regardless, Turner continues to live on in American history and cultural memory as something of an enigma, if not a completely unknowable individual. Because Turner was a slave, and therefore considered property and not fully a person in a legal sense, the only real record of his life comes from the “confessions” he allegedly made to Gray at the Southampton County jail in November 1831. Thus, while the historical record of Turner’s insurrection and the its consequences reflects the actions of such parties as the Virginia General Assembly, the U.S. Congress, and countless individuals, the memory of Nat Turner in American life is somewhat more difficult to pin down. Whereas history depends on the written record, almost no record exists of Turner’s life with the exception of Gray’s pamphlet. As a result, historians and cultural observers continue to be vexed by the confessions, since there is no way of knowing whether the words attributed to Turner by Gray were actually his own. On the one hand, Gray clearly may have been motivated by the same thing that motivated many prominent whites at the time he met Turner: namely, a desire to attach some kind of explanation to the insurrection so that the fears of white people could be assuaged. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Gray lacked either the creativity or the initiative to create a profile of Turner entirely on his own. To have done so would have been remarkable, given the short time between Gray’s interview with Turner and the subsequent publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner. Moreover, Gray claimed on the cover of the pamphlet that the entire transcript of the “confessions” had been read in court in Southampton County on November 5, 1831, where Turner allegedly acknowledged the veracity of the account. Nevertheless, the confessions raise more questions about Nat Turner than answers. The pamphlet has allowed Turner to be portrayed differently by people with disparate motives for remembering him. Gray’s insistence that the confessions were accurate provide cover to historians and others intent on portraying Turner as something of a hero, as a person who responded to horrors of slavery with a terrifying rampage of his own, and who spoke of his exploits calmly and with conviction and intelligence. To many, Turner’s actions are made understandable, if not necessarily justifiable, by the dehumanization and violence engendered by the institution of slavery; and to these observers, Turner’s confessions offer a glimpse into the deep sense of frustration and religious evangelism that must have driven him to do what he did. Others demonize Turner not only for recounting the deaths of so many people to Gray, but for doing so in such grisly detail. In their view, Turner is nothing but a monster, a fanatic bent on exacting revenge blindly from any white person who had the misfortune of crossing his path on the morning of August 22, 1831. At the same time, doubts about the role Gray may have played in recording Turner’s alleged confessions make it possible to discount the more gruesome

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aspects of Turner’s account and focus on the fact that Turner was bold enough to take up arms to fight against slavery. This point is easy for observers to overlook today, but to generations of historians who believed that slaves were irrevocably damaged psychologically and emotionally by slavery, the idea that a slave could have the wherewithal and the desire to foment such an insurrection was a profound one indeed. The many competing visions of Turner came to a head with the 1967 publication of a novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, written by William Styron. Styron has said that he was encouraged to write the novel from the perspective of Nat Turner by his friend and fellow writer James Baldwin, who praised Styron, after the novel was published, for beginning “to write the common history—ours.” The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968 but did not receive universal acclaim. Styron’s book was the subject of especially biting criticism from a group of African American writers who were offended by Styron’s suggestion in the novel that Turner had harbored amorous feelings for Margaret Whitehead, the young white woman he said he had killed with a fence post during the insurrection. In 1968, a rebuttal to the novel titled William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond was published, detailing a litany of complaints about the liberties Styron had taken in his portrayal of Turner and the rebellion. The resulting furor made the book more popular than ever and raised serious questions about issues of race, violence, slavery, and reconciliation simmering below the surface of American culture in the 1960s. The controversy was revealing in many ways, not least of all because it exposed the simple reality that Styron’s novel could be considered no more or less reliable as an authentic account of the event than was Thomas Ruffin Gray’s own report of Turner’s “confessions” from 1831. Today, nearly 200 years after the Southampton rebellion occurred, historians and other cultural commentators continue to investigate the character at its very epicenter: Nat Turner. Many historians, and certainly many teachers, are simply unsure of what to do with Turner, and for many American students, the rebellion he led remains an uninvestigated mystery. Nevertheless Nat Turner’s rebellion is remembered by nearly everyone who studies it as a tragic consequence of the United States’ long and calamitous association with the “peculiar institution” of legalized slavery. —Dave Powell See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

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Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, Together with the Full-Text of the So-called “Confessions” of Nat Turner Made in Prison in 1831. New York: Humanities Press, 1966. Drewry, William Sidney. The Southampton Insurrection. Washington, DC: The Neale Co., 1900. French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Gray, Thomas Ruffin. The Confession, Trial, and Execution of Nat Turner, the Negro Insurrectionist; Also a List of Persons Murdered in the Insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, August 21st and 22nd, 1831, with Introductory Remarks. Petersburg, VA: J. B. Edge, Printer, 1881. Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967. Tragle, Henry Irving. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Abolitionists Abolitionists advocated the immediate and unconditional end of slavery in the United States, primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries. Typically, references to abolitionists relate to American writers, intellectuals, former slaves, freedmen, and social activists who labored to end slavery in the United States beginning in the 1830s. Although some abolitionists worked tirelessly through well-organized antislavery societies to abolish the institution, abolitionism more broadly describes efforts to end slavery that held adherents together through a shared sense of moral and intellectual purpose. Their work was undertaken with awareness of the fact that the United States had been founded on the premise that “all men are created equal” even though the institution of slavery was very much present at the nation’s moment of creation. Although neither the word “slave” nor the word “slavery” are explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, discussion of the future of slavery was prominent at the Constitutional Convention. The idea that all men are, in fact, created equal helped galvanize the abolitionist movement. Spurred by Enlightenment philosophy (as the architects of the nation’s government had been) and by no small measure of religious fervor, abolitionists formed societies and founded newspapers devoted to the proposition that slavery should be immediately abolished. Abolitionists were not merely antislavery advocates; they saw themselves as participants in a zero-sum game where the complete dismantling of the slave system could be the only acceptable outcome. Of course slavery was very deeply entrenched in the society of 19th-century America. Abolitionists in the United States—most of whom lived and worked in the North—labored tirelessly to turn the tide of public opinion against slavery. Perhaps the most prominent abolitionist was a newspaper editor named William Lloyd Garrison. He edited a radical abolitionist newspaper known as The Liberator, which argued for the “immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves” held in the United States. Garrison, along with Arthur Tappan, founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and saw its membership ranks swell in the years that followed. Former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, were frequently featured speakers at meetings of the society, and many prominent white writers, such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), were also widely recognized as abolitionists. Although earlier attempts to end slavery had focused on such schemes as repatriating slaves to Africa either wholesale or by creating colonies there (such as Liberia, which took its capital city’s name from a well-known proponent of colonization, President James Monroe), abolitionism was recognized after the 1830s

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as a movement not only to end slavery, but to see to the integration of former slaves into American society as well. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln in 1863, abolitionists continued to fight for the total destruction of slavery in all parts of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution finally put a legal end to slavery in 1865, but the cause of abolishing social, economic, and other forms of discrimination based on race has continued unabated. Abolitionists left a legacy of literary and political discourse on human freedom that distinguishes their efforts and provides inspiration to millions who believe in social justice even today. —Dave Powell

Further Reading Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Growing up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Harrold, Stanley. American Abolitionists. New York: Longman, 2001. Lowance, Mason, ed. Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Confessions of Nat Turner The Confessions of Nat Turner refers simultaneously to a fictional literary sensation published in 1967, an extant document published in the form of a pamphlet in early 1832, and an actual historical event that occurred in the fall of 1831. That event was a meeting that took place in the Southampton County jail in Virginia following the largest slave insurrection in the history of the United States. The insurrection’s mastermind was a slave named Nat (he has since been known by the surname Turner, after his master), one of the more controversial figures in the history of the antebellum United States. Remembered as an intelligent and religious man, Nat Turner conceived and led a rebellion in the Virginia Tidewater in August 1831 that resulted in the murder of 60 white men, women, and children on various plantations in Southampton County. By October of that year, Nat Turner had been captured and was brought to trial. While awaiting his eventual execution, Turner was interviewed by Thomas Ruffin Gray, a local white lawyer and scion of a wealthy Virginia family. Gray took it upon himself to record Turner’s “confession” of the crimes he had committed so that posterity may note both the causes of the insurrection and the singular character of Nat Turner, its mastermind. Gray reported that Turner took sole responsibility for plotting the insurrection and claimed to not have shared his plans with

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anyone other than a few close confidants. Furthermore, Gray said that Turner claimed to have no knowledge of any wider plot to rebel against slavery in other parts of Virginia or the south. Historians have since suggested that Gray made these claims, with Turner as their mouthpiece, to help quell the fears of whites deeply shaken by Turner’s insurrection. Significantly, Gray’s motives have also been ascribed to demonstrating to northern abolitionists and evangelist preachers that Turner’s intelligence was their fault: by sharing with him the possibility of freedom, Gray argued, abolitionists had turned Turner into a fanatical killing machine. Gray’s report of Turner’s “confession” has since ignited controversies that reveal the limitations of historical research even as they shed light on the character of the man who led the largest (and, by some measures, most successful) slave uprising in the history of the United States. Gray’s description of his interactions with Turner cemented the view of Nat Turner as a larger-than-life figure who was literate, passionate, and eminently capable of narrating his own story. This image of the intelligent slave did much to humanize Turner and rendered him at once both a seemingly knowable and unknowable historical figure. At the same time, Gray’s account disarmed a key component of the proslavery worldview, namely that slaves were practically inhuman and thus incapable of intelligent thought and feeling. Nat Turner’s rebellion and confession also inspired novelist William Styron, a Virginia native born in 1925, to write an eponymous fictional account of Turner’s “confession” that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. Despite the acclaim, Styron received heavy criticism from African American historians and writers for repeating many of the stereotypes of slaves given credence by Thomas Gray. The controversy over Styron’s novel revealed with great intensity the fine line that runs between “truth” and fiction and illustrated that “historians,” such as Thomas Gray, often act with particular motives in mind. Whereas Gray presented himself to the public as a chronicler of Turner’s confession, historians now largely agree that Gray’s own motives played a significant part in shaping whatever Turner may have said to suit Gray’s own aspirations as a lawyer and pamphleteer. In the end, the conversations between Gray and Turner are lost to history, but the legend of Nat Turner lives on, largely because of the confessions he made to Thomas Gray. —Dave Powell

Further Reading French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Gray, Thomas Ruffin. The Confession, Trial, and Execution of Nat Turner, the Negro Insurrectionist; Also a List of Persons Murdered in the Insurrection in Southampton

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Moses Story The Moses story refers to biblical passages that provided inspiration to African Americans who sought freedom from the bonds of slavery in the years before the Civil War. Moses was a figure in the Old Testament who led the Israelites out of slavery and into the Promised Land. The story of Moses served as a powerful allegory for slaves hopeful that they could one day be delivered from their captivity through religious faith and perseverance. It also reflected the influence of Western biblical traditions on slaves who integrated the teachings of Western Christianity with African rhythms and religious customs to forge a distinct culture of their own. The story of Moses is one of pain, suffering, and deliverance. In the Bible, Moses, the child of a Hebrew slave, is sentenced to death along with other slave children but saved when his mother places him on a makeshift raft and sends him floating down the Nile River. Moses was eventually raised by an Egyptian princess and educated in the advanced Egyptian society. His religious visions began when, at about age 40, he was instructed by a burning bush to lead the Hebrews out of slavery and into the socalled “Promised Land.” Moses persuaded the Israelites to follow him, but the Pharaoh would not let them go; this passage became the inspiration for the spiritual hymn “Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)”: Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell ole Pharaoh Let my people go! The Pharaoh’s refusal to allow the Israelites to follow Moses resulted in the visitation of 10 plagues upon the people of Egypt, and eventually Moses parted the seas to permit the exodus of the Israelites out of captivity.

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The story of Moses provided powerful inspiration for slaves who feared that they may never taste the fruit of freedom. Like the Israelites, many slaves believed they would eventually reach the Promised Land despite their many years of debasement, pain, and turmoil. Also like the Israelites, slaves believed that their connection to one another, and their faith in a higher power that believed in justice, would end their misery. The story of Moses and the Israelites inspired countless slaves to resist the institution of slavery and helped sow the seeds of rebellion against it. The story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt also had a very real contemporary corollary for many slaves: the Underground Railroad. “Conductors” on the “railroad” led slaves out of the South and into freedom in the North. None was more daring than Harriet Tubman, a slave born in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1820. During a 10-year period prior to 1860, Tubman made no fewer than 19 trips into the South to escort more than 300 slaves to freedom, including her own parents who had aged into their seventies at the time. For her efforts, Tubman was later anointed “The Moses of Her People”—a fitting moniker for someone who led so many from the darkness of captivity to the light of freedom. —Dave Powell

Further Reading Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2005. Johnson, James Weldon, and J. Rosamond Johnson. The Books of the American Negro Spirituals. New York: Viking Press, 1925. Weatherford, Carole Boston, and Kadir Nelson. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. New York: Hyperion Books, 2006. WGBH Educational Foundation and the Public Broadcasting System. “Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/ home.html (accessed November 10, 2008).

Slave Preachers Slave preachers played an extraordinarily important role in shaping the cultural institutions and personal relationships of slaves in the years prior to emancipation. As new scholarship on the nature of slavery has proliferated in the past three decades, slave preachers have received increased attention from historians interested in understanding the dynamics of life among slaves and how slaves expressed themselves through the institutions of family and church. Much of this scholarship

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turns the previously dominant interpretation of the nature of the slave experience on its head. Whereas earlier generations of historians tended to depict slaves as helpless cogs in an institutional machine, recent scholarship reveals that slaves were far from an “inferior race” in need of civilization, as many historians suggested until the 1960s, and were instead remarkably resilient, creative, and determined to access freedom while they were still alive. Much of the credit for the development of such attitudes toward freedom may be ascribed to the preachers who brought religion to slaves on plantations and elsewhere. The religion these ministers preached was an amalgamation of Western Christianity enforced by slaveholders and African traditions that lived in the cultural values and relationships forged by slaves amongst themselves. Generally speaking, most slave preachers were itinerant and illiterate, and many were given to sharing vivid images and subversive ideas in their powerful sermons. The most subversive ideas, of course, were those that challenged the conditions of slavery and suggested to slaves that there might be opportunities for freedom within their lifetimes. Significantly, many slave preachers turned the theology of white Protestantism upside down. Whereas slaveholders preferred that their slaves be imbued with the sense that their toil on earth might be rewarded in heaven—a view that doubled as a psychological mechanism protecting some slaveholders from guilt and as a convenient social control device at the same time—many slave preachers encouraged slaves to see themselves as a people chosen by God to bring the light of freedom to themselves and future generations. Rejecting the idea that they should be humble, obedient, and patient, these slave preachers instead presented the biblical tales of Moses and the Israelites, Daniel in the lion’s den, and the story of David and Goliath to show their brethren that the interpretation of God’s will promoted by their masters was not necessarily the only one. Of course, many slave preachers had to cloak their sermons in secrecy to avoid being persecuted by the slaveholders for whom they presumably worked (though it should be noted that in many instances, slaves chose their own preachers in a culturally organic way). Because they walked on such a tightrope, a lingering question, as noted by religious historian Albert J. Raboteau, has been whether slave preachers were instruments of the status quo or purveyors of revolutionary thought amongst the slaves to whom they preached. Like many historians of his generation, Raboteau concludes that the weight of historical evidence suggests that slaves recognized the limits under which their preachers worked, lending credence to the argument among many historians that slaves were very much aware of their condition and eager to resist it as much as possible. In this sense, the role of slave preachers in helping to bring about emancipation and in shaping African American culture cannot be overstated. —Dave Powell

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Further Reading Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Raboteau, Albert J. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Turner, Nat (1800–1831) Nat Turner led the most infamous slave uprising in the history of the United States in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. The story of Turner’s life is cloaked in mystery, clouded by a multitude of competing accounts written by historians and contemporaries, and—in one famous and, to some, notorious case—a white author of a fictional account of his life published over a hundred years after Turner’s death. The particulars of Turner’s life have been sensationalized by some and downplayed by others as he has become for many a larger-than-life representation of the battle to end slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Born on October 2, 1800, Turner was seen by those who knew him as an exceptional child and as someone marked for greatness. He surprised even his masters with his precocious ability to read and write. Turner was also heavily influenced by his maternal grandmother, who was a member of a Methodist church called Turner’s Meeting House. The church was a place of worship for slaves on the Turner plantation and was the birthplace of much of Nat Turner’s knowledge of biblical passages and his abiding faith in religion as a source of inspiration and emancipation. Indeed, as historian Gayraud Wilmore has argued, Turner’s deep understanding of his master’s religion led him to discover something that white Christians had attempted to conceal from their slaves: the idea that the God described in the Bible (particularly in the Old Testament) was a God who demanded justice and had the power to liberate people from captivity. Turner also realized that this God acted through prophets sent to earth to help subjugated peoples escape the bonds of their captivity. Armed with this faith, and galvanized by visions that he later described seeing over a period of several years, Turner traveled throughout southern Virginia and perhaps even North Carolina, sharing his vision with the fellow slaves he came into contact with. Finally, a series of unexplained events culminated in

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August 1831 in an unusual atmospheric phenomenon known as the “Three Blue Days,” leading Turner to believe that the time had come for him to execute a planned insurrection against slavery. Turner’s rebellion was suppressed within 48 hours, but not until as many as 60 white men, women, and children had been killed. A subsequent interview at the Southampton County Jail established Turner’s reputation as a wild-eyed religious radical, a depiction that suited the developing narrative of the rebellion as an aberration masterminded by a single man. It also helped assuage the fears of whites worried that Nat Turner represented a movement of slaves intent on ending their captivity through violence, if necessary. Ironically, Turner’s characterization by his interviewer, Thomas Gray, also solidified Turner’s reputation as a highly intelligent individual—a fact that undermined the slaveholding elite’s conceptualization of slaves as practically inhuman and thus incapable of rational and intelligent thought, let alone rebellion against slavery. Turner was hanged for his crimes on November 11, 1831. Nat Turner lives on in historical memory as a hero, a villain, a murderer, a liberator, and as a rebellious mastermind. He also, in many ways, serves as a prism through which our own interpretations of historical events can be filtered and as a reminder that the business of historical interpretation is shaped as much by our present circumstances as by the circumstances of the past. —Dave Powell

Further Reading French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Greenberg, Kenneth S. ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People. 2nd ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983.

A Contemporary Account of Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831) Nat Turner (1800–1831) was the leader of a bloody slave rebellion that erupted in Southampton County, Virginia, on August 21, 1831. A slave of Samuel Turner, Nat was a literate and religious man who came to believe that God had chosen him to carry out some great task. In August 1831, Nat Turner viewed a solar eclipse as the signal for him and his band of followers to rise up against the whites who enslaved them. Moving from plantation to plantation, the rebels freed all slaves and killed all whites whom they encountered. The 55 deaths caused by Turner and his followers was the largest number of fatalities in any antebellum slave insurrection. The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but Turner remained at large for two months. After his capture,

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) he was swiftly convicted of murder and executed. Reproduced her is an account of the uprising that appeared in the (Richmond) Enquirer in late August 1831.

The Banditti A fanatic preacher by the name of Nat Turner (Gen. Nat Turner) who had been taught to read and write, and permitted to go about preaching in the country, was at the bottom of this infernal brigandage. He was artful, impudent and vindictive, without any cause or provocation, that could be assigned. He was the slave of Mr. Travis. He and another slave of Mr. T. a young fellow, by the name of Moore, were two of the leaders. Three or four others were first concerned and most active. They had 15 others to join them. And by importunity or threats they prevailed upon about 20 others to cooperate in the scheme of massacre. We cannot say how long they were organizing themselves—but they turned out on last Monday early (the 22d) upon their nefarious expedition. . . . They were mounted to the number of 40 or 50; and with knives and axes—knocking on the head, or cutting the throats of their victims. They had few firearms among them—and scarcely one, if one, was fit for use. . . . But as they went from house to house, they drank ardent spirits—and it is supposed, that in consequence of their being intoxicated,or from mere fatigue, they paused in their murderous career about 12 o’clock on Monday. A fact or two, before we continue our narrative. These wretches are now estimated to have committed sixty-one murders! Not a white person escaped at all the houses they visited except two. One was a little child at Mrs. Waller’s, about 7 or 8 years of age, who had sagacity enough to Creep up a chimney; and the other was Mrs. Barrow, whose husband was murdered in his cotton patch, though he had received some notice in the course of the morning of the murderous deeds that were going on; but placed no confidence in the story and fell victim to his incredulty. His wife bid herself between weatherboarding, and the unplastered lathing, and escaped, the wretches not taking time to hunt her out. It was believed that one of the brigands had taken up a spit against Mr. Barrow, because he had refused him one of his female slaves for a wife. Early on Tuesday morning, they attempted to renew their bloody work. They made an attack upon Mr. Blunt, a gentleman who was very unwell with the gout, and who instead of flying determined to brave them out. He had several pieces of firearms, perhaps seven or eight, and he put them into the hands of his own slaves, who nobly and gallantly stood by him. They repelled the brigands—killed one, wounded and took prisoner (Gen. Moore), and we believe took a third who was not wounded at all. . . . The militia of Southampton had been most active in ferreting out the fugitives from their hiding places. . . . But it deserves to be said to the credit of many of the slaves whom gratitude had bound to their masters, that they had manifested the greatest alacrity in detecting and apprehending many of the brigands. They had brought in several and a fine spirit had been shown in many of the plantations of confidence on the part of the masters, and gratitude on that of the slaves. It is said that from 40 to 50 blacks were in jail—some of whom were known to be concerned with the murders, and others suspected. The courts will discriminate the innocent from the guilty.

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Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) It is believed that all the brigands were slaves—and most, if not all these, the property of kind and indulgent masters. It is not known that any of them had been the runaways of the swamps and only one of them was a free man of color. He had afterwards returned to his own house, and a party sent there to apprehend him. He was accidently seen concealed in his yard and shot. . . . Nat, the ringleader, who calls himself General, pretends to be a Baptist preacher’s great enthusiast—declares to his comrades that he is commissioned by Jesus Christ, and proceeds under his inspired directions—that the late singular appearance of the sun was the sign for him, &c., &c., is among the number not yet taken. The story of his having been killed at the bridge, and of two engagements there, is ungrounded. It is believed he cannot escape. The General is convinced, from various sources of information, that there existed no general concert among the slaves. Circumstances impossible to have been feigned, demonstrate the entire ignorance on the subject of all the slaves in the counties around Southampton, among whom he has never known more perfect order and quiet to prevail. Source: Enquirer (Richmond, VA), August 30, 1831.

Texas Revolt (1835–1836) In August 1821, a revolutionary entered San Antonio de Bexar, the capital of Spanish, now Mexican Tejas. Although in the dying days of Spanish rule, insurgents had been nothing new to the frontier province, this rebel was different. He came armed, not with guns, but with surveying tools. His goals lay not in establishing a new political order, but rather, an economic one. His promise of prosperity was the standard raised. To his potential audience, American’s dealing with the horrific economic crisis of the Panic of 1819 was desperate for hope. So much so that Stephen F. Austin’s contract for settling 300 families was complete in just one year, with 297 families established. Austin ceaselessly worked to insure the success and prosperity of his colonists. He expanded his colonial contracts and assured many beneficial items for his colonists: Tax-free status for six years, legalization of slavery, and duty-free ports (James E. B. Austin to J. H. Bell, Austin Papers, 589; and Stephen Austin to Luciano Garcia, Austin Papers, 703). Crucial to Austin’s success was that his colonists stay out of politics. Mexico, distracted by its own nation building, was too preoccupied with establishing its government and order to pay attention to distant Texas. Left in this status of salutary neglect, Texas prospered. By 1828, however, events in Mexico City had calmed down enough that once again attention could be paid to Texas. General Manuel Mier y Tera´n was dispatched to Texas, and his observations horrified him. Mexican sovereignty was almost nonexistent. He fearfully stated that “these colonies, whose industriousness and economy receive such praise, will be the cause for the Mexican federation to lose Tejas unless measures are taken soon” (Tera´n to President Guadalupe Victoria, March 28, 1828, as seen in Tera´n 2000, 32). When Tera´n sent his report to Mexico, the Mexican congress responded by issuing the Decree of April 6, 1830. This decree called for the establishment of a military presence in Texas and a limit on immigration, and it directly affected the region’s prosperity by removing the tax-exempt status and collection of tariffs. Many histories argue that a myriad of points about the decree ignited frustrations. The bans on immigration, and even slavery, are listed as flashpoints of the Texas rebellion. A critical insight sees these points as secondary. The true threat that compelled the Texians to action was the threat to prosperity. As historian Crane Brinton argued, revolutions begin when there “is the existence among a group . . .

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of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity” (Brinton 1965, 33). In other words, the prosperity that had visited the colonies was threatened. With the presence of Mexican troops off the Texas coast, the period of salutary neglect was over. In the Department of Nacogdoches, Juan Davis Bradburn arrived with troops and erected a brick and stockade fort garrisoned; it was an obvious show of force (Henson 1982, 50), and the colonists saw it as such. Much of the garrison consisted of convict-soldiers (Henson 1982, 52). Bradburn began to impress their slaves for further construction of his fortress, and told them that they should be free. Although many aggravating secondary items were present, the main threat to the agrarian economy was the flashpoint of outright revolt: maritime commercial enforcement. Bradburn’s first attempt to collect customs was thwarted by colonial petitions. When legal restrictions were removed, Bradburn was ready. In November 1831, all ports were closed save the one at Anahuac—the fort supplied with a garrison. At Brazoria, some captains, chafing at the limitation, simply defied the order and began to float downstream. Including one vessel, the Nelson that was fired upon, and in response, an enraged crewman, Spencer H. Jack fired his own rifle, wounding one of the guards (Henson 1982, 83). This outraged Bradburn, who declared martial law. Bradburn not only continued tariff collections, but enlarged his threat to prosperity by taking “property from the colonists, disclaimed their land titles, and declared that all of their slaves were freed” (Lewis 1969, 5). Some questioning colonists, including lawyer William Barrett Travis and Spencer Jack’s brother Patrick C. Jack, were thrown into jail. When yet another Jack, William, arrived to free his brother, Bradburn responded by telling him he had 15 minutes to leave, or he too would be arrested. William left and spread the word of this injustice. Volunteers arrived to take up arms against this threat to prosperity. By June 4, the rebel numbers had reached 130 and although still outnumbered by the Mexican force of 162, the rebels were determined. Fort Velasco was put under siege. A group was formed to travel to Brazoria to retrieve three cannons (Rowe 1903, 282–283). A merchant schooner, Brazoria, was requisitioned. By the time Velasco was reached, the rebel numbers included from 150 to 190. Ugartecha would not allow them to pass, and a battle ensued lasting more than 10 hours (Henson 1982, 107–108). Continual fire from the Texians on the shore, and cannonade from the Brazoia, silenced the Mexican cannon. While rainfall limited the effectiveness of the rifle troops, the cannon on the Brazoria continued to fire. At 10:00 a.m. with his powder ruined, Ugartecha was forced to raise the white flag (John Austin to Francisco M. Duclor, Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 100–101).

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Casualties of the battle depended on which side was believed. The Mexican report stated 7 Mexican dead and 19 wounded, while 7 Texians were killed and 15 wounded (Hill 1962, 16). The Texian observer of the battle, however, claimed only 6 Texian dead, none wounded and 34 Mexican dead and wounding, “I think about 40” (“Alexander Thompson to William Thompson” 1904, 326–327). The casualties on both sides of the battle, however, were insignificant compared to its consequences. Then, an event in Mexico City occurred assisted the Texians. A young general, Santa Anna, had carried out his Plan of Vera Cruz, attempting to return Mexico to the Liberal Constitution of 1824. In the battle of federalism, the Texians claimed a federalist victory of state rights (J. Austin to F. Duclor, Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 101). At Anahuac, the commander of the garrison at Nacogdoches, Colonel Jose de la Piedras, seemed to reinforce this notion when he found Bradburn had extended his authority and dismissed him. As the revolutionaries had “thus obtained their object” of “shewing [sic] the Military that the constitution should be adhered to and the civil power rule”—in other words, with the threat to prosperity gone— the militants simply “return’d home peaceably” (Alexander Thompson to William Thompson, Lamar 1968). General Jose Antonio Mexica and 400 soldiers arrived to ensure all was well, and remained at this location to observe the Texians for one week. He found the colonists “placid, loyal, and exulted” over Santa Anna’s victories. Pleased at his discovery, Mexica sailed away on July 24, giving the Texas santanistas his blessing. The Texians—bloodied by the lessons learned—believed they had learned how to make changes in the Mexican political system. Now that they had cast their lot with the federalists, the Texians continued in pursuit of a goal that would grant them the political voice that they sought, and the prosperity they craved—separate Mexican statehood. Flush with victory, the Texians called a series of political meetings known as the Consultation of 1832 and 1833. Their main object was to ensure prosperity. This could be achieved by tariff reduction and separation from their sister state Coahuila. Stephen Austin, with Erasmo Seguin and Dr. James Miller, were chosen to present the petition to Mexico City on April 13, 1833. The Texians apparently seemed to believe that now that their petitions had been filed, they could let down their vigilance. All points seemed to display the victory of their rights. Tariff enforcement had not returned. The “Decree of April 6” had been repealed. Texas would receive additional representation in the legislature. English could be used in legal documents (Barker 1928, 113–114; Report of Ugartechea to Teran, Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 100–101; Henson 1976, 39). Prosperity had returned to the coasts. It is not surprising, then, that news of Austin’s arrest in Saltillo on January 3, 1834, was lost in the other victories the Texians had gained.

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Unbeknownst to the Texians were the conditions of Austin’s arrest. His incarceration was harsh. He remained incarcerated for almost a year, without any charges being pressed. He was released on December 25, 1834, but without his passports he would remain in Mexico City until July 11, 1835. During Austin’s absence, the Texians followed Austin’s rule of staying out of politics, and Texas prospered. A Mexican general, sent to spy on the Texians, not only found all placid, but also was certain “that Texas is soon destined to be the most flourishing section of its republic”(Almonte 1925, 178). The peace in Texas was inspired not by federalist promises, but rather, distance from the capital, Mexico City. Specifically, Santa Anna had grown more centralistic. To continue his consolidation of power, he ordered all state militia reduced (Henson 1976, 69–70). Many provinces revolted, but as Texas did not, it was ignored. Texas’s sister state of Coahuila rebelled, and although they cried to Texas for support, few assisted. Prosperity lived in Texas, and few were willing to rock the boat. Then on January 1, 1835, Colonel Ugartechea, still in military command, dispatched various garrisons to differing locations in Texas. Customs collections were to begin at Anahuac, and it would be enforced by soldiers and a new revenue cutter (Barker 1928, 137, 152). With salutary neglect ending, a threat to the prosperity in the region appeared (Andrew Briscoe to J.D. Allen, McDonald 1995, 110). The owners of a stopped vessel, the Ohio, went to their attorney, William Barrett Travis, to file a protest. Travis responded through what he had done in the past: he led a popular revolt. Specifically, he led 30 rebels to expel the threat at Anahuac (Barker 1901, 200). They were successful, but rather than receiving accolades, Travis was berated for his threat to the peace and told he would have to make a public apology (Travis to Henry Smith, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 81). The moneyed interests believed that activity might bring repression. The action, however, was too much, Martin Perfcto de Co´s, the military commander in Texas, found the Texians show wanting and called for the arrest of those who had taken part in the expulsion. Sensing a threat to prosperity, Columbia put out the call for another political meeting, the Consultation (“W. H. Wharton and Others Call for a Public Meeting,” Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 219). The catalyst that shook the Texians from inactivity was arrival of the same man who warned them to remain politically inactive. Stephen F. Austin arrived back in Texas on September 2, 1835. That prior day, some Texians at Anahuac became enraged at the capture of a brig, the Tremont, by the Mexican schooner of war, the Correo de Mejico. The Texians recaptured the Tremont. As Austin’s boat, the San Felipe, arrived, the Mexican captain, Thomas Thompson, was preparing to retake the Tremont. The Texians disembarked Austin and used the Laura to tow

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the San Felipe to capture the Correo. Upon boarding the Correo, Thompson, unable to find his papers, was arrested. Austin responded by preparing his people to resist. With Austin back in Texas, activity began. Committees of correspondence maintained information on Mexican troop movements. A call was issued for another political consultation to prepare (“W. H. Wharton and Others Call for a Convention,” Lamar 1968). Two weeks before the political meeting, however, fighting erupted. In a threat surpassing prosperity and striking survival, Mexican general Martin Perfecto de Co´s dispatched more than 100 dragoons to retrieve a cannon from Gonzales. In its short history, Gonzales had been destroyed twice by Native American attacks. All this changed once they were given a fieldpiece by the Mexican government. The “cannon” was nothing more than a spiked armament captured from Spanish rebels. While its firing was inaccurate, it was able to make a loud noise, which was enough of a threat to persuade Native Americans against attack. Now however, Mexican forces were arriving to take the town’s guardian. When the Mexican forces arrived on September 29, a meager 18 Texians stood in determined opposition on the opposite bank of the swollen Guadalupe River. The Texians were determined to hold on to the cannon as it was seen as necessary for survival—discouraging Native American attacks (Smithwick 1983, 76). Although Lieutenant Francisco Castan˜eda was prevented from crossing, he waited for the stream recede. During Castan˜eda’s delay, messengers rode to the countryside crying for reinforcements. By October 1, the Texians’ numbers swelled to over 180, and preparations were being made to fight the next day. On October 2, 1835, after parley failed, the rebel flag declaring “Come and Take it” was unfurled by the cannon now mounted on a wagon. In what is known as the “Lexington of Texas,” shots were fired, and one, possibly two Mexicans were killed. As the Texians held the woods, Castan˜eda retreated with his troops. The Texians faced no losses, and they were emboldened for a fight (T. J. Rusk, “Account of the fight at Gonzales,” Lamar 1968). The only problem is, they did not agree on what they were fighting for. Indeed, one observer, Noah Smithwick, attempted to explain: “Some were for independence, some were for the Constitution of 1824; and some were for anything, just so long as it was a row” (Smithwick 1983, 76). Enraptured by the relatively easy victory at Gonzales, George M. Collinsworth led a contingent of 49 men to remove the threat of troops by capturing the Presidio at Goliad (La Bahia), and hopefully capture General Co´s. (Anonymous, Lamar 1968) As they marched, their numbers increased to probably about 120 men. On October 10, the Texian force was able to catch the Mexican guards by surprise. The Presidio was captured after about 30 minutes of resistance by the guards. Although the Texians were bloodied, none were killed, while Mexican forces

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faced 3 dead, 7 wounded, and more than 21 taken prisoner (R. R. Royal to Stephen Austin, Austin Papers, III, 179). By October 12, Stephen F. Austin, now commander in chief, decided that the forces mustering at Gonzales should capture San Antonio. They took the battle to Co´s, rather than allow him to attack the settlements piecemeal. In dealing with the rebel Texians, Co´s was shocked by their aggression. In his reply to Austin’s request to vacate, he points that he, if anything, was too nice to the colonists: “I might be accused of weakness, for having taken too much into consideration, [for] the local interests of those new settlers, who wish to prosper by going beyond the bounds set by nature herself” (Martin Perfecto de Co´s to Stephen Austin, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 86) Co´s then implied to Austin that if his army does not desist, a violent reprisal will follow (Martin Perfecto de Co´s to Stephen Austin, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 87). The Texian numbers grew and included residents of San Antonio like Pla´cido Benavides and around 30 other Bexaren˜os on October 15. On October 22, Juan Sequin joined the fight, notifying Austin that many others in San Antonio were in support of the federalist cause (Hardin 1994, 28). Rather than diminishing the will to fight, the unified Texians continued their march. The first engagement occurred on October 28. Ninety rebels, led by James Bowie, took on the approximately 400 Mexican soldiers at Mission Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Purı´sima Concepcio´n. The Texians had one inarguable strength: their weapons. The Kentucky long rifles of the Texians were superior in distance and accuracy to the Mexican Brown Bess muskets. Utilizing this strength to the fullest, the Mexican force was forced to retreat at the loss of 27 Mexican casualties. The Texians meanwhile, had only one death. With this victory, however, the Texians decided to lay siege to Bexar. This form of wisdom over valor may have been smart, but this warfare was extremely stagnant to troops ready for action. Its effectiveness was displayed November 26 by a skirmish known as the “Grass Fight.” A group of Texians attacked an incoming mule train that was believed to hold gold. According to participant Henry Dance, a force of 350 Mexican solders was engaged. The results of the battle were simple. The Mexican army was “defeated and left the field 15 men left Dead [sic] on the ground and many borne upon horses while our loss was one man wounded in the shin [sic]” (Henry C. Dance to the Editors, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 95). The Texians were disappointed at only finding grass in the mule parcels. The fact that feed for the animals had to be brought in displayed the siege’s effectiveness. The Texians also captured letters with the troubling news that reinforcements were on the way. Stephen Austin was called away to the consultation and William H. Wharton was placed in charge. The Texians, however, soon grew anxious. On December 5, Ben Milam was ready. The cry of “Who will go to San Antonio with old Ben

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Milam” was answered by more than 300 Texians. In grueling house-to-house fighting, the Texians were able to slowly push the enemy back. Despite the fact Milam “fell Dead [,] Shot through the Brains with a Rifle while walking about encouraging his men,” the advance continued (Henry C. Dance to the Editors, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 97). By December 10, Co´s dispatched a soldier carrying the flag of surrender. In the peace agreement, Co´s promised that he would not interfere with the Texians and their battle for the Liberal Constitution of 1824. With the battle for freedom being fought in the forefront, in the background, 48 delegates of the Consultation set about the work of explaining what the fight was for, and how best prosperity could be maintained. One faction, the War Party, wanted an immediate declaration of independence. The other group, the Peace Party, believed the best interests of Texas would lie in staying in Mexico (Notes Concerning the Consultation and Convention, Lamar 1968, vol. 2, 394–395). They had been able to prosper and could prosper again. To do so, however, both a return to the Liberal Constitution of 1824 and separate Mexican statehood would be needed (J. Kerr, “Address against Independence,” Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 287–292). Indeed, it was believed that the remaining Mexican federalists would rise to the side of the Texians. On November 6, a vote was called for. Only 15 of the delegates wanted independence, whereas 33 voted for separate Mexican statehood (“Notes Concerning the Consultation and Convention,” Lamar 1968, vol. 2, 395–396). With reason for fighting decided, on November 7, 1835, a new provisional government was formed. With its birth, the all the unity that had bound the delegates disappeared. Henry Smith of the War Party was chosen provisional governor while members of the General Council were of the Peace Party. In the dying moments of unity, Stephen Austin was dispatched to the United States for aid, while Sam Houston was chosen to be commander in chief of the army. Even the slightest semblance of unity disappeared over disagreement on a proposed expedition to capture Matamoras. To those who gave support, it seemed like the smart thing to do. By taking the war to Mexico, specifically Matamoras would provide many benefits to Texas. Besides removing pressure on Texas, it would provide a clarion call for Mexican federalists. Economically, Texas could use the money from the customs collected at Matamoras; with the war distant, the economy would face less damage. To the opposition, Texas could barely afford the army it had, much less afford the waste on an expedition that may fail (James W. Fannin to J. W. Robinson, Lamar 1968, vol. 1, 333). Overriding the governor’s veto, Dr. James Grant was dispatched with 300 troops to take Matamoros. (Colonel W. G. Cook, Lamar 1968, vol. 4, part I, 42). Governor Smith responded, by disbanding the council. The council responded by removing the governor. Both sides left vowing to hold another meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos on

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March 1, 1836 (Notes Concerning the Consultation and Convention, Lamar 1968, vol. 2, 395). During this time of need for solidarity and preparation, the government was absent. This lack of cohesion by the government was reflected in most of the military matters. Units, hesitant to listen to an unknown Sam Houston, either disobeyed or acted without orders. Even groups such as the Matamoros expedition, once dispatched soon turned piecemeal as rival groups went in pursuit of specific interests (Reuben R. Brown, Account of His Part in the Texas Revolution, Lamar 1968, vol. 5, 366–372). Some simply returned home. Although Colonel James C. Neill, knowing he would have needed 1,000 more men to protect San Antonio, he decided with his meager force to reinforce fortifications at the Alamo. As the months passed into February, the urgency, and therefore speed diminished. Neill’s requests for additional reinforcements also went unanswered (Winders 2004, 89). Infighting and disunity caused a waste of the Texians’ most precious resource— time; Santa Anna was beset by no such difficulty. When the capture of Bexar and the humiliation of General Co´s became known, Santa Anna planned to crush the rebel Texians. Utilizing the two main roads into Texas, the El Camino Real and the Atascosito road, his troops could quickly eradicate the problems. The El Camino Real wound through the center, while the Atascosito skirted the coast. Through these two routes, the rebels would be crushed. As speed was paramount, Santa Anna quickly amassed and dispatched his forces. He rushed to the El Camino Real to capture San Antonio; meanwhile, General Jose´ Urrea would take 500 infantry and cavalry up the Atascosito road to capture Goliad. By February 16, 1836, Santa Anna had crossed the Rio Grande. The effects of this rushed march should have reaped huge benefits. Indeed by February 21, Santa Anna was on the outskirts of San Antonio de Bexar catching the Texian rebels by surprise. The unseasonable weather, however, prevented the crossing of a flooded steam. He had to wait two days for the waters to subside. This allowed his presence to be known, and the alarm to be raised, while the garrison prepared for battle. As the rebels and their families rushed to sanctuary at their garrison at the Alamo, the Mexican army prepared itself for a siege. Both sides were confident of victory. The rebels, numbering a little more than 200, were confident of reinforcement. The Mexican army, numbering around 2,000, believed a siege would starve the rebels into submission while artillery pummeled the defenses. By February 24, the siege began. Although the Texian rifles prevented the enemy from getting within 200 yards of the fort, Travis began to use what he felt was his most powerful weapon—a pen. Risking their lives, couriers rushed from the defenses carrying dispatches. At first, the letters were full of confidence and bravado. For example, in his letter of February 24, Travis, still sure of reinforcement,

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proudly boasts of how the enemy’s cannonade killed none, and his defiance to demands of surrender (Wallace et al. 2002, 96). Travis pled to both the government, which had not even officially met yet, as well as the commander at Goliad to send a relief column. As time passed, only 32 men from Gonzales fought their way in to reinforce the garrison. By the 10th day of the siege, its effectiveness was evident. As Travis found his letters unanswered, his pen became sardonic. In his letter of March 3, Travis, prophetically exclaimed he would “fight the enemy on its terms and his bones would rebuke the lethargy of his countrymen.” Travis would not have to wait long. On the evening of March 5, the Mexican cannon stopped firing. The majority of the 189 Texians succumbed to exhaustion and slept. The Mexican army of 1,800 soldiers advanced under the cover of darkness. They would have caught the Texians unaware had not a nervous soldado began to cry out “Viva Santa Anna.” Awakened, the Texian defenders quickly rallied. Initial waves were repulsed; Santa Anna was eventually able to take the citadel. The clearing fog of war revealed 600 Mexican dead, compared to 189 defenders. The surviving family members, such as the Dickersons, were allowed to leave so they could tell the colonials what might be in store for them. The news, spread like wildfire across the Texas prairie, had a mixture of effects. Many families immediately began evacuation in the “Runaway Scrape,” taking only provisions they could carry. Some however, facing the seriousness of the calamity, formed volunteer units to fight against the centralist threat. Meanwhile, the new government found itself in a desperate situation. The 44 delegates met in a freezing Hall in Washington-on-the-Brazos. News from Stephen F. Austin was not good, as many investors had supported a previous Mexican federalist revolutionary, General Jose´ Antonio Mexı´a, whose expedition met with disastrous failure in November 1835. Mexı´a’s political connection with Texas soured many responses to Austin’s pleas of support for a federalist revolution as he arrived in the city in January 1836. Letters were sent home telling the Texians that if they wanted financial support, independence should be declared. (Miller 2004, 105.) In the litany of aggressions committed causing the separation, the document states that although the colonists who “colonize[d] the wilderness” were rewarded by suffering “military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyranny,” and making “Piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant parts for confiscation.” Only for the cause of “self-preservation” were the Texians in favor of splitting (Texas Declaration of Independence, in Wallace 2002, 98–99). So on March 2, 1836, the collected delegates approved the declaration and Texas was to be free, although those who died at the Alamo would never know.

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While Santa Anna was busy engaging the garrison on the El Camino Real, General Jose´ Urrea was preparing to decimate resistance along the Atascosito road. Arriving at Matamoros on January 31, Urrea found the town safe. The threat of Texian attack had apparently become victim of sloth. The Matamoros expedition had stalled at San Patricio, close to the Nueces River, in search of more horses. Urrea crossed the Rio Grande with a diminutive force of 320 infantry, 230 dragoons, and a small field gun and rushed to meet the enemy (Hardin 2004, 61). This gamble would pay huge dividends as by February 27, Urrea was able to catch a smaller army both unaware and divided. At 3:00 a.m., Urrea pounced upon Johnson’s group of 60 men. By dawn, fighting had ceased. Fort Lipantitla´n and 32 rebels were captured. Twenty Texians dead with the loss of only one soldier and four wounded to the Mexican force. Indeed, only eight men, including Colonel Johnson were able to escape. Questioning the citizenry, Urrea discovered that Grant would soon be returning from his horse foray. Near the banks of Agua Dulce Creek, Urrea prepared an ambush. On March 2, the Texians unknowingly walked into the trap. Dr. Grant and about 40 soldiers were slaughtered in the resulting battle. Meanwhile, at Goliad, Commander James Walker Fannin found himself a victim of Texas’s inaction. Many of the benefits that seemingly assisted his garrison, proximity to Copano provided fresh recruits from the United States, provision of supply, and the walls of his defense strong, seemingly made him strong. Appearances however, were deceiving. Demands were thrust upon him. The Matamoros expedition had drawn off needed supply and soldiers. As events accelerated, desperate petitions began to flow. Pleas for reinforcement, evacuation protection, and consolidation of his units all demanded action. Meanwhile, the Mexican army was advancing. Fannin dispatched Captain Amon B. King to help evacuate the families at Refugio. Supremely confident, King harassed the local ranchers. To his surprise, he ran into the advance guard of Urrea’s army. Rather than leaving the field after the short battle, King sent word for reinforcement (Samuel Brown, Battle of the Mission [Refugio], Lamar 1968, vol. 2, 8–10) Fannin agreed and dispatched William Ward and his Georgia Battalion to the rescue. Upon arrival, on March 13, they found that King and his men fortified in Refugio Mission. The group of 60 Mexican soldiers retreated and used their time to harass local Tejanos. This waste played directly into Urrea’s hand. On March 14, he arrived with his main force to find the rebels once again inside the mission. Although King and Ward defended the mission, they ran out of gunpowder. At nightfall, they attempted escape. As their harassment of local ranchers had won them few friends, King and his men were soon rounded up and taken prisoner. Ward’s men were captured piecemeal and also taken prisoner. With the countryside pacified, Urrea began to march on his objective, Goliad (Samuel Brown, Battle of the Mission [Refugio], Lamar 1968, vol. 2, 8–10).

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At Goliad, Fannin did nothing with the myriad of calls placed before him. On February 26, he did try to take 320 of his men and four cannon to relieve the Alamo however a wheel came off one of his wagons. As problems continued until sunset and into the next day, it was decided to stay at the fort. By March 13, Fannin finally received orders from his superior, General Samuel Houston. Fannin was ordered to abandon Fort Defiance (Goliad) and retreat to Victoria. Fannin was ready, but he wanted to wait on King and Ward’s return. So he wasted four days only to discover they had been captured. On March 18, he prepared for withdrawal, and on March 19, the troops began the move finally towards Victoria. Fannin remained assured the Mexican army would not attack his more than 400 Texians (Hardin 2004, 61). Urrea’s army, which had been reinforced to more than 1,600 soldiers, was on the outskirts of Goliad, at the same time that Fannin began his retreat. Fannin unknowingly aided the enemy by stopping his troops after only an hour’s march for a rest in the middle of an open field. Urrea discovered the vulnerable Texians and quickly used his cavalry to deprive them of cover. Although the Texians fought ferociously, they soon ran out of water to swab their guns. By nightfall, the tally of 9 Texians dead and 51 wounded was small compared to their predicament. With water and food nonexistent and gunpowder running low, morale plummeted. Sunrise intensified the grimness of the Texians situation. Overnight, the remainder of Urrea’s troops and artillery had arrived. Now facing a vastly superior foe, the Texians sallied forth under a flag of truce (Joseph E. Field, “Fannin’s Surrender,” Lamar Papers, vol. 5, 120–121). Although only an unconditional surrender would be granted, it was believed that they would be treated as prisoners of war. They were marched back to Goliad, the prisoners were confident. So on March 27, Palm Sunday, the prisoners were led out of the fort, believing they would be sent to the United States. None questioned the fact that 83 of the prisoners, including a 14-year-old boy, were kept inside the fort. No resistance was offered. Santa Anna, however, saw the Texians as nothing more than pirates, and as such, they could be killed. After being lined up in three separate groups, their guards received the order to fire. Although 28 Texians were able to escape, 342 Texians fell dead in what was known as the “Goliad Massacre” (S. T. Brown, “Account of his Escape from Goliad,” Lamar Papers, vol. 2, 8–10). News of the martyrs for freedom spread among a backdrop of chaos. On March 11, Houston, who had been away negotiating peace with the Cherokee, had returned to Gonzales to find that his army had been reduced to only 347 men. Although believing he would be joined by Fannin’s men, the general knew he could not waste time. He began a series of retreats, and with each step, he incorporated more volunteers and training. With Santa Anna close behind, many believed that Houston was trying to get as close to the American border as possible to try to draw

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in American units. Then, on April 18, scout Erastus “Deaf” Smith captured a Mexican courier whose dispatches showed Santa Anna had lightened his forces in the race to catch the rebel government on the run. For the first time in more than a month of retreat, Houston turned south. By the next day, knowing that Santa Anna would be arriving at Buffalo Bayou, the Texians took up camp in the woods. Hearing the Texians were in the area, Santa Anna showed up at the bayou and made camp only three-fourths of a mile away from the Texian camp. On the afternoon of April 21, 1836, just 18 minutes would forever change America. Although a minor cavalry skirmish had broken out the day before, all had remained placid. The Mexican forces had received 540 reinforcements earlier that afternoon bringing their numbers up to around 1,200 soldados, outnumbering the 910 Texians. At noon, Houston held a council of war. With excitement building, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon, the Texian army began their advance. A hill rising 15 feet had kept the Texian movements from enemy view, and after being at station for more than 33 hours, the Mexican soldiers were exhausted. At 4:30, the Texians crested the hill and, filled with rage and shouting “Remember the Alamo—Remember La Bahı´a,” attacked, catching the enemy totally off guard. Although the battle lasted only 18 minutes, the slaughter continued until the Texians became exhausted. Six hundred fifty Mexicans were killed, and more than 700 were taken prisoner, including Santa Anna. Only 9 Texians were killed, and 30 wounded. Houston took Santa Anna prisoner, where he was forced to recognize the independence of Texas. In its mad pursuit of self-governance for the sake of prosperity, Texas had won independence. Texas would last almost 10 years as an independent nation, surrounded by both danger and opportunity. The fact that Texas was a slave state status slowed attempts at annexation. Mexico’s reluctance to recognize Texas’s independence, and later its borders, also impeded talks. The eventual annexation of Texas by the United States would lead to the Mexican-American War over conflict about the border. The lands acquired from that war, in turn, laid the groundwork for the Civil War. —Andrew Galloway See also all entries under Bear Flag Revolt (1846).

Further Reading “Alexander Thompson to William Thompson.” August 5, 1832. Texas State Historical Association 7, no. 4 (April 1904): 326–328. Almonte, Juan N. “Statistical Report on Texas, 1835.” Translated by C. E. Castan˜dea. Southwestern Historical Quarterly 28, no. 3 (January 1925): 177–222.

Texas Revolt (1835–1836) Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1919. The Austin Papers. Edited by Eugene Barker. Vol. 2. Part I, Vol. 3. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924. Barker, Eugene C. “Difficulties of a Mexican Revenue Officer in Texas.” Texas Historical Association Quarterly 4, no. 3 (January 1901): 190–202. Barker, Eugene C. Mexico and Texas 1821–1835. Dallas, TX: P. L. Turner Company, 1928. Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York, Prentice-Hall, 1938. Revised ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1965. Hardin, Stephen L. The Alamo 1836: Santa Anna’s Texas Campaign. Westport, CT: Osprey Publishing, 2004. Hardin, Stephen L. Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Henson, Margaret Swett. Juan Davis Bradburn: A Reprisal of the Mexican Commander of Anahuac. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982. Henson, Margaret Swett. Samuel May Williams: Early Texas Entrepreneur. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1976. Hill, Jim Dan. The Texas Navy. Reprint ed. New York: Perpetua Book, 1962. Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte. The Papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Vols. 1, 2, 4, and 5. Edited by Gulick, et al. Austin, TX: Pemberton Press, 1968. Lewis, Carroll A., Jr. “Fort Anahuac: The Birthplace of the Texas Revolution.” Texana 1 (Spring 1969): 1–11. Miller, Edward L. New Orleans and the Texas Revolution. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. McDonald, Archie P. William Barret Travis: A Biography. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1995. Rowe, Edna. “The Disturbances at Anahuac in 1832.” Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 4 (April 1903): 265–299. Smithwick, Noah. The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas Days. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Teran, Manuel de Mier, Texas by Teran: The Diary Kept by General Manuel de Mier y Teran on His 1828 Exploration of Texas. Edited by Jack Jackson. Translated by John Wheat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Wallace, Ernest, David M. Vigness, and George B. Ward, eds. Documents of Texas History. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Winders, Richard Bruce. Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution. Abilene, TX: State House Press, 2004.

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Battle of the Alamo (1836) After initial victories in their war for independence, the Texians were supremely confident. Indeed, 111 of the 189 defenders had routed the Mexican army from San Antonio during the siege of Bexar. San Antonio was valuable real estate as it lay on the major land route into Tejas, the camino real. The provisional government remanded Commander Samuel Houston’s recommendation for the Alamo’s destruction, as it was considered “the key to Texas.” This seemed a monumental task. The garrison was underprovisioned, undermanned and unprepared. Although six of the defenders were native-born Tejanos, 27 had been born in Europe, the remainder were born in the United States. Only 40 had lived in the Mexican province for more than two years. Their ages ranged

As depicted in a painting of the Battle of the Alamo by Percy Moran, Mexican soldiers under pez de Santa Anna besiege Texans barricaded inside the Alamo during the Gen. Antonio Lo Texas Revolution. Numbering approximately 189 men, the Texans fought off the Mexicans, who numbered around 3,000 to 4,000 troops, for 13 days until the Mexican Army finally overran the Alamo on March 6, 1836. (Library of Congress)

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from 15 to 56. Although a trickle of volunteers from the United States, like the New Orleans Greys and others led by David Crockett, emboldened the commanders, they were still desperately shorthanded. However, they believed that reinforcement would surely come. Santa Anna shocked the Texians by arriving in San Antonio on February 23. As Texian co-commander William B. Travis knew that the garrison could not last long against Santa Anna’s forces, he confidently dispatched messages to both Gonzales and the General Council for reinforcement. On February 24, the Mexican army laid siege. As the other commander, James Bowie, was sick, Travis took full command. It was during this siege that Travis issued “never surrender or retreat” letters for reinforcements “to come to our aid, with all dispatch.” Although “the immortal 32,” a group from Gonzales, fought their way through the enemy to reach the Alamo, they were the lone reinforcements. By March 3, the effectiveness of the siege was evident. Mexican cannons had severely weakened the walls. Travis wrote a letter of defiant rebuke: “I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms; yet I am ready to do it, if my countrymen do not rally to my relief, I am determined to perish in defense of this place, and my bones shall reproach my country for her neglect.” Before nightfall on March 5, the Mexican guns fell silent. In the silence, many Texians collapsed into exhausted sleep. By 3:00 a.m., Santa Anna assembled some 1,800 assault troops for the attack. With tension building, by 5:00 a.m., one nervous soldier shouted “Viva Santa Anna.” Other Mexican soldados responded with shouts of their own that alerted the slumbering Texians into action. Travis ran to his position, where he was shot in the forehead and killed. With the defenses deprived of a commander, the first wave of attack was repulsed. On the second wave, the defensive line collapsed. Some retreated to the Long Barracks, where combat became hand to hand. Others were cut down by light cavalry. By dawn, the 90-minute battle had concluded. At the cost of 600 lives, Santa Anna had killed 189 known rebels. All were burned on a funeral pyre, save Jose´ Enrique Esparza, whose body was identified by his brother and given a Christian burial. So why do Americans, and Texans in particular, so cherish a battle that ended in defeat? Militarily, little was gained. Houston, in treaty with the Cherokee, was not with his army. Santa Anna had wasted supply, forcing his maneuver to San Jacinto. However, both politically, and morally, this sacrifice was indispensable to the rebels. When Susannah Dickenson and Travis’s slave Joe relayed the news of what had happened, Travis’s death reproached the Texians. With danger made actual, a rallying point was created. Combined with the news of the Goliad Massacre, where 342 rebels who were promised clemency were cut down, the threat of tyranny was made real. Civilians began the “runaway scrape” to America, while the Texian soldiers prepared to meet Santa Anna. Burning in righteous outrage, it

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should come as no surprise that as the Texians crested the hill at San Jacinto, “Remember Goliad, Remember the Alamo!” was their clarion call. —Andrew Galloway

Further Reading Groneman, Bill. Alamo Defenders: A Genealogy, the People and Their Words. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1990. Winders, Richard Bruce. Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution. Abilene, TX: State House Press, 2004.

Austin, Stephen F. (1793–1836) In the wake of the Panic of 1819, Stephen F. Austin was down on his luck. His family’s fortune was wiped out, and its privilege gone. The young Austin, once a business, civic, and community leader, found himself unemployed, and he found the knowledge gained at school and at Transylvania University to be useless. Drifting from Missouri to New Orleans, Austin searched unsuccessfully for employment. Cap in hand, he accepted financing from a lawyer, Joseph H. Hawkins, in the hopes that his father might get another break in Spanish territory. His father was granted an empresario (land agent) contract in Texas, but then he died, and left his grant to Austin. Utilizing his political acumen, business savvy, and a long-suffering persistence; Austin worked out a colonization plan so grand and successful he would become known as the Father of Texas. Austin’s empresario contract survived numerous governments. Austin maneuvered to ensure prosperity for his settlers. He chose rich alluvial soil between the Brazos and Colorado rivers for settlement. His land allotments grew from 640 acres per head of household, to a Spanish league (4,428 acres). Austin’s surveying allowed for the easy transfer of title. Austin enabled the landing of foreign registered vessels at Galveston by 1825. The maritime prosperity encouraged officials to turn a blind eye to other illegitimate landing points. Austin worked for other empresarios, and this generosity placed others on the periphery of his colonies, limiting Native American attacks and thereby increasing the desirability of his lands. Austin worked out other compacts. Austin’s colonials did not have to pay the total amount for their land until after a year. Texas was free of tariffs for seven years, and debt collection cases could not be heard in Texas courts for 12 years. Austin was even able to get the prohibition on slavery lifted for Texas to encourage colonization.

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Austin’s endeavors flourished. By 1829, General Mier y Tera´n was shocked to find Tejanos outnumbered by “ten to one.” The Decree of April 6, passed in 1830, attempted to stymie foreign influence. Austin, as well as many Texans, was infuriated at these impediments. He traveled to Texas’s sister state, Coahuila, to argue for Texas. In his absence, the threats to prosperity prompted the Texans to rebel. The Mexican commanders at Fort Anahuac and Velasco were forced to surrender. To avoid trouble, the Texans proclaimed loyalty to the new leader of Mexico—Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Austin returned to find Texans excited about the possibility of separate Mexican statehood. While he found the desire to push ahead politically unwise, Austin took leadership positions in political conventions of 1832 and 1833. Austin was chosen to represent Texas before the Mexican Congress. Austin won many concessions for Texas. Overjoyed, he wrote that preparations for separate statehood should begin. This letter was intercepted and found dangerously insubordinate by Santa Anna, who ordered Austin’s arrest. In Saltillo, Austin was taken into custody and escorted back. Although not charged, he remained incarcerated until December 1834 and was not allowed to leave Mexico City until July 1835. Austin returned to Texas a changed man. His conciliatory approach was gone. As Mexico was ready to exert authority over Texas, another political meeting, the Consultation, was called for. Before that could happen, the opening shots of the Texas revolution occurred at Gonzales, October 2. Austin was elected to command the Texian volunteers at the siege of Bexar (San Antonio). By November, the provisional government sent Austin and two others as commissioners to the United States. Austin labored in New Orleans to gain men, money, supplies, and recognition for Texas. He was fairly successful and returned after the victory at San Jacinto. In September 1836, Austin bid for the first president of the Republic, but was defeated by Samuel Houston. He accepted an offer to be the Republic’s secretary of state. This final service did not last long. At Columbia, Austin’s exhausted body could not take the cold of the winter. He contracted an ailment that soon progressed to pneumonia. Stephen Austin died on December 27, 1836, leaving the nation that became a state forever in his debt. —Andrew Galloway

Further Reading Barker, Eugene C., ed. The Austin Papers. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928. Cantrell, Gregg. Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

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Houston, Samuel (1793–1863) Samuel Houston, the fifth of nine children, was born in Virginia on March 2, 1793. His father died shortly after completing the sale of the old estate and acquisition of new lands in eastern Tennessee. Young Samuel preferred his father’s books to either schoolwork or labor. When his family tried to force him to be a clerk at their store, Houston ran away. He headed west, albeit only eight miles, to live as a Cherokee. With the Cherokee, Houston gained valuable lessons. Chief Oo-loo-te-ka (“He who puts away the drum”) was known for his willingness to search for conciliation rather than war. This deeply affected the young Houston. He found favor, was adopted into the chief’s own family, and given the name of “Colonneh,” which translates to “The Raven,” a sign of good luck. Shortly after the six-foot, two-inch Houston returned to American society, the War of 1812 began. While Houston’s charisma propelled him to sergeant, it was his bravery and military skill that caught the eye of General Andrew Jackson. So impressed was Jackson that Houston was cared for by Jackson’s own doctor and granted convalescences in Jackson’s home. Though he did receive three nearfatal wounds during his service, he was a first lieutenant when he left the army in 1818. After passing the bar, Houston turned to politics. In a meteoric rise, by 1823 and 1825, Houston was elected to Congress, and in 1827, he became governor of Tennessee. By 1829, Houston took Eliza Allen as his bride. But as quickly as his star rose, it fell twice as fast. As he was preparing for reelection, his three-month marriage fell apart. Historians still have no idea why Eliza packed her bags and went home. Houston responded by resigning, escaping west to “Indian territory,” (today known as Oklahoma). There he met both the Cherokee and a whiskey bottle. By 1832, Houston moved west once again, to Texas. Quickly he became embroiled in politics. He represented Nacogdoches at the Convention of 1833. By 1835 he was appointed general of the military district east of the Trinity, and he was elected a representative to the Consultation of 1835. By 1836, independence from Mexico was decided and Sam Houston was elected commander in chief of the armies of the new Republic of Texas. Although at first, only some respected his title, the defeats of the Alamo and Goliad solidified loyalty. Houston conducted a masterful retreat. His soldiers thirst for battle culminated on April 21, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto. In a battle that officially lasted only 18 minutes, Santa Anna was defeated, and independence was won.

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Houston served the new republic from the start. He was elected as Texas’s first president in 1837. And after tenure as a congressman, he ran and won the presidency again in 1841. In his terms, he carried a pacific policy towards relations with Mexico and a balanced budget. Wanting always what was best for Texas, Houston worked for annexation to the United States, and although it remained out of his grasp, Texas eventually was annexed under his hand-picked successor, Anson Jones. After Texas joined the United States, Houston still worked for Texas as senator. This was done until 1859, when Houston left national office to serve as governor of Texas, making him the first and only American to serve as governor of two different states. He did this in the hopes that he could keep Texas in the Union, but by 1861, this was impossible. As he preferred to whittle in the basement of the capital rather than take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, Houston was removed from office in March of that year. Though demonized by some of the populace, his love for Texas never died. On July 26, 1863, he lay in his bed in Huntsville, fading from pneumonia. As his wife Margaret read from the Bible, the 70-year-old Houston spoke. A fading whisper carried his last words “Texas . . . Texas . . . Margaret.” —Andrew Galloway

Further Reading Campbell, Randolph B. Sam Houston and the American Southwest. 2nd ed. New York: Longman Publishers, 2002.

Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de (1794–1876) Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was a leader who personified ambition, and who possessed the skills to thrive in most of the political chaos of his life. Born February 21, 1794, to a middle-class family in Jalpa, Vera Cruz, he refused limitations. By 1810, at age 16, he entered the Spanish Vera Cruz battalion as a cadet. Under the leadership of Joaquı´n de Arredondo, he displayed his martial talent. By 1813, Lieutenant Santa Anna was in Tejas. At the battle of Medina, Arredondo put to the sword 1,300 of the 1,400 rebels; Spain, meanwhile, lost only 55 men. Arrendondo proceeded to disdainfully pacify and depopulate Tejas through a campaign of terror and mass executions. Besides a citation for bravery, Santa Anna learned strong lessons on dealing with insurgents.

Texas Revolt (1835–1836) A controversial figure in Mexican history, pez de Santa Anna became Antonio Lo Mexico's president in 1833. Though he won some battles, notably at the Alamo, he was forced into retirement following his defeat in the Texas Revolution in 1836. Ten years later, Santa Anna led Mexico through the disastrous Mexican-American War that resulted in a massive loss of Mexican territory and a humiliating defeat for Santa Anna's forces. (North Wind Picture Archives)

Feeling change in the political winds, and despite his promotion to brevet lieutenant colonel, Santa Anna threw his support to rebel Agustin de Iturbide in 1821. Although he received the rank of general and helped Mexico win independence, he remained unsatisfied. By 1823, he overthrew the increasingly despotic Emperor Iturbide. Seen as a champion of liberalism, he was promptly elected military g overnor of Yucatan in 1824. As an expedition to Cuba floundered, he grew tired of his position and resigned. Moving to Vera Cruz, he married, and was made governor. Spain’s attempt to re-conquer Mexico in 1829, brought Santa Anna a needed diversion. Winning fame through repulsion of the Spanish, he announced his retirement. Three years later, however he was back. Santa Anna, feeling the change of political winds, overthrew the centralist government. By 1833, his victorious army brought a return to federalism. Under his presidency, Mexico was given back to her people—at least for six months. By 1834, Santa Anna demanded the states disband their militias, causing 11 states to rebel. Mercilessly, the rebellions were put down. When Santa Anna defeated the state militia of Zacatecas, he allowed the “rape of Zacatecas,” where his soldiers looted for 48 hours. At the end of this campaign, Texas began her fight for independence at Gonzales, October 2, 1835, and Santa Anna rushed to Texas. Ordering no quarter to the Texians at the battle of the Alamo, followed by the slaughter of 350 Texians at Goliad, Santa Anna followed the formula of halting rebellion. His failure to post guards San Jacinto, on April 6, 1836, was a supreme miscalculation, and Samuel

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Houston used this opportunity to attack. The surprised Santa Anna was defeated in less than 18 minutes. After capture, he signed the Treaty of Velasco, recognizing the independence of Texas. After a trip to the United States, the disgraced Santa Anna retired to his estates in Mexico, where opportunity arose again. Over Mexico’s debt, the French invaded beginning the “Pastry-War.” Though the French were forced to retreat, Santa Anna lost a leg to shrapnel. Riding the fame, he served as president in 1839 and liked it so much that he overthrew the presidency of Bustamante in 1841 and became dictator. His greed and excesses led to an empty treasury. By 1845, he was exiled to Cuba. Events brought Santa Anna home, namely the Mexican-American War. Santa Anna convinced the American president, James K. Polk, that he could negotiate peace. Allowed to return to Mexico, he raised an army of 18,000 to fight the invaders. After a draw against Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista, he retreated to Mexico City. He then had to face Winfield Scott’s army. An oversight at Cerro Gordo led to his retreat and the capture of Mexico City. Following the surrender to the United States, Santa Anna was again exiled. By 1853, Mexico was wrought with difficulties and called Santa Anna back. To help fill the empty treasury, Santa Anna sold more than 20 million acres to the United States of America in the Gadsden Purchase. By 1855, Santa Anna was overthrown and banished. Over more than 11 years, Santa Anna plotted his return. Upon landing in Mexico however, he was again arrested and banished. In exile, he wandered throughout the Caribbean. He was finally allowed back to Mexico in 1874. His pleas for a pension for his service to Mexico fell on deaf ears. Living on the grace of his son-in-law, Santa Anna slowly faded for three years. On June 21, 1876, he died in obscurity. —Andrew Galloway

Further Reading Hardin, Stephen. The Alamo 1836: Santa Anna’s Texas Campaign. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Meyer, Michael C., and William L. Sherman. The Course of Mexican History. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842) The 1842 constitutional crisis that briefly resulted in the state of Rhode Island having two competing popularly elected governments and the threat of an armed civil war is sometimes referred to as “Dorr Rebellion” or “Dorr’s War.” The persistence of the terms of the original 1663 colonial charter that was wholly inadequate for the society brought forth by the American Revolution was, more than 50 years later, the source of active resentment. As the rest of the United States moved toward a more expansive and inclusive definition of who had suffrage, Rhode Island remained trapped under a system that defined the electorate narrowly and whose original provisions had no method of amendment. Before, during, and after the rebellion, both political parties used the “Dorr War” to advantage with followers. For Democrats, popular sovereignty found its hero in Thomas Dorr and his followers. Whigs saw a cautionary tale about insurrections and mobbing driven by Jacksonian politics. The charter system favored rural free-hold farmers, and in a state where the American industrial revolution was born and the percentage of men in the commercial sector was high, the practical effect was the disenfranchisement of between 40 and 60 percent of the adult white male population by 1840. Only “freemen” who were defined as native-born adult white male land holders and their eldest sons had access to the ballot, the right to serve on juries, and the ability to sue in court. Increasingly, the majority of the state’s population was concentrated in towns and cities and was at a political disadvantage in the General Assembly. Democrats and Whigs claimed to be bound by the provisions of the original charter’s terms, which allowed alterations by the London government, but the system suited them both. Democrats who wanted suffrage expanded to foreign-born white men who immigrated for work in the textile mills wanted native-born black men excluded. At a stalemate in terms of the parameters of reform, both parties concentrated on gaining power in the state, while the disenfranchised grew restive as they watched the rest of the nation continue to expand the franchise state by state. Popular reform efforts in the decades prior to the 1842 rebellion failed—most notably that of the Rhode Island Constitutional Party of the 1830s. The Rhode Island Suffrage Association founded in 1840 was more determined. Their position was that the majority had earned the right with the Revolution to determine the

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nature of their government. The Suffragists had widespread support, and former Whig assemblyman Thomas Wilson Dorr quickly became the leader of the party. Dorr, a Harvard-educated attorney, was himself a beneficiary of the existing system as the son of a prosperous man whose holdings included extensive real estate and textile mills. His father, Sullivan Dorr, was in fact active in the Charterite opposition during the crisis. In October 1841, the Suffrage Association held a statewide constitutional convention to force the issue of reform. The resulting “People’s Constitution” included a widely expanded definition of suffrage, modified the legislative apportionment for the state, established an independent judicial system, and included a state bill of rights. The Suffragists ran an extralegal statewide referendum, which drew up to 60 percent of the white male population of the state. The vote, the organizers claimed, was nearly 14,000 (or more than half the total male population of the state) for the People’s Constitution and fewer than 100 against. The figure, whether correct or incorrect, was significant not only for its claims about a true popular sovereignty on the question but because the turnout percentage would have had to include a clear majority of already enfranchised freeholders. The response from the state government and Charterites was to offer a competing constitution with many of the same reforms. The “Law and Order Constitution” was opposed by the Dorrites. The opposition from the Suffragists was primarily located in the constitution’s failure to include the large population of foreignborn white men who made up a significant percentage of their party. Thomas Dorr and the Suffragists boycotted the referendum and, ironically, had an active ally at the polls in the form of hard-line Charterites who opposed any amendment to the original charter that served them so well. The Charterite Law and Order Constitution was put to a public referendum in March 1842, and it too passed, giving the state two popularly approved new constitutions. Despite the clear message that a majority of voting Rhode Island men found reform adequate, Dorr and the Suffragists pressed on calling for an election of a new governor and legislature under the terms of its constitution of October 1841. The Rhode Island General Assembly and Governor Samuel Ward King responded by passing legislation (popularly called the “Algerine Law”) that criminalized the activities of the Suffrage Association and its supporters. It was now treason against the state of Rhode Island to run for office in the upcoming April 1842 election called by the Suffrage Association or to attempt to assume any office. Knowing that the Suffrage Association was strongest in the northern half of the state, the law provided for trial of violators by the state Supreme Judicial Council, who openly supported the existing government and whose authority allowed it to try defendants in such cases in areas where reliably loyal jury pools could be found.

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On April 18, 1842, the supporters of the People’s Constitution elected 35-yearold attorney Thomas Wilson Dorr as governor and a full slate of legislative candidates who called themselves the “People’s Government” and the legitimate government of the majority of Rhode Islanders. Two days later, on April 20, 1842, the official election was held, and Samuel Ward King was reelected. As both the factions under Dorr and King claimed legitimacy, the state had two complete rival governments. King immediately appealed to President John Tyler for assistance in putting down what was moving quickly in the divided state in the direction of civil war. Tyler reaffirmed the King administration’s legal rights but urged compromise rather than military intervention. King’s government began arrests of known Dorrites, while Thomas Dorr and 200 of the Suffragists headed to the capital at Providence in May 1842 with the intention of seizing the state arsenal. The Suffragists found a large contingent of men guarding the arsenal (including Dorr’s own father and uncle) and dispersed without incident. Governor King declared martial law in the state and called out the militia. Thomas Dorr, along with many of the Suffragists, fled the state. Dorr was indicted in absentia in August 1842. Although the Suffragists’ 1842 coup failed, King and his charter government still faced widespread dissatisfaction with the constitutional situation. To ameliorate this dissent, a new constitution was adopted in April 1843. The vote was extended to all native-born adult males (including free blacks) who had been in the state for at least two years. Thomas Dorr, still in exile, believed that the time was right to return and press for more reforms by raising the additional reform issues in a trial for treason. Dorr returned to Rhode Island in October 1843 and was, as he planned, arrested. Dorr was jailed at Providence for six months before his trial. Authorities moved him to the center of the conservative Charterite region of Newport for a trial that began on April 2, 1844. Dorr based his defense on the idea that treason could only be committed against the nation, not an individual state, and that during the statewide crisis of 1842 when the Algerine Law was passed, he and the People’s Constitution government were the legitimate government because the voters had overwhelmingly approved the constitution they had created. The judges rejected this line of defense and did not allow the jury to rule upon it. They asserted that since allegiance is due to a state, treason could be committed against it. Further, they declared that the legislature elected in 1843 was legitimate and that no judge or jury could rule on the legitimacy of that in 1842. The jury’s authority in the trial, according to the court, was circumscribed by law to considering the facts of the case under the existing law. Since Dorr did not refute the facts surrounding his actions in 1842, he was found guilty of treason against the state on May 6, 1844, and sentence to life in solitary confinement at hard labor. By all reports, Dorr did

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suffer the harshest terms of the sentence for at least one year. He was denied visitation by family, exercise beyond work, and any reading materials. In 1845, the state offered him amnesty in return for an oath of allegiance to the 1843 constitution. Dorr, in poor health due to conditions at the state prison and his treatment, refused. Dorr’s situation and the large number of supporters for the original rebellion returned the issue to the political arena in the gubernatorial race in 1845. Sympathy for the harsh penalty Dorr received and his firmness on rejecting amnesty for principle won him widespread sympathy from a faction known as “liberationists.” When a sympathetic government was elected in 1845, they passed a bill on June 27 of that year, releasing him from prison. His civil rights were restored only in 1851. Dorr had appeals in the system while in prison, abandoning the effort only in 1849. In 1854, the state legislature passed a bill that annulled the original conviction, but the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Thomas Dorr died on December 27, 1854, still convinced that he was right in 1842 and refusing to back down. The U.S. Supreme Court, deciding on the one case that reached it rising out of Dorr’s War, Luther v. Borden (1849), determined that the people had no such rights to rebel without the consent of their government. With that decision written by Justice Roger B. Taney, Abraham Lincoln would, in 1861, challenge the secession of the southern states and justify martial law. But the decision reached in relation to the Dorr Rebellion of 1842 had more profound implications as it called into doubt the legitimacy of the Revolution that created the nation itself as Thomas Dorr would have recognized. —Gretchen A. Adams See also all entries under Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Molly Maguires (1870s); BrooksBaxter War (1874); Black Patch War (1909); Bonus Army (1932); Battle of Athens (1946); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Dennison, George M. The Dorr War: Republicanism on Trial, 1831–1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976. Gettleman, Marvin E. The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849. New York: Random House, 1973. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

Charterites By the early 1840s, most states had regularlized their suffrage qualifications to reflect contemporary ideas about democratic participation. Rhode Island, unlike most of the rest of the United States, had nothing approaching universal white male suffrage even 50 years after the American Revolution. The royal charter issued by Charles II in 1663 that created the original colony still marked the parameters of suffrage and even some access to the courts. Although the original charter was a model of enlightened political liberalism in the 17th century, it was woefully inadequate not only for a republic, but for a state whose economy was shifting quickly from agrarian freehold farms to a commercial and industrial base. The constitutional crisis that arose in 1842 called “Dorr Rebellion” (or “Dorr’s War”) pitted traditionalists called “Charterites” against the “Dorrites” or “Suffragists” of the Rhode Island Suffrage Party lead by Thomas Wilson Dorr. The conflict featured a short period during which the state had two elected governments claiming legitimacy, which nearly erupted into an armed civil war. The original charter privileged the landowning farmers and their eldest sons by restricting not only voting rights, but jury service and the right to file lawsuits to this class of men. As the northern half of Rhode Island led the industrializing and urbanizing efforts of the post–War of 1812 United States, political power in the state was concentrated into ever-decreasing circles. The southern portion of the state, with its flatter terrain, retained much more of its agricultural base and became the stronghold for the “Charterites” when the Rhode Island Suffrage Association rose in 1840 as a party-based challenger to the state’s electoral status quo. The Suffragists’ party attracted not only the large number of foreign-born men in the state who had immigrated to work in the textile mills in the northern cities and towns, but those native-born men whose future was tied not to farming but to wage labor. The Suffragists organized a referendum on their “People’s Constitution” that allegedly received 14,000 approving votes and fewer than 100 in favor of the existing charter. The supporters of the charter in state government understood the mood of the people and organized their own counter-reforms in the form of the “Freeholder’s Constitution.” That, too, passed by a wide margin and contained most of the critical reforms the Dorrites wanted. The Dorrites, however, rejected the constitution because it excluded foreign-born residents of the state from voting. In response, in April 1842, they elected a new legislature and Thomas Dorr as governor, declaring it the will of the people. Governor Samuel Ward King responded by appealing to the federal government, without much success. With

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two factions claiming to be the legally elected government, the Dorrites attempted to seize the state arsenal at Providence on May 19, 1842. Charterites came out in full force to defend the arsenal, and the group included Thomas Dorr’s own father, Sullivan, and his uncle Crawford Allen. The show of force dissipated the crowd, and the Charterites, fearing an attack in Woonsocket, fortified a building there as well. Despite the strength of the Suffragist movement in that mill city, no attack materialized. But most practical Charterites either favored some modification to the old colonial charter or saw the political expediency in setting the terms of reform themselves. Toward that end, they held their own convention in the Charterite stronghold of Newport and offered their “Law and Order Constitution” to the electorate for a referendum. In November 1842, despite a Dorrite boycott, it passed by a landslide margin. Most of the elements of the People’s Constitution were present, with the notable exception that black men who were otherwise eligible were granted suffrage and the foreign-born men who filled the mills of Rhode Island were excluded. The Charterite constitution took effect in May 1843 and brought Rhode Island into the mainstream of the movement toward universal male suffrage in the United States. —Gretchen A. Adams

Further Reading Dennison, George M. The Dorr War: Republicanism on Trial, 1831–1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976. Gettleman, Marvin E. The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849. New York: Random House, 1973. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Dorr, Thomas Wilson (1805–1854) Thomas Wilson Dorr, the leader of a rebellious faction who precipitated a constitutional crisis in Rhode Island in 1842, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 5, 1805, to a Sullivan Dorr, a wealthy textile manufacturer, and his wife. Educated at the exclusive Philips Exeter Academy in Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard College in 1823, Dorr went on to study law in New York and returned to Providence to practice law and begin a career in state politics in 1827. Elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1834 as a Whig, Thomas Dorr benefitted from the state’s restrictive constitution and, by any measure, seems an unlikely organizer of an armed rebellion that briefly made him governor, but

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that ended with him convicted of treason and imprisoned. But the actions of the “Dorrites” established universal male suffrage in line with the rest of the United States in Rhode Island by 1845. More than 50 years after the American Revolution, Rhode Island still operated under the terms of the 1663 royal charter granted by King Charles II of England. By 1841, the state was unique in its antiquated methods of determining legislative representation, its failure to adopt some form of universal suffrage for adult white men, and its failure to have a written bill of rights. The original charter that privileged freehold farmers and their eldest sons increasingly not only restricted the expansion of the electorate in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing state and effectively disenfranchised those whose economic fortunes began to rely on commercial activities and wage labor, but concentrated the state’s political power in the shrinking rural population. In 1840, Thomas Dorr joined the Rhode Island Suffrage Association to address the grievances against the state government. Dorr quickly rose to the leadership of the Suffragists, who called a popular convention in 1842. There, they created a “People’s Constitution” whose primary feature was general suffrage for white adult men in the state. The government and its supporters, known as “Charterites,” responded to the overwhelming support for the Dorrite movement by offering their own “Freeholder’s Constitution” that included virtually all the reforms advocated by Dorr and his followers. The Suffragists, having attracted a significant following from the foreign-born mill workers, opposed the Freeholder’s Constitution because of its failure to extend the franchise to that group. The Freeholder’s Constitution also passed a public referendum, and each group claimed, after statewide elections in April 1842, to be the legally elected government of Rhode Island. The Charterites, led by Governor Samuel Ward King, appealed to President John Tyler for federal assistance in putting down the Dorr Rebellion. Tyler was reluctant to enter into the fray and urged King to find a compromise. The attack on the state arsenal by Dorrites in May was quickly routed by the state militia, and martial law was imposed. Dorr and many of his followers fled Rhode Island when the Charterite legislature and Governor King proved determined to prosecute them under the quickly passed “Algerine Law” that labeled their actions treason against the state of Rhode Island, placing a $5,000 bounty on Dorr’s head. Dorr remained in exile until October 1843, when he hoped that the recent constitutional reforms that were finally approved by the legislature would protect him. King, however, had him arrested and tried in the Charterite stronghold of Newport. Dorr was found guilty and sentenced to solitary confinement for life at hard labor. He was offered an amnesty after one year’s imprisonment, largely as a political move by Governor King because of the widespread public sympathy for his situation. Dorr refused the terms and was released only when the legislature passed an

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unconditional amnesty bill on his behalf in 1845. The election of his uncle Phillip Allen to the governorship in 1851 resulted in the restoration of his civil rights, but an attempt by the General Assembly to nullify the original verdict in 1854 was a short-lived victory as the state Supreme Court deemed the move unconstitutional. Dorr died shortly thereafter at the age of 49, having given his health and much of his life to the cause of fighting for universal male suffrage. —Gretchen A. Adams

Further Reading Dennison, George M. The Dorr War: Republicanism on Trial, 1831–1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976. Gettleman, Marvin E. The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849. New York: Random House, 1973. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Universal White Male Suffrage The Revolutionary generation placed a premium on the “independence” of an individual when considering voting capabilities. Only when a man (or, in some states, white women and free black men and women) had sufficient economic independence could he be relied upon to act in the interests of the commonweal rather than himself. Individual states determined the terms by which citizens qualified to vote, but virtually all states through the first decades of independence used some formula of property ownership or personal worth. The decades after the War of 1812 saw rapid expansion in all areas of national life, and each combined to increase the pressure on states to widen the electorate. As states moved toward a universal white male suffrage, though, they regularized the status of a voter by both race and gender by disenfranchising all women and black men. The improvements in transportation and communication increased the dissemination of ideas. Campaign biographies, religious tracts that stressed individualism and were in tune with natural-rights ideology in politics, the partisan nature of newspaper publishing, and the overtly political nature of commemorations and oratory created a political culture that was pervasive. The rise of industry concentrated wage laborers, craftsmen, and commercial men away from the countryside and effectively disenfranchised many. In addition, the patchwork quality of suffrage qualifications and the increasingly democratic nature of not only American society in general, but in the newly settled areas in particular where suffrage was

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often automatically granted on arrival, put pressure on all of the states to liberalize their requirements. The Democratic Party capitalized on the movement to recruit white working-class men, and most states had reduced any economic thresholds to voting to virtually none for white men by the early 1820s. Rhode Island was the most noticeable holdout from this trend toward universal white male suffrage, even as it was in the forefront of the industrialization that reduced the opportunities for individual access to voting rights. The state had failed to create a constitution in the post-Revolutionary years, but relied instead on the 1663 charter granted by King Charles II to create the colony. Unusually progressive for its day in its granting of religious freedom, by 1842, it was stunningly anachronistic. All voting rights, the ability to bring suit in court, or to serve on a jury were tied to freehold rights. A landed farmer and his eldest son had rights, while the large number of wage laborers and small business owners without real estate holdings did not. The state had a constitutional crisis in 1842 with Dorr’s Rebellion, which threatened civil war and briefly saw two governments with popular support each claiming authority in the state before order was restored. Ultimately, the conservative Charterists prevailed, but practical considerations forced them to make the necessary reforms to extend suffrage not only to nearly all white adult men in the state, but, against the trend nationwide, Rhode Island included black men as well. With the inclusion of Rhode Island in the democratizing trend of the antebellum decades, nearly universal white male suffrage was achieved by 1845. —Gretchen A. Adams

Further Reading Dennison, George M. The Dorr War: Republicanism on Trial, 1831–1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976. Gettleman, Marvin E. The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849. New York: Random House, 1973. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

Luther v. Borden: The Judicial Aftermath of Rhode Island’s Dorr Rebellion (1849) In 1841, the Rhode Island People’s Party, a group organized by Thomas Dorr, drafted a new state constitution, which was then ratified by a statewide vote. The new constitution was meant to replace the state’s original constitution, which was based on a charter issued by Charles II in 1663, and which enfranchised only a tiny proportion of the state’s population. Dorr was elected governor by

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Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842) the newly enfranchised voters, but the charter government refused to accept the new constitution as valid and declared a state of insurrection. In the ensuing military struggle, Dorr’s forces were defeated and he fled the state. When he returned, he was tried and convicted for treason and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the legislature soon after ordered his release. Reproduced here are excerpts of the 1849 Supreme Court decision in Luther v. Borden, which arose out of a suit filed by Martin Luther, a supporter of Dorr, who was seized in his house by officers of the charter government during the insurrection. Luther argued that the charter government was not the legal government and its officers thus had no right to act as they did. In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a longtime supporter of Andrew Jackson, refused to rule on the question of the charter government’s legitimacy, saying that such a question was political and beyond the power of the Court to decide. This decision, in effect, upheld the charter government as the legal government of Rhode Island at the time of the Dorr incident. Mr. Justice Taney delivered the opinion of the court: . . . The charter government . . . passed resolutions declaring that all acts done for the purpose of imposing [Dorr’s] constitution upon the State to be assumption of the powers of government, in violation of the rights of the existing government and of the people at large; and that it would maintain its authority and defend the legal and constitutional rights of the people. But notwithstanding the determination of the charter government, and those who adhered to it, to maintain its authority, Thomas W. Dorr, who had been elected governor under the new constitution, prepared to assert the authority of that government by force, and many citizens assembled in arms to support him. The charter government thereupon passed an act declaring the State under martial law, and at the same time proceeded to call out the militia, to repel the threatened attack and to subdue those who were engaged in it. In this state of the contest, the house of the plaintiff, who was engaged in supporting the authority of the new government, was broken and entered in order to arrest him. The defendants were, at the time, in the military service of the old government, and in arms to support its authority. The Circuit Court . . . instructed the jury that the charter government and laws under which the defendants acted were, at the time, the trespass is alleged to have been committed, in full force and effect as the form of government and paramount law of the State, and constituted a justification of the acts of the defendants as set forth in their pleas. It is the opnion of the Circuit Court that we are now called upon to review. Certainly, the question which the plaintiff proposed to raise by testimony he offered has not hereto fore been recognized as a judicial one in any of the State courts. . . . In Rhode Island, the question has been directly decided. Prosecutions were there initiated against some of the persons who had been active in the forcible opposition to the old government. And in more than one of the cases evidence was offered on the part of the defense similar to the testimony offered in the Circuit Court, and for the same purpose; that is, for the purpose of showing that the proposed constitution had been adopted by the people of Rhode Island, and had, therefore, become the established

Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842) government, and consequently that the parties accused were doing nothing more than their duty in endeavoring to support it. But the courts uniformly held that the inquiry proposed to be made belonged to the political power and not to the judicial; that it rested with the political power to decide whether the charter government had been displaced or not; and when that decision was made, the Judicial Department would be bound to take notice of it as the paramount law of the State, without the aid of oral evidence or the examination of witnesses; that, according to the laws and institutions of Rhode Island, no such change had been recognized by the political power; and that the charter government was the lawful and established government of the State during the period in contest, and that those who were in arms against it were insurgents, and liable to punishment. This doctrine is clearly and forcibly stated in the opinion of the Supreme Court of the State in the trial of Thomas W. Dorr, who was the governor elected under the opposing constitution, and headed the armed force which endeavored to maintain its authority. It is worthy of remark . . . when we are referring to the authority of State decisions, that the trial of Thomas W. Dorr took place after the constitution of 1843 went into operation. The judges who decided that case held their authority under that constitution; and it is admitted on all hands that it was adopted by the people of the State, and is the lawful and established government. . . . The point, then raised here has been already decided by the courts of Rhode Island. The question relates, altogether, to the constitution and the laws of that State; and the well settled rule in this court is, that the courts of the United States adopt and follow the decisions of the State courts in questions which concern merely the constitution and laws of the State. Upon what ground could the Circuit Court of the United States which tried this case have departed from this rule, and disregarded and overruled the decisions of the courts of Rhode Island? . . . [T]he power of determining that a State government has been lawfully established, which the courts of the State disown and repudiate, is not one of them. Upon such a question the courts of the United States are bound to follow the decisions of the State tribunals, and must therefore regard the charter government as the lawful and established government during the time of this contest. Moreover, the Constitution of the United States, as far as it has provided for an emergency of this kind, and authorized the general government to interfere in the domestic concerns of a State, has treated the subject as political in its nature, and placed power in the hands of that department. Under . . . the Constitution it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State. For as the United States guarantee to each State a republican government, Congress must necessarily decide what government is established in the State before it can determine whether it is republican or not. And when the senators and representatives of a State are admitted into the councils of the Union, the authority of the government under which they are appointed, as well as its republican character, is recognized by the proper constitutional authority. And its decision is binding on every other department of the government, and could not be questioned in a judicial tribunal. . . .

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Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842) So, too, as relates to the clause in the above mentioned article of the Constitution. . . . Congress . . . provided that, “in case of an insurrection in any State against the government thereof, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States, on application of the Legislature of such State or of the executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), to call forth such number of the militia of any other State or States, as may be applied for, as he may judge sufficient to suppress such insurrection.” By this act, the power of deciding whether the exigency had arisen upon which the government of the United States is bound to interfere, is given to the President. . . . [H]e must determine what body of men constitute the Legislature, and who is the government, before he can act. . . . If there is an armed conflict, like the one of which we are speaking, it is a case of domestic violence, and one of the parties must be in insurrection against the lawful government. And the President must, of necessity, decide which is the government, and which party is unlawfully arrayed against it, before he can perform the duty imposed upon him by the act of Congress. After the President has acted and called out the militia, is a circuit court of the United States authorized to inquire whether his decision was right? Could the court, while the parties were actually contending in arms for the possession of the government, call witnesses before it and inquire which party represented a majority of the people? . . . If the judicial power extends so far, the guarantee contained in the Constitution of the United States is a guarantee of anarchy, and not of order. Yet if this right does not reside in the courts when the conflict is raging, if the judicial power is at that time bound to follow the decision of the political, it must be equally bound when the contest is over. It cannot, when peace is restored, punish as offenses and crimes the acts which it before recognized, and was bound to recognize, as lawful. It is true that in this case the militia were not called out by the President. But upon the application of the governor under the charter government, the President recognized him as the executive power of the State, and took measures to call out the militia to support his authority if it should be found necessary for the general government to interfere; and it is admitted in the argument, that it was the knowledge of this decision that put an end to the armed opposition to the charter government, and prevented any further efforts to establish by force the proposed constitution. The interference of the President, therefore, by announcing his determination, was as effectual as if the militia had been assembled under his orders. And it should be equally authoritative. For certainly no court of the United States, with a knowledge of this decision, would have been justified in recognizing the opposing party as the lawful government; or in treating as wrongdoers or insurgents the officers of the government which the President had recognized, and was prepared to support by an armed force. In the case of foreign nations, the government acknowledged by the President is always recognized in the courts of justice. And this principle has been applied by the act of Congress to the sovereign States of the Union. The remaining question is whether the defendants, acting under military orders issued under the authority of the government, were justified in breaking and entering the plaintiff’s house. . . . Unquestionably a military government, established as the permanent

Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842) government of the State, would not be a republican government and it would be the duty of Congress to overthrow it. But the law of Rhode Island evidently contemplated no such government. It was intended merely for the crisis, and to meet the peril in which the existing government was placed by the armed resistance to its authority. . . . And if the government of Rhode Island deemed armed opposition so formidable, and so ramified throughout the State, as to require the use of its military force and the declaration of martial law, we see no ground upon which this court can questions its authority. It was a state of war; and the established government resorted to the rights and usages of war to maintain itself, and to overcome the unlawful opposition. And in that state of things the officers engaged in its military service might lawfully arrest anyone, who, from the information before them, they had reasonable grounds to believe was engaged in the insurrection; and might order a house to be forcibly entered and searched, when there were reasonable grounds for supposing he might be there concealed. . . . No more force, however, can be used than is necessary to accomplish this object. And if the power is exercised for the purposes of oppression, or any injury willfully done to person or property, the party by whom, or by whose order, it is committed would undoubtedly be answerable. Upon the whole, we see no reason for disturbing the judgment of the Circuit court. The admission of evidence to prove that the charter government was the established government of the State was an irregularity, but is not material to the judgment. . . . Much of the argument on the part of the plaintiff turned upon political rights and political questions, upon which the court has been urged to express an opinion. We decline doing so. The high power has been conferred on this court of passing judgment upon the acts of the State sovereignties, and of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, and of determining whether they are beyond the limits of power marked out for them respectively by the Constitution of the United States. This tribunal, therefore, should be the last to overstep the boundaries which limit its own jurisdiction. And while it should always be ready to meet any question confided to it by the Constitution, it is equally its duty not to pass beyond its appropriate sphere of action, and to take care not to involve itself in discussions which properly belong to other forums. No one, we believe, has ever doubted the proposition, that, according to the institutions of this country, the sovereignty in every State resides in the people of the State, and that they may alter and change their form of government at their own pleasure. But whether they have changed it or not by abolishing an old government, and establishing a new one in its place, is a question to be settled by the political power. And when that power has decided, the courts are bound to take notice of its decision, and to follow it. The judgment of the Circuit Court must therefore be affirmed. Source: 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1 (1849).

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Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844) Riots took place on May 6–8, and July 6–7, 1844, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where there had been a rise in anti–Roman Catholic sentiment with many people worried about the increasing Irish Catholic population, so many Irish people having immigrated to the United States with the increase in the severity of the Irish potato famine. Following the outbreak of the potato famine in Ireland, many Irish started to immigrate to the United States and elsewhere, and many of these immigrants headed for the major cities in the United States, where the start of the Industrial Revolution had led to the demand for a large unskilled labor force. Many poor immigrants headed for Philadelphia, amongst other places. This led to some tensions as the existing population was largely Protestant, and most of the new immigrants were Roman Catholic. In the early 1840s, anti-Catholic leaflets were distributed around Philadelphia, and matters came to a head on November 10, 1842. All students in government schools in Philadelphia started the day by reading the Protestant King James version of the Bible. This had been accepted since the Anglicans took over the reins of the government of the city from the Quakers in the 1740s. However on that day, the Roman Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Kenrick, wrote to the Board of Controllers of Public Schools asking that Roman Catholic children should be allowed to read the Douai version of the Bible. He also asked that Roman Catholic students be excused from Protestant religious education classes. The board agreed with this and ordered that no child should be forced to take part in religious teaching, and that parents could nominate the version of the Bible from which they wished to read. In late 1843, rumors started circulating that a school director from Kensington, Hugh Clark, who was Catholic, had visited a girls’ school and asked the principal to stop reading the Bible. The principal then complained that she would rather lose her job than obey that command, to which Clark reported that he found students had stopped reading the Bible to use a different version. He felt that this was confusing and suggested that perhaps the Bible reading should stop. This was soon interpreted as a Roman Catholic interfering in the religious observances of Protestants and that the Catholics were trying to stop the reading of the Bible.

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As a result, on May 3, 1844, the primary supporters of the Protestant nativist movement, the American Republican Party, held a meeting in Kensington denouncing the situation. As the talk took part in a largely Roman Catholic Irish area, there were many hecklers, and people hissed the speakers off the stage as well as throwing missiles at them. Three days later, the nativists returned in large numbers and started urging for action. As it started raining soon afterwards, the crowd moved into a local market where inflamed rhetoric led to scuffles between protesters and counterprotesters. People from the nearby buildings then started opening fire, and one or two nativists were shot dead. Soon a large crowd of nativists went on the rampage, and they attacked the nearby Seminary of the Sisters of Charity and the house of some well-known Catholics. Two more nativists were killed, but the riot was eventually controlled as constables from nearby areas were brought into Philadelphia. On May 7, nativists urged for Protestants to rise up and stop attempts by the Roman Catholics to control the city. Marching to Kensington, there were nativists who shot at passersby and vice versa. It was during these riots that nativists burned down the Hibernia fire station, the original market used in the street dispute on the previous day, and about 30 homes. General George Cadwalader had to call out the local militia to try to calm down the situation, and Bishop Kenrick issued a statement asking for all Catholics to avoid confrontations. The matter calmed down slightly, but on May 8, rioting started again with nativists marching on Kensington and burning down St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church and its rectory, and also attacking the Seminary of the Sisters of Charity, the target of the earlier riot. It was largely contained in Kensington, but another nativist crowd gathered and marched on St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church, on Fourth Street in central Philadelphia. Mayor John Morin Scott pleaded with the crowd and deployed troops nearby, but they were unable to stop people from setting fire to the church and cheering when the steeple fell. During these riots, some 14 people were killed, 50 badly injured, 200 forced to flee, and property worth some $150,000 was damaged or destroyed. It was clear that the rioting was directed against the Irish Catholics, not the German Catholics, and Mayor Scott had the militia standing guard on Catholic properties. Bishop Kenrick also tried to diffuse the situation by ordering that all Catholic churches close on the following Sunday (May 12) to avoid any provocation. On June 18, the grand jury blamed the Irish Catholics for starting the trouble, and on the authorities for not reacting fast enough to the escalating situation. Nativists argued that they were victims of the Catholics and that Mayor Scott was in a large part responsible for the problems. Gradually, the situation calmed down, but on July 4, a large demonstration by the Native American Party took place to coincide with Independence Day. Father John Patrick Dunn of the Church of St. Philip Neri was worried that his church might bear

Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844)

the brunt of any rioting, and asked for a company of soldiers to help guard it. Twentyfive muskets were made available to the church. Five of these were later found to be defective, but the demonstration passed off peacefully. However, on the following day, several thousand nativists started demonstrating in front of the church, and Father Dunn deployed his armed volunteers to protect the place. At that point, the sheriff intervened, disarming those guarding the church and urging the mob to disperse. However, a man who had been injured in the May riots called on the crowd to search the church in case there were any other weapons there. Another search by the militia unearthed a keg of gunpowder, and also 53 muskets and 10 pistols. The search party remained to guard the church, and the crowd gradually dwindled away. At noon on July 6, another crowd appeared outside the church, and after a show of force by the militia—numbering 150—they dispersed. Three cannons were then deployed, and when the crowd started throwing rocks at the militia, General Cadwalader ordered the firing of one of the cannons. After protests, he countermanded the order and, on the following day, released a man called Charles Naylor, who had been involved in begging Cadwalader not to open fire. It was not long before the demonstrators themselves laid their hands on a cannon and started firing it at the church. A second cannon was then found at the wharfs and used to fire at the church. Massive rioting then took place, and with soldiers firing on the crowd, seven were killed and nine seriously wounded. By the early morning, the militia had seized control of both cannons, and there were 15 to 20 dead, including some soldiers. Governor David R. Porter continued to move soldiers into the city, and by July 7, there were about 5,000 militia. Gradually, the numbers were scaled down, but tension remained, especially after the grand jury again blamed the Catholics for the rioting, but this time supported the actions of authorities. There were worries that there might be rioting in other cities, especially in New York City, but these did not eventuate. The Nativist Riots were to become an election issue that the Whig Party used to garner support from the nativists, an action condemned by the Democratic Party. The presidential elections saw a victory for the Democrat, James Polk (who won Pennsylvania), over the Whig, Henry Clay. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Philadelphia Election Riot (1742); Pima Revolt (1751); Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856).

Further Reading Clark, Dennis. The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973. Weigley, R. F., et al., eds. Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.

327

Catholicism With the exception of the French in parts of Canada, most of the settlers in North America during the 18th century were from Britain or the Netherlands, and the vast majority of these were Protestant. Some, such as the Pilgrim Fathers who had arrived in the 17th century, were Puritans. As such, there was widespread distrust of the Roman Catholics in many parts of North America, and in the United States after it gained its independence. Some of this was clearly doctrinal, but many Protestants were nervous about a large group that took their spiritual leadership from the Papacy. These two reasons for anti-Catholic hatred in Philadelphia— especially the latter—helped the Protestant protagonists during the Nativist Riots in 1844. There had been Roman Catholics among some of the early settlers in what became the United States. Lord Baltimore had hoped that Catholics might settle in Maryland, although they were never more than a small minority of the state’s inhabitants. There were also the French in areas such as New Orleans, and the Spanish to the west. However, not until the early 19th century were there large influxes of Irish Catholics into Pennsylvania. This came with the Irish potato famine, and hundreds of thousands of Irish leaving Ireland each year in the hope of a new life in the United States, Australia, or elsewhere. As this coincided with industrialization in the United States, this led to many flocking to Philadelphia, where they found work in the newly enlarged iron and steel foundries, or in the factories nearby. As most of these newly arrived Irish Catholics were poor, it was not unnatural that many sent their children to the local government schools, which in turn led to friction over the readings from the Bible. This was the reason that was easily exploited by the nativists, who claimed that the Catholic children would prevent Protestants from using their own Bibles, thereby forcing Protestant children to study religion as Catholics. The Roman Catholic bishop, Francis Kenrick, was soon drawn into the dispute. He had been born in Dublin, Ireland, had been trained at Rome, where he was ordained, and then appointed to a chair of theology at a seminary at Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1821. During his time in Kentucky, he was involved in what is now termed “interfaith dialogue,” whereby he worked with local Protestants. It was precisely because of this that, in 1830, he was appointed to take over the diocese of Philadelphia, which had been badly managed. He proved active in working with a cholera epidemic that broke out in 1832. The rioting in 1844 came as a shock to many of the Catholics in Philadelphia, and Kenrick immediately decided to play down the situation, entrusting the

329

330

Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844)

defense of churches to the civil authorities and temporarily stopping church services to prevent anything said from inflaming the situation. It resulted in some Catholic property being lost in the riots, two churches being set on fire, and antagonism with some of the more aggressive members of the congregation. However, it did win praise from many in Philadelphia, and a number of prominent people from the city subsequently converted to Catholicism. However, in 1848, Pope Pius IX opposed the liberal revolutions in Europe, and this would once again lead to antagonism between Catholics and nativists. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Clark, Dennis. The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973. Purcell, Richard J. “Francis Patrick Kenrick.” Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 5, 339–340. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960.

German Americans The first Germans known to have settled in the United States were some artisans who lived in Jamestown in 1608, but the first place to have a significant German community was Germantown, Pennsylvania, which was established in 1683 near Philadelphia. Initially, most of the Germans moving to North America were Protestants, including many members of small religious sects who faced persecution in Europe. Some of the Hessian soldiers who came over to fight for the British in the American War of Independence also settled in the Americas, and indeed in the 1790 census, the first taken since independence, it appeared that some 9 percent of the white population of the new nation were Germans or of German descent. The major focus of these was in Pennsylvania, where they made up about a third of the entire population of the state, but until the 1810s, the overwhelming majority of these were Protestants. Following the end of the War of 1812, increasing numbers of Catholic Germans were moving to North America. The Germans in Philadelphia, especially the Catholics and the members of the small sects such as the Mennonites, Anabaptists, and Moravians, saw the Quakers in Pennsylvania as natural allies against the Anglican ascendancy. Some were artisans working in cities such as Philadelphia, but many were farmers who brought with them intensive agricultural practices which proved successful in the fertile soils of Pennsylvania. It may seem odd that the Germans who were Lutherans and those who were Catholic should make

Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844)

common cause. These were collectively known as the Pennsylvania “Dutch,” a corruption of “Deutsch,” but also because many of the Germans in Pennsylvania at the time came from the Rhineland, the Palatine, and other areas near the Netherlands. Many of the early German Americans in the United States were politically aware, having left Europe for religious or political reasons. Indeed, large numbers of Catholics who moved to Philadelphia after 1815 did so to escape the settling of scores that took place in the former Confederation of the Rhine, the pro-French “state” established by Napoleon between 1806 and 1813. Many more politically conscious Germans were to migrate to the United States after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848. Because many of the German businessmen tended to favor members of their community, it was not unnatural that antagonisms arose, and it was not long before Germans became targets of hatred in the 1844 Nativist Revolts. Although many of the Nativists focused their hatred on Roman Catholics, for Germans, they did not seem to discriminate, as many of the Germans attacked were Protestants. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Barry, Colman J. The Catholic Church and German Americans. Washington, DC: Bruce Publishing Co., 1953. Luebke, Frederick C. Germans in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Wood, Ralph, ed. The Pennsylvania Germans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942.

331

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History An Encyclopedia Volume 2

Steven L. Danver, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Revolts, protests, demonstrations, and rebellions in American history : an encyclopedia / Steven L. Danver, editor. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59884-221-0 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-59884-222-7 (ebook) 1. Protest movements—United States—History. 2. Revolutions—United States—History. 3. Protest movements—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Revolutions—United States— Encyclopedias. I. Danver, Steven Laurence. HN57.R48 2011 303.48’40973—dc22 2010038363 ISBN: 978-1-59884-221-0 EISBN: 978-1-59884-222-7 15 14 13 12 11

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

xix xxi

VOLUME 1 BACON’S REBELLION (1675–1676) Bacon, Nathaniel (1647–1676)

1 9

Berkeley, Sir William (1605–1677)

11

House of Burgesses

13

Indentured Servants

15

Susquehannock Indians

17

Tobacco

19

Nathaniel Bacon’s Manifesto (1676)

21

Nathaniel Bacon’s “Declaration of the People of Virginia” (1676)

24

PUEBLO REVOLT (1680)

27

Franciscans (1209–Present)

37

On˜ate, Juan de (c. 1552–1626)

39

Otermin, Antonio de (dates unknown)

41

Pope´ (dates unknown)

43

Pueblo Religions

45

Santa Fe´

47

Declaration of Pedro Naranjo, December 19, 1681 LEISLER’S REBELLION (1689–1691) Calvinism Dominion of New England (1686–1689) Leisler, Jacob (c. 1640–1691) Religious Conflict in 17th-Century New York Jacob Leisler’s Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety at Boston, June 4, 1689 Jacob Leisler: “A Modest and Impartial Narrative” (1690)

v

49 53 57 58 60 61 62 63

vi

Contents

STONO REBELLION (1739)

69

Slave Codes

73

South Carolina

75

Description of the Rebellion by Georgia Governor James Oglethorpe (1739) NEW YORK SLAVE INSURRECTION (1741)

76 79

Fires

83

Manhattan Island

84

Investigation into a New York Slave Conspiracy (1741) PHILADELPHIA ELECTION RIOT (1742)

85 91

Anglicanism

95

Quakers

96

PIMA REVOLT (1751)

99

Jesuits

103

Oacpicagigua, Luis (d. 1755)

104

Parrilla, Diego Ortiz (c. 1715–c. 1775)

105

Tohono O’odham

106

PONTIAC’S REBELLION (1763)

109

Amherst, Jeffrey (1717–1797)

117

French and Indian War (1754–1763)

118

Neolin (dates unknown)

119

Ohio River Valley

121

Pontiac (d. 1769)

122

Smallpox

124

STAMP ACT PROTESTS (1765)

127

Adams, Samuel (1722–1803)

139

Declaratory Act (1766)

140

Salutary Neglect

142

Stamp Act Congress (1765)

144

Taxation without Representation

145

Stamp Act Resolutions of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1765)

147

An Account of the Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston (1765)

148

Contents

BOSTON MASSACRE (1770)

151

Adams, John (1735–1826)

157

Attucks, Crispus (c. 1723–1770)

158

Broadsides

159

Preston, Thomas (1722–1798)

161

Revere, Paul (1734–1818)

162

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

164

Richard Palmes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

166

REGULATOR MOVEMENT (1771)

169

Battle of Alamance (1771)

177

Dobbs, Arthur (1689–1765)

178

Husband, Herman (1724–1795)

179

Tryon, William (1729–1788)

181

PINE TREE RIOT (1772)

183

Royal Authority

187

Shipbuilding

188

BOSTON TEA PARTY (1773)

191

Coercive Acts (1774)

199

First Continental Congress (1774)

200

Sons of Liberty

202

Townshend Acts (1767)

203

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Tea Party (1773)

204

SHAYS’ REBELLION (1787)

207

Bowdoin, James (1726–1790)

217

Massachusetts General Court

218

Shays, Daniel (1747–1825)

220

Taxes

222

An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion (1786)

223

A Letter to the Hampshire Herald Listing the Grievances of the Rebels (1786)

224

WHISKEY REBELLION (1794) Federal Supremacy

227 237

vii

viii

Contents

Hamilton, Alexander (1755–1804)

239

Martial Law

241

Tom the Tinker

243

President George Washington’s Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

245

President George Washington’s Second Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

248

ANTEBELLUM SUPPRESSED SLAVE REVOLTS (1800s–1850s)

251

Boxley, George (c. 1779–1865)

261

Deslondes, Charles (d. 1811)

262

Gabriel (d. 1800)

263

Vesey, Denmark (c. 1767–1822)

265

Description of Denmark Vesey (1822)

266

NAT TURNER’S REBELLION (1831)

269

Abolitionists

279

Confessions of Nat Turner

280

Moses Story

282

Slave Preachers

283

Turner, Nat (1800–1831)

285

A Contemporary Account of Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831) TEXAS REVOLT (1835–1836)

286 289

Battle of the Alamo (1836)

303

Austin, Stephen F. (1793–1836)

305

Houston, Samuel (1793–1863)

307

Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de (1794–1876)

308

DORR REBELLION (1841–1842)

311

Charterites

315

Dorr, Thomas Wilson (1805–1854)

316

Universal White Male Suffrage

318

Luther v. Borden: The Judicial Aftermath of Rhode Island’s Dorr Rebellion (1849)

319

Contents

PHILADELPHIA NATIVIST RIOTS (1844)

ix

325

Catholicism

329

German Americans

330

Index

I-1

VOLUME 2 BEAR FLAG REVOLT (1846)

333

Bear Flaggers

339

Fre´mont, John Charles (1813–1890)

341

Sonoma

343

William B. Ide’s Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic (1846) BLEEDING KANSAS (1854–1858)

345 347

Guerilla Warfare in Kansas and Missouri

353

Jayhawkers

354

Missouri Compromise (1820–1821)

356

Popular Sovereignty

358

Pottawatomie Massacre (1856)

359

Topeka Constitution (1855)

361

PORTLAND RUM RIOT (1855)

365

Immigrants

369

Temperance

370

KNOW-NOTHING RIOTS (1855–1856)

373

Bloody Monday (1855)

377

Nativism

378

Plug Uglies

379

Rip Raps

380

Vigilance Committees

381

UTAH WAR (1857–1858)

383

Buchanan, James (1791–1868)

389

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

390

Nauvoo Legion

391

Polygamy

392

x

Contents

State of Deseret

394

Young, Brigham (1801–1877)

395

Major J. H. Carleton’s Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1859) HARPERS FERRY RAID (1859)

396 415

Brown, John (1800–1859)

423

Causes of the Civil War

425

Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870)

427

“Secret Six”

429

John Brown’s Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution (1859)

430

Southern Editorial Responses to John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1859)

432

NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS (1863)

435

Civil War (1861–1865)

441

Conscription

442

Copperheads

443

Racism

444

Excerpts from a New York Times Account of the New York City Draft Riots (1863)

446

A Rioter’s Letter to the New York Times and the Newspaper’s Response (1863)

447

NEW ORLEANS RIOT (1866)

449

Carpetbaggers

453

Reconstruction (1863–1877)

454

Voting Rights

456

MOLLY MAGUIRES (1870S)

459

Irish Americans

463

Pennsylvania

464

Unionism

465

Excerpts from an Article Describing James McPartland’s Infiltration of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s (1894)

467

Contents

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT (1870S)

473

American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)

483

Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906)

484

Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887)

486

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

487

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

489

Congressional Debate on Women’s Suffrage (1866)

491

Sojourner Truth Urges Women to Continue the Fight for Equal Rights for All Women, White and Black (1867)

493

Address of Victoria C. Woodhull to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives (1871)

494

The Comstock Law, Enacted to End the Circulation of Obscene and Immoral Literature (1873)

496

U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony: The Sentencing of Anthony for Voting Illegally (1873)

497

Bradwell v. Illinois: The Rights and Privileges of a Citizen (1873)

499

Excerpts from Susan B. Anthony’s “Social Purity” Speech (1875)

501

Declaration of Rights for Women (1876)

504

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1881)

508

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self” Address (1892)

510

Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (1895)

512

Muller v. Oregon: The Weakness of Women (1908)

515

Excerpts from History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910)

516

Excerpts from Emma Goldman’s The Traffic in Women and Marriage and Love (1910)

522

Excerpts from Anna Garlin Spencer’s Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1912)

529

Margaret Sanger on Sex Education and Contraception (1913)

533

COLFAX MASSACRE (1873)

537

Freedmen

541

Klanism

542

xi

xii

Contents

BROOKS-BAXTER WAR (1874)

545

Baxter, Elisha (1827–1899)

549

Brooks, Joseph (1821–1877)

550

Republican Party

551

FLIGHT OF THE NEZ PERCE´ (1877)

553

Indian Reservations

557

Joseph, Chief (1840–1904)

558

Relocation

560

Surrender Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´, October 5, 1877 GREAT RAILROAD STRIKES (1877)

561 563

Pittsburgh

569

Railroad Workers

570

Robber Barons

571

Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS)

572

HAYMARKET RIOT (1886)

575

Anarchism

585

Bombings

586

Eight-Hour Workday

587

May Day

589

McCormick Harvesting Machine Company

590

The Circular of Anarchist August Spies (1886)

591

Excerpts from the Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887)

592

SEATTLE RIOT (1886)

593

Chinese Immigrants

597

Knights of Labor

598

WOUNDED KNEE I (1890)

601

Dakota Uprising (1862)

611

Sioux

613

Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890)

614

Excerpts from Philip Wells’s Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)

616

Contents

HOMESTEAD STRIKE (1892–1893)

619

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA)

629

Carnegie Steel

630

Lockouts

631

Pinkerton National Detective Agency

632

Yellow-Dog Contracts

633

Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards (1892)

634

Account of the Course of the Strike (1892)

637

Two Examples of Yellow-Dog Contracts (1904 and 1917)

640

PULLMAN STRIKE (1894)

643

American Railway Union (ARU)

651

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926)

652

Pullman Palace Car Company

654

Wage Cuts

656

Two Excerpts from U.S. Strike Commission Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894

657

LATTIMER MASSACRE (1897)

661

Eastern European Immigrants

665

Miners

666

Strikers’ Resolutions and Editorials Appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger Following the Deaths of Striking Coal Miners at the Lattimer Mine, Hazleton, Pennsylvania (1897) NEW ORLEANS RACE RIOT (1900)

668 671

Charles, Robert (c.1866–1900)

675

Jim Crow Laws

676

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

678

ATLANTA RACE RIOT (1906)

681

Economic Competition

685

White Supremacy

686

SPRINGFIELD RACE RIOT (1908)

689

Jewish Americans

693

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

694

xiii

xiv

Contents

BLACK PATCH WAR (1909)

697

American Tobacco Company (ATC)

701

Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA)

702

Statement of Charles H. Fort, President of the Tobacco Growers’ Association of the United States, February 4, 1904 LUDLOW MASSACRE (1914)

703 707

Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I)

713

Industrial Violence

714

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)

716

Excerpt from Godfrey Irwin’s Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado (1914)

718

Walter Fink’s Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp (1914)

719

Index

I-1

VOLUME 3 PLAN DE SAN DIEGO (1915–1916)

727

Mexico

733

Tejanos

735

Texas Rangers

736

GREEN CORN REBELLION (1917)

739

Conscription Act (World War I, 1917)

743

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

744

Socialism

746

HOUSTON RIOT (1917)

749

Black Soldiers

753

Discrimination

754

BOSTON POLICE STRIKE (1919)

757

Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933)

761

Unionization

762

RED SUMMER (1919)

765

Great Migration

773

Lynching

775

Race Riots

777

Contents

Excerpt from the Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riots (1920)

778

Excerpts from the “Anti-Lynching” Hearings Held before the House Judiciary Committee (1920)

782

Excerpts of Testimony from Laney v. United States Describing Events during the Washington, D.C., Riot of July 1919 (1923)

789

BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN (1921)

793

Coal Mining

797

Hatfield, Sid (1893–1921)

798

Matewan Massacre (1920)

799

TULSA RACE RIOT (1921)

801

Ku Klux Klan

805

Segregation

806

Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot (1921)

808

Excerpts from the Preliminary and Final Reports of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2000 and 2001)

809

BONUS ARMY (1932)

829

Battle of Anacostia Flats (1932)

835

Great Depression (1930s)

836

Hooverville

837

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964)

840

Veterans’ Rights

841

Waters, Walter W. (1898–1959)

843

Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia: Excerpts of President Herbert Hoover’s Letter to the District Commissioner and from His Press Conference (1932) TOLEDO AUTO-LITE STRIKE (1934)

844 847

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

851

Battle of Toledo (1934)

852

National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)

854

WEST COAST LONGSHOREMEN’S STRIKE (1934)

857

Bloody Thursday (1934)

861

Bridges, Harry (1901–1990)

862

xv

xvi

Contents

Communism

864

International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)

865

San Francisco

866

ZOOT SUIT RIOTS (1942)

869

Mexican Americans

877

Police Brutality

878

Servicemen

880

BATTLE OF ATHENS (1946)

883

Mansfield, Pat (dates unknown)

887

Political Corruption

888

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (1953–1968)

891

Carmichael, Stokely/Kwame Ture (1941–1998)

903

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1929–1968)

904

Malcolm X (1925–1965)

907

March on Washington (1963)

908

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

910

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

912

President John F. Kennedy’s Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi (1962)

913

Excerpts from the Civil Rights Act of 1964

915

ANTIWAR MOVEMENT (1960S–1970S)

925

Counterculture

937

Kent State (1970)

938

The Moratorium (1969)

941

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

943

Speech Delivered by Paul Potter, President of Students for a Democratic Society, at the Washington Monument (1965)

945

Students for a Democratic Society Leaflet Distributed at the Antiwar March on Washington (1965)

950

Statements of the Fort Hood Three (1966)

951

Excerpts from United States v. Spock: Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Others Accused of Conspiring to Aid and Abet Draft Evasion (1969)

957

A Father’s Disgust with Antiwar Demonstrations (1970)

960

Contents

Displaying the Flag on the Seat of His Pants: Excerpts from Smith v. Goguen (1974) WATTS RIOT (1965)

961 965

Arson

973

Looting

974

Excerpt from the Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California (1965) DETROIT RIOTS (1967)

976 987

Excessive Force

993

Housing

994

Kerner Commission (1967–1968)

995

Excerpts from Cyrus R. Vance’s Report on the Riots in Detroit (1967) CHICAGO RIOTS (1968)

997 1009

Chicago Seven

1019

Daley, Richard J. (1902–1976)

1021

Democratic National Convention (1968)

1022

Hayden, Tom (1939–)

1024

Hoffman, Abbie (1936–1989)

1025

National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe)

1027

ALCATRAZ ISLAND OCCUPATION (1969–1971)

1031

Indians of All Tribes

1035

Oakes, Richard (1942–1972)

1036

Termination

1038

Trudell, John (1946–)

1039

The Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father and His People, November 1969 FEMINIST MOVEMENT (1970S–1980S)

1040 1043

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

1053

Roe v. Wade (1973)

1055

Steinem, Gloria (1934–)

1056

ATTICA PRISON RIOT (1971)

1059

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

1063

Rockefeller, Nelson A. (1908–1979)

1064

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Contents

TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES (1972)

1067

American Indian Movement (AIM)

1071

Indian Treaties

1072

Red Power

1073

WOUNDED KNEE II (1973)

1075

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

1079

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

1080

Pine Ridge Reservation

1081

Wilson, Dick (1934–1990)

1082

SAGEBRUSH REBELLION (1979–1981)

1085

Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976

1089

Public Lands

1090

Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004)

1091

Watt, James G. (1938–)

1093

LOS ANGELES UPRISING (1992)

1095

Denny, Reginald (1953–)

1101

King, Rodney (1965–)

1102

Los Angeles Police Department

1103

Williams, Damian Monroe (1973–)

1105

Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery (1992) WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS (1999)

1106 1121

Direct Action Network

1125

Economic Justice

1126

Globalization

1127

DAY WITHOUT AN IMMIGRANT (2006)

1129

Undocumented Immigrants

1133

List of Contributors Index About the Editor

1137 I-1

Bear Flag Revolt (1846) California experienced culture clash in the mid-1840s. While diversity is a fine theory, a majority is going to impose its shared political, social, religious, and economic beliefs, whether in a nation, province, town, or even family. Only a few hundred participants decided the outcome of the June 1846 Bear Flag Revolt. In January and February 1845, California experienced a reoccurring comic political revolution when Californios ousted Mexican governor Manuel Micheltorena, but this time American “foreigners,” that is, noncitizens, participated. New governor Pı´o Pico ruled from Los Angeles, the center of a population for 7,000 Californios, while Commandant General Jose´ Castro stayed in Monterey. By June 1846, both planned to depose the other. The presence of Americans emphasized the changing population. In 1841, John Bidwell brought the first overland party of settlers to California. However, to own land, they had to convert to Catholicism and become Mexican citizens. By 1845, arrivals increased American numbers to 1,300, and they resided mostly in the isolated frontier counties of Sacramento, Yolo, Napa, Sonoma, and Marin. A majority came to farm, but wild trappers, hunters, and adventurous spirits were ready for a fight. Prefect Manuel Castro quipped in January 1846, “The idea of those gentlemen is that God made the world and them also; therefore, what there is in the world belongs to them as sons of God.” That also meant preventing takeover by the British, who had a mighty 80-gun man-of-war at San Blas. With the example of the loss of Texas before them, the Mexican government prepared for war with the United States. On July 10, 1845, it banned immigrants from Missouri and Oregon from entering California. These orders reached California in mid-September, and General Castro undertook to enforce them. He met with settlers at Sonoma on November 6 and at Sutter’s Fort on November 11. Castro had Mexican citizens sign bonds for the settlers’ good behavior and told them they could remain in California only provisionally. He also offered to buy New Helvetia so he could expel John Sutter, the settlers’ greatest friend, from California. Tensions increased rapidly thereafter. In December 1845, U.S. Army captain John Charles Fre´mont arrived with 50 heavily armed topographical engineers under orders to give Mexican authorities no “just cause of complaint.” However, the self-centered Fre´ mont became

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typically arrogant and abrasive. On March 5, 1846, General Castro ordered Fre´ mont to leave the vicinity of Monterey specifically and his department generally. Fre´mont, in defiance, took his command into the Gavilan Mountains and on today’s Fre´mont Peak, raised the U.S. flag. After more posturing, on March 10, Fre´mont marched to Sutter’s Fort and then to Oregon. He complained to his wife on April 1, “I have become disgusted with everything belonging to the Mexicans.” In April 1846, Mexican Californian military leaders gathered in Monterey to discuss the future, including on whether to align with Great Britain or the United States. While in session, the U.S. warship Portsmouth, 20 guns, arrived. On April 17, the USS Cyane brought disguised Marine lieutenant Archibald H. Gillespie with secret instructions from Secretary of State James Buchanan for Consul Thomas Larkin and Captain Fre´ mont. Generals Castro and Mariano Vallejo spotted his ruse immediately. Likewise on April 17, settler William Todd wrote home to Kentucky, “The Mexicans talk every spring and fall of driving the foreigners out of the country. They must do it this year or they can never do it.” To emphasize this point, Sub Prefect Francisco Guerrero at San Francisco proclaimed that Americans who did not leave when asked could be “expelled whenever the government may find it convenient.” Concurrently, Fre´mont’s heavy hand came down upon the Native Americans. Larkin complained on March 1, 1846, that “the wild Indians are carrying off thousands of horses” necessary for cattle ranching and farming. On his way north, Fre´mont stopped for several weeks in March and April at Peter Lassen’s ranch along the Sacramento River. Here, his men massacred 175 Indians peaceably going about their daily lives. On May 9, Gillespie caught up with Fre´mont at Klamath Lake in Oregon and delivered his instructions, which essentially told Fre´mont to watch for opportunities. Fre´mont abandoned exploring and returned to the Sutter Buttes, 60 miles from Sacramento, to await developments in the approaching war between the United States and Mexico. Local pressures increased tensions. In late May 1846, rumor joined Indian and Californio attacks on Americans. Captain John Sutter talked to the Miwok chief, who said that General Castro encouraged Indians to burn wheat fields and kill settlers, and in particular, Castro had given Chief Eusebio a new rifle to shoot Sutter. Only force of personality allowed Sutter to maintain his fortified settlement on the California frontier among competing Indians, Californios, and overland immigrants. If the Swiss immigrant would not sell, Castro knew New Helvetia would collapse with Sutter’s death. Castro would then finish off the weakened Americans.

Bear Flag Revolt (1846)

Gillespie picked up the rumor on May 29, Sutter recorded it in his diary on June 3, and his biographer Al Hurtado concluded Sutter had a “sincere belief that it was real.” Sutter checked attempts on his life, while Fre´mont’s men predictably massacred five villages along the Sacramento River of innocent Maidus. The alleged Californio threat, though, led worried Americans to look to the army officer for leadership. Between May 30 and June 8, they gathered around Fre´mont. Settler William Ide received an unsigned note reading: “Notice is hereby given, that a large body of armed Spaniards on horseback, amounting to 250 men, has been seen on their way to the Sacramento Valley, destroying crops, burning the houses, and driving off the cattle. Capt. Fre´mont invites every freeman in the valley to come to his camp.” In this case, loose talk gave rumor credibility. On June 5, General Castro asked General Vallejo for 170 horses to be driven to his headquarters in Santa Clara to use in his coming campaign against Governor Pico. However, when Lieutenant Francisco Arce crossed with the herd at Knight’s Landing (Grafton, Yolo County), he made belligerent remarks about using them against the Americans. Ferryman William Knight rushed to Fre´mont’s camp. Settlers badgered Fre´mont as to whether he would participate, and he gave different answers at different times. Recent biographer Tom Chaffin concluded he was a “nervous prevaricator.” General Mariano Vallejo felt Fre´mont had a “very elastic conscience,” while Ide suspected Fre´mont wanted “neutral conquest,” that is, he wanted General Castro to begin hostilities. With implied consent from Fre´mont, on June 9, Zeke Merritt left with a small party of men, who surprised Arce on June 10, and returned with the horses early on June 11. Fre´mont “highly applauded” the act, according to Ide, but refused to accept the horses for the United States. The raid, though, led the settlers to neutralize the one Mexican settlement in the area, Sonoma. Merritt’s party of 33 started that afternoon. The settlers arrived in the undefended town early on September 14, and began spirited negotiations with the hospitable General Vallejo for his surrender. Merritt began, Bob Semple joined him, and then John Grigsby and Sam Kelsey came in. Finally teetotaler William Ide found that “The bottles had well nigh vanquished the captors!” The victors finally marched Vallejo, his brother Salvador, son-in-law and Alcalde Jacob Leese, and secretary Victor Prudon off to Fre´mont’s camp. Outside Vallejo’s Casa Grande, the restless settlers kept good order. Leaders promptly squelched the one who wished to loot. However, the nature of their revolt baffled them. John Grigsby asked if the leaders had “Captain Fre´mont’s name in black and white to authorize you in this you have done?” When none could produce such a document, Grigsby declared, “I have been deceived. I resign and back

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out.” Ide then rallied the men through his oratory: “Choose ye this day what you will be! We are robbers, or we must be conquerors!” On June 15, 1846, the settlers gained coherence. That morning, they raised a new flag adorned with a grizzly bear, which is now the state flag, and gave themselves a name. Hereafter, they were the Osos or Bears, fathers of the Bear Flag Republic. To provide ideological substance, Ide issued a rambling proclamation, claiming, incredibly, that they had been “invited to this country by a promise of lands” and “a republican government.” With the failure of these supposed Mexican guarantees, the Bear Flaggers called on all “to assist us in establishing and perpetuating a republican liberal, just, and honorable government.” Not surprisingly, when Ide revised his decree on June 18, he dropped the alleged causes and declared the Bears’ intention “to establish good government.” Meantime, General Vallejo, who favored American annexation, blocked an attempt to rescue him, as he expected to be paroled, but on July 16 became a prisoner at Sutter’s Fort. Fre´mont, who now camped there, threatened to send Sutter, as a Mexican citizen, across Mexican lines, and closely confined Vallejo and his friends. At Sonoma, Chief Solano looked after the general’s wife and six children, while Ide commanded the garrison of 25. Naval officers at last secured Vallejo’s release from Fre´mont’s severity on August 1. The Californios were quick to react to the capture of Sonoma. On June 18, Henry L. Ford sent Thomas Cowie and George Fowler to Henry D. Fitch’s ranch on the Russian River to ask superintendent Moses Carson, Kit’s brother, for a barrel of gunpowder. A detachment of Juan Padilla’s command of 25 captured them near Santa Rosa. Similarly, William Todd, on a similar mission, fell into Californio hands. Their fates were different. Three-fingered Jack tortured Cowie and Fowler over two days, stoning them, pulling out broken jaws with riatas, cutting off pieces of their bodies, and finally disemboweling them. Captain Grigsby found the bodies in mid-July “horribly mangled,” while the Monterey Californian of September 12 carried the lurid details. Even though the Bears captured Three-fingered Jack on June 20 and heard of his actions, they did not harm him. He later repaid this kindness by joining Joaquin Murietta’s gang and murdering men of every race and creed. Some miles south, Padilla’s men took Todd to Olompali Rancho, midway between Petaluma and San Rafael. Meantime, General Castro divided his 160 men into three companies under Jose´ A. Carrillo, Manuel Castro, and Joaquin de la Torre. The three would attack Sonoma by different routes, but only de la Torre took action. He crossed the bay with 60 cavalrymen on June 23 from San Pablo, landed at Point San Quentin, and united with the others at Olompali.

Bear Flag Revolt (1846)

Two days later, on June 25, 1846, Captain Ford with 19 men encountered the Californios. The brisk skirmish left one of Torre’s men dead, another wounded, and Todd rescued. That same day, Captain Fre´mont intervened. On June 23, while Torre invaded Marin County, Fre´mont and 90 men marched from Sutter’s Fort to Sonoma. Upon their arrival on June 25, Fre´mont assumed command of a greatly expanded army that now included 140 Bears. The next day, he left a garrison of 75 at Sonoma and departed with 130 men for San Rafael. During Fre´ mont’s week in San Rafael, Sunday, June 28, became a day of infamy. A small boat landed three men, who hoisted their saddles, and started walking toward the mission. Kit Carson queried Fre´mont, who remarked, “I have no room for prisoners.” At 50 yards, without even inquiring of their identity, Carson, Granville Swift, and Sam Neal shot the aged and popular Jose´ de los Reyes Berryessa, and the 20-year-old twins Francisco de and Ramo´n de Haro. “It is well,” was Fre´mont’s comment, although he later blamed the atrocity on his Delaware Indian scouts. Early biographers blistered him for his inhumanity; some later ones have not. Later that day, a captured Indian revealed startling news. Torre planned to attack Sonoma. Fre´mont rushed back, while Torre’s skillful ruse allowed him to return to Contra Costa County unmolested. On June 30, General Castro united his forces in Santa Clara. Meantime, Fre´mont crossed the Golden Gate to the Presidio of San Francisco on July 1, where he disabled the 10 cannon that Vallejo had abandoned a decade before. The Americans then gathered in Sonoma on July 4 for a grand celebration. On July 5, Fre´mont officially ended the Bear Flag Republic after 22 days. The Bear army became Fre´mont’s California Battalion of 250 men commanded by Captains Ford, Swift, and Grigsby. Richard Owens took charge of Fre´mont’s topographical engineers. The indecisive Commodore John Drake Sloat, who might have raised the American flag on July 2, at last raised it in Monterey on July 7. The Stars and Stripes flew in San Francisco on July 9 and then at Sutter’s Fort and Sonoma on July 11. As Old Glory ascended, one observer remarked that “Cubby [the Bear] came down growling.” John Grigsby with 50 men garrisoned Sonoma, and on July 16, he ably summarized affairs to Captain John B. Montgomery, commanding the Portsmouth. First he observed, “The Spaniards appear well satisfied with the change.” Then Grigsby truthfully admitted, “We wish your advice in all respects, as we are a company of men not accustomed to such business.” —Robert J. Chandler See also all entries under Texas Revolt (1835–1836).

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Further Reading Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California. Vol. 5, 1846–1848. San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1886. Harlow, Neal. California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific, 1846–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Hurtado, Albert L. John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. Rosenus, Alan. General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1999. Royce, Josiah. California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886. Walker, Dale L. Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999.

Bear Flaggers Bear Flaggers were not many—only 33 participated in the attack on Sonoma on June 14, 1846—but they were tough. Most came from the border states, often from interrelated families. They were trappers, hunters, farmers, and skilled laborers, not afraid to take six months to cross the country to start anew. Virtually all arrived in the 1840s, most less than a year before the Bear Flag Revolt. Yet, many had already participated in Californio politics when they joined Captain John Sutter in 1845 during the squabble to oust Governor Manuel Micheltorena. All knew how to take care of themselves. William Fallon, (c. 1805–1848), known as “Big” or “Mountain,” was a combative 200-pound Irishman who trapped through the West in the 1830s. O’Fallon Bluffs on the Platte River commemorates him. In 1845, he participated in the Micheltorena campaign with John Sutter, and helped capture Sonoma on June 14. He was a lieutenant in Captain Ford’s company and fought at Olompali. Henry L. Ford (1822–1860) was born in Vermont as Noah E. Ford. In 1842, he deserted from the army at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he was training to be a dragoon officer, when the army would not give him leave to attend his brother’s funeral. Instead, he took his brother’s name and stowed away on a whaler for California. He arrived in Monterey in 1842, became a hunter for Sutter, raised cattle, and participated in the Micheltorena campaign. He was on the horse detail, and the Bears found his military training invaluable. John Grigsby (1806–1876), though born in Tennessee, grew up in Missouri, and arrived in California in 1845 with numerous other family members in the Grigsby– William Ide party. He was one of the negotiators after the Bears captured Sonoma, but withdrew upon learning of Fre´mont’s wishy-washy support. He soon returned, became a respected captain, and a founder of Napa. William B. Ide (1796–1852), a Vermont-born carpenter, farmer, schoolteacher, and rancher, became a Mormon in 1830s Ohio and Missouri, but broke with the church. In 1845, he was living in Illinois and decided to go to Oregon to recoup, but diverted to California. Ide led the Bears until Fre´mont usurped his position. Others found Ide to be strange, fussy, bombastic, dogmatic, but even shrewd. The three Kelsey brothers, Andrew (c. 1820–1849), Ben (1813–1889), and Sam (c. 1816–1866), were born in Kentucky and raised in Missouri. They were members of a large clan of farmers, millwrights, and gunsmiths. Andrew and Ben arrived in 1841 with the Bidwell party, and Ben became a hunter for John Sutter. In 1841, Sam continued on to Oregon, rather than going to California. However, in 1843, he met Ben and Andrew coming north with cattle, and in 1844, he became part of the Kelsey party going from Oregon to California. All helped build Edward

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Turner Bale’s mill at Napa, which became a gathering place for Bears. Sam became a negotiator at Sonoma on June 14, and a Bear lieutenant. Dr. William T. Knight (c. 1805–1849), who came from a good Baltimore family, was cultivated, but hot-tempered. He gave up medicine and journeyed to New Mexico. However, in 1841, being fearless and unafraid authorities expelled him for allegedly fomenting revolution and he arrived in Los Angles that year. In 1843, Knight established a cattle ranch and ferry in Yolo County, and like so many other settlers, he joined Sutter in the Micheltorena campaign. Knight led by personality, and naturally participated in the horse capture. Ezekiel Merritt, a.k.a. “Stuttering Zeke” (1807–c. 1850), was born in Tennessee and grew up to be a raw, illiterate, uncouth trapper. Known for hard drinking, a tobacco-stained beard, and a notched tomahawk, Merritt took action. He trapped in New Mexico and came to California in 1833 with Joseph Walker. In 1841, he was a hunter for Sutter and participated in the 1845 Micheltorena campaign, all of which gave him knowledge of the land. Later that year, he and Henry Ford sold grindstones. Merritt captured General Castro’s horses, which precipitated his attack on Sonoma. Samuel Neal (1817–1859), a Pennsylvanian, joined Fre´mont’s Second Expedition, where he exhibited endurance, strength, and good workmanship. In 1844, Sutter discharged him in California at his request, where he became a blacksmith for Sutter and likewise participated in the Micheltorena campaign. He became a Mexican citizen and received a five-league grant in Butte County, at which Fre´mont and Gillespie stopped. He participated in the horse raid. Robert Baylor Semple, (1806–1854), the son of a Kentucky legislator, trained in dentistry, law, and printing and also attended William and Mary College. Not surprisingly, the exceedingly skinny, six-foot,,eight-inch Semple became known for his rhetoric. He became a steamboat captain and pilot on the Mississippi River in Illinois, until flooded out. On August 17, 1844, he left with Lansford Hastings and 10 men from Missouri and arrived at Sutter’s Fort on December 24, 1845. Semple participated in the horse capture and negotiated at Sonoma on June 14. He later presided over the 1849 state constitutional convention. Granville Swift (1821–1875), was another Kentuckian, a nephew of Daniel Boone and related to the Todds and the Semples. While his family became prominent landowners in Missouri, Swift became a hunter. He went to Oregon in 1843, and came to California with the Kelsey party in 1844. The six-foot, one-inch Swift was with the horse party and the raid on Sonoma. Although he became wealthy, he never became cultured. William Todd (1818–1883), a cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln, was trained as a druggist, but often in poor health. By the 1840s he was in Missouri at loose ends, and in 1845, joined the Grigsby-Ide party. Todd settled in Yolo County and

Bear Flag Revolt (1846)

witnessed the growing tension. “There will be a revolution,” he predicted on April 17, 1846, adding that if he were still in California, “I will take a hand in it.” Todd designed the Bear Flag. —Robert J. Chandler

Further Reading Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California. Vol. 5, 1846–1848. San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1886. Warner, Barbara R. The Men of the California Bear Flag Revolt and Their Heritage. Spokane, WA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1996.

Fre´mont, John Charles (1813–1890) Conceived in the liaison between a royalist French teacher and a married woman, John Charles Fre´mont came into the world controversially, and his life mirrored his origins. Possessed with a brilliant mind, he could be impulsive, devious, inscrutable, manipulative, charismatic, self-centered, and vain. One constant was a disdain for all those over him, including the president of the United States. As a loner, Fre´mont was not forthright in what he wanted, allowing others to turn his deviousness in politics and business to their advantage. Fre´mont’s acknowledged skills brought him a direct commission in 1838 from the secretary of war into the elite Army Topographical Engineers. Then, in 1841, he secretly married Jessie, the vivacious daughter of Missouri’s powerful senator Thomas Hart Benton, which gave him unrivaled preferment to lead three army surveying expeditions between 1842 and 1846. Guide Kit Carson and a bodyguard of able Delaware Indians scouts were common to Fre´mont’s fieldwork, but what especially distinguished his surveys were the accurate scientific measurements, the multitude of observations about geography, flora, and fauna. The First Expedition in 1842 traversed South Pass into the tangled Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. On a rugged 13,500-foot mountain, now known as Fre´ mont Peak, the explorer unfurled the Stars and Stripes. Fre´ mont’s Second Expedition in 1843–1844 journeyed to Oregon, Nevada, across the Sierra in winter to Sutter’s Fort, through Southern California, and back to the Salt Lake area via Las Vegas. Fre´mont’s reports, published in 1843 and 1845, became best sellers. They sang of the land and the glories of this national heritage running all the way to the Pacific. They encouraged settlers to Oregon and later to California, while Brigham

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Young knew that the Great Salt Lake would be a haven for the persecuted Mormons. John and Jessie were celebrities, and the nation adored them. Fre´mont’s Third Expedition began in 1845 and culminated with the Bear Flag Revolt. Fre´mont, with news from Senator Benton, could feel the tension of the approaching war with Mexico and evidently wished to be around if something happened. After he reached California in December 1845, he seemed to be in no hurry to be anywhere. When he approached Monterey early in 1846, Consul Thomas Larkin warned, “Your encamping so near town has caused much excitement.” Fre´mont instead antagonized General Jose´ Castro. Tom Chaffin, in his 2002 biography of Fre´mont, declared Fre´mont’s comments on his actions to be “duplicitous apologia.” Fre´mont gave conflicting answers to the settlers and abused natural allies John Sutter and Mariano Vallejo. During the Bear Flag Republic, Fre´mont was also responsible for all of the wanton bloodshed from the American side, two attacks on peaceful Indians and the execution of three Californios. After California became American, Fre´mont became involved in turmoil, some not of his own making. Commodore Robert F. Stockton had quickly replaced the aged and infirm Commodore John D. Sloat, and worked well with Fre´mont. The Americans captured Los Angeles on August 13, but unfortunately, Stockton placed the rigid Gillespie in command. The Californios revolted on September 22, forced Gillespie’s surrender on September 29, and kept the Americans at bay until the New Year. While Fre´mont marched south, Commodore Stockton and General Stephen Watts Kearny put together a huge force for the times, 550 men, and reentered Los Angeles on January 10. General Andres Pico, however, preferred to surrender on Fre´mont’s generous terms on January 12 at Cahuenga. Commodore Stockton then appointed Fre´mont governor on January 16, but the irascible General Kearny disagreed. After several weeks, Kearny ordered Fre´mont court-martialed. Fre´mont continued to have wonderful opportunities—U.S. Senator, owner of the rich Mariposa gold mines, two more exploring expeditions in 1848–1849, and 1853–1854, first Republican presidential candidate in 1856, Civil War general, railroad promoter, and governor of Arizona Territory—but through events and his own actions, they came to nothing. —Robert J. Chandler

Further Reading Chaffin, Tom. Pathfinder: John Charles Fre´mont and the Course of American Empire. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Egan, Ferol. Fre´mont: Explorer for a Restless Nation. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1985.

Bear Flag Revolt (1846) Nevins, Allan. Fre´mont: Pathmarker of the West. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1955. Rolle, Andrew. John Charles Fre´mont: Character as Destiny. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Sonoma Sonoma, the most prominent town north of San Francisco Bay, began in 1823 when Father Jose´ Altimira chose the site for Mission San Francisco Solano. Although the final mission was established just before secularization in 1833, it supported 1,000 Indians on the produce of 5,000 sheep and goats, 3,500 cattle, 725 horses, 500 pigs, and 3,300 bushels of grain. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1808–1890) became the administrator of the property. On June 24, 1835, Governor Jose´ Figueroa ordered General Vallejo to found a pueblo, encourage settlers, fight raiding Indians, and watch the Russians at Fort Ross. Vallejo closed the Presidio of San Francisco and moved its garrison to Sonoma, which he spaciously laid out. The huge plaza—200 varas to a side, a vara being 33 inches— today contains the city hall set amid parkland. East of the plaza and across First Street stood the mission, quadrangle, and straw huts for the few Indians remaining. Most impressive was Vallejo’s complex, covering 600 feet on the north side of the plaza along Spain Street. Moving from east to west, at the east end was a two-story adobe barracks, 110 feet long by 50 feet, with a five-foot-wide balcony running its full length. A 52-by-45-foot hall at the eastern end served to assemble the troops, 40 cavalry, and 25 Indian infantry, and today, state park rangers assemble tourists. Westward, a 25-foot wall connected it to Vallejo’s “L”-shaped home, with its similar balcony and equal 50-foot width. Casa Grande exemplified its name with a 130-foot frontage, but even its short wing was 100 feet. At the west end, where the wings joined, a 15-foot square, four-story tower rose. Each floor had a narrow balcony for watchmen. A 150-foot wall attached the tower to the two-story adobe home of Vallejo’s brother Salvador. Additionally, fences and walls separated outbuildings for stables, barns, and other uses. The general soon had bearing pear and peach trees, and beginning in 1837, he made 250 gallons of wine and 280 gallons of brandy from his 100-yard square vineyard. By order and by his cosmopolitan, generous nature, General Vallejo encouraged settlers to his new town. In late 1834, Jose´ Maria Hı´jar and Jose´ Maria Padre´s

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arrived with 150 artisans, and some settled in Sonoma. Alas, they entered factional politics, and Vallejo arrested both leaders. Appropriately, Lieutenant Prado Mesa had charge of the adobe jail along the east side of the plaza among the homes of retired soldiers. Through the 1830s, General Vallejo and his ally Chief Solano fought smallpox, campaigned against hostile Indians, attempted to stop epidemic horse stealing— similar to automobile theft today—and reduced the kidnapping of Indian children. Unfortunately, Chief Solano turned out to be one of the chief traders. The general, at least, curtailed his involvement. The sea always brought a few foreigners, but beginning in 1841, American overlanders appeared, many of whom received large land grants. On the west side of the plaza, Alcalde (Mayor) Jacob Leese, Vallejo’s brother-in-law, built a handsome two-story adobe home. Nearby was Captain Henry D. Fitch, another brother-in-law, and Victor Prudon, Vallejo’s secretary. American arrivals in 1844 included the Kelsey party of 34 from Oregon with several future Bear Flaggers, and in 1845, 450 came to California. Among them, 20 families from the party led by future Bear Flaggers John Grigsby and William B. Ide settled around Sonoma. Vallejo, though, yearned for the United States to absorb California and expected no trouble. In 1844, with the Russians gone and the frontier quiet, he grew tired of paying the soldiers and dismissed the Sonoma garrison. When the Bear Flaggers entered the northern Mexican headquarters on June 14, 1846, the barracks were empty. During the Bear Flag Republic, William Ide garrisoned Sonoma with 25 men, and it became the headquarters for recruits. By June 25, about 120 Bears were in town. Soon John Grigsby garrisoned Sonoma with 50 men. The Bears maintained perfect order, with no looting or mayhem. In American California, Sonoma incorporated as a town in 1850 and became the county seat. A large lumber business supported local commerce, and for a while, Sonoma was a stopping point on the way to the mines. Soon, however, miners went upriver to Sacramento, and in 1854, Santa Rosa became the county seat. In 1851, General Vallejo moved a half-mile away (his home Lachryma Montis is a state park) and Casa Grande became a school before burning in 1867. In the mid1870s, Sonoma quietly became famous for wine through the famed vineyards of General Vallejo, Jacob Rink Snyder, Agoston Haraszthy, a family soon among Vallejo’s in-laws, Jacob Gundlach, and Emil Dresel. It keeps that distinction today. —Robert J. Chandler

Further Reading Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California. Vol. 5, 1846–1848. San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1886.

Bear Flag Revolt (1846) Harlow, Neal. California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific, 1846–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Rosenus, Alan. General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1999. Royce, Josiah. California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886.

William B. Ide’s Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic (1846) In June 1846, a group of about 30 California settlers responded to a threat from the Mexican government to expel all settlers who were not Mexican citizens by seizing the town of Sonoma and taking into custody the Mexican commandante of Northern California. On June 15, the rebellious settlers issued the following proclamation, which was written by one of their number, a recent arrival named William Brown Ide. Two days later, Ide and his colleagues raised the Bear Flag in Sonoma, thereby proclaiming California an independent republic. Ide was then chosen as commander of the new republic. Only 25 days later, Ide and his group supported the American commander John C. Fremont when his forces took control of California for the United States. To all persons, citizens of Sonoma, requesting them to remain at peace, and to follow their rightful occupations without fear of molestation. The Commander in Chief of the Troops assembled at the Fortress of Sonoma gives his inviolable pledge to all persons in California not found under arms that they shall not be disturbed in their persons, their property or social relations one to another by men under his command. He also solemnly declares his object to be First, to defend himself and companions in arms who were invited to this country by a promise of Lands on which to settle themselves and families who were also promised a “republican government,” who, when having arrived in California were denied even the privilege of buying or renting Lands of their friends, who instead of being allowed to participate in or being protected by a “Republican Government” were oppressed by a “Military Despotism,” who were even threatened, by “Proclamation” from the Chief Officer of the aforesaid Despotism, with extermination if they would not depart our of the Country, leaving all of their property, their arms and beasts of burden, and thus deprived of the means of flight or defense. We were to be driven through deserts, inhabited by hostile Indians to certain destruction. To overthrow a Government which has seized upon the property of the Missions for its individual aggrandizement; which has ruined and shamefully oppressed the laboring people of California, by their enormous exactions on goods imported into this country; is the determined purpose of the brave men who are associated under his command. He also solemnly declares his object in the Second place to be to invite all peaceable and good Citizens of California who are friendly to the maintenance of good order and equal rights (and I do hereby invite them to repair to my camp at Sonoma without delay)

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Bear Flag Revolt (1846) to assist us in establishing and perpetuating a “Republican Government” which shall secure to all: civil and religious liberty; which shall detect and punish crime; which shall encourage industry, virtue and literature; which shall leave unshackled by Fetters, Commerce, Agriculture, and Mechanism. He further declares that he relies upon the rectitude of our intentions; the favor of Heaven and the bravery of those who are bound to and associated with him, by the principle of self preservation; by the love of truth; and by the hatred of tyranny for his hopes of success. He further declares that he believes that a Government to be prosperous and happyfying in its tendency must originate with its people who are friendly to its existence. That its Citizens are its Guardians, its officers are its Servants, and its Glory their reward. Source: Fred Blackburn Rogers, William Brown Ide, Bear Flagger (San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1962), appendix A.

Bleeding Kansas (1854–1858) “Bleeding Kansas” is a phrase contemporaries used to describe the partisan warfare in the Kansas Territory that occurred between antislavery Free State and proslavery elements. Both sides sought to influence Kansas’s impending entry into the Union as a slave or free state through the use of terror and intimidation of their opponents. Both sides justified their actions as self-defense, and each viewed the other as illegitimate. The violence was concentrated in the eastern half of the territory and was conducted by settlers in Kansas as well as proslavery “border ruffians” from the neighboring slave state of Missouri. The violence in “Bleeding Kansas” polarized the nation and served as a portent for the American Civil War. The violence in the Kansas Territory had its origins in passage of the KansasNebraska Act of 1854. With the enactment of this legislation, the U.S. Congress, in effect, nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery in the territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and served as the basis for sectional peace on the slavery question for more than 30 years. In the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Congress replaced the ban on slavery with the concept of “popular sovereignty.” This provision was supported by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories and the dominant figure in Congress and the Democratic Party in the 1850s. Popular sovereignty held that the inhabitants of a territory could decide on the question of slavery before its admission as a state. Originally, Douglas and other advocates of popular sovereignty assumed that Kansas was too far north for the use of slaves and that, consequently, slave owners would not settle there. They did not realize that the farmland along the Missouri River in the eastern part of the territory was as conducive to the use of slaves as the “black belt” of western Missouri, where most of the state’s slaveholders and their charges lived. Adding fuel to the combustible Kansas question was its location. As the northernmost of the slave states, Missouri was already bordered by the free states of Iowa to the north and Illinois to the east. There was no question that Nebraska to the northwest would enter the Union as a free state. If Kansas also entered the Union as a free state, Missouri would be enclosed on three sides, heightening the prospects of slave flight (or even insurrection) as well as abolitionist activity. It was small wonder that proslavery Missourians viewed a free Kansas as a threat.

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The settlement of Kansas, the formation of a territorial government, and Kansas’s status as slave or free thus became highly politicized and emotional issues with an inherent potential for violence. The first emigrants into the new territory were settlers from the nearby slave states, particularly Missouri. Proslavery in outlook, they established settlements at Atchison and Leavenworth. Antislavery settlers also moved into Kansas and congregated near the towns of Lawrence and Topeka. The earliest of these moved from the Upper Midwest. Later emigrants, encouraged and funded (and often provided with arms) by antislavery organizations such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company, came from New England and the Ohio Valley. The initial elections for the state legislature on March 30, 1855, further polarized both the settler community in Kansas and the country as a whole. The election campaign was marred by violence on both sides. Although the territorial governor, Andrew H. Reeder, (whom President Pierce appointed in late 1854 and who was to be the first of seven to hold the position), proclaimed that only residents of the territory were eligible to vote, he was unable to enforce his own rules. Although over half the established settlers in Kansas at the time were from Missouri, this was not a secure enough majority to satisfy proslavery activists such as David Atchison. Inflamed by rumors that 30,000 antislavery northerners were descending on Kansas to inflate the vote totals for the Free Soilers, a flood of “one-day Kansans” crossed over from Missouri to vote in the elections. With these fraudulent votes and widespread threats against antislavery settlers, many of whom were forcibly expelled from their land and forced to leave the territory, a proslavery legislature was elected. Where an early census showed only 2,500 men in the territory, over 5,000 votes had been cast (Freehling 2007, 75). Despite the apparent fraud, President Pierce recognized the new proslavery legislature as legitimate. The first Kansas territorial legislature convened on July 2, 1855, in Pawnee and later moved east to Shawnee Mission. It enacted a constitution that approved slavery and barred opponents of slavery from holding state office. Antislavery elements, led by Charles Robinson, vowed to set up an alternative antislavery government. They convened their own constitutional convention at Topeka in October 1855 and drafted the Topeka Constitution, which banned slavery in the territory. Elections sanctioned by the Topeka delegates were held on January 15, 1856, with free-state men participating. They elected an antislavery legislature and also voted Robinson as governor. Kansas thus had two governments—the proslavery government recognized by the Pierce administration seated at Shawnee Mission, and one created by Free Staters in opposition with its capital at Topeka. Each considered the other fraudulent. In this atmosphere, violence was inevitable. The apparent fraud in the March 1855 elections gave ammunition to antislavery militants, such as John

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Brown and James H. Lane, who advocated violence against proslavery forces. Both sides had organized local militias for self-defense. The largest proslavery militia was the Platte County Self-Defense Association, organized by Atchison, which had Free State areas during the election campaign. Among the largest Free Soil militias was the Pottawatomie Rifles, organized by John Brown Jr. with the encouragement of the elder Brown. Local militias had already clashed in the “Wakarusa War” in November 1855, and emotions remained high on both sides. These tensions exploded into violence during a four-day period from May 21 to May 25, 1856, ignited by the sacking of Lawrence, one of the centers of antislavery sentiment, by a proslavery sheriff’s posse on May 21 and the massacre in retaliation of several prominent proslavery activists by an antislavery band led by John Brown and his sons. The posse, led by Franklin County sheriff Samuel Jones, had been sent by the Shawnee Mission government to arrest several antislavery activists sheltering in Lawrence. The raid resulted in the destruction of a newspaper office and the burning of several private homes along with the local church. Brown learned of the attack on Lawrence while camped nearby with a company of Pottawatomie Rifles. For him and several of his followers, the raid was the last straw. Not only were they enraged by continuing reports of widespread violence by “border ruffians” against Free State settlers, they were also angered by what Brown viewed as the cowardly response by antislavery leaders such as Robinson, who urged Free Soilers to exercise restraint. He regarded them as little more than traitors to the antislavery cause. John Brown viewed the Lawrence incident as an opportunity to put his advocacy of violence against proslavery supporters into action. On May 24, he, along with four of his sons and seven other members of their company, undertook a retaliatory expedition. Even though no one had been killed in Lawrence, they killed five prominent slavery supporters over the next two days in the vicinity of Pottawatomie Creek. The Pottawatomie Massacre, as it came to be known, sent shockwaves through Kansas, Missouri, and the rest of the country. Far from deterring further attacks from border ruffians and proslavery Kansans, it precipitated a savage guerilla war along the Missouri-Kansas border that intensified in 1856. The violence of the spring and early summer had ignited the tinderbox of hostility between the two communities and had intensified the cycle of attack and retribution that threatened to engulf the entire region. Both pro- and antislavery militias attacked suspected opponents. These raids often resulted in the burning of farms, looting, and frequent killings. Frequently, the raiders used their depredations for indiscriminate looting and thievery regardless of the politics of their victims. In early June, a proslavery band attacked Osawatomie, widely considered to be John

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Brown’s home base, and burned it to the ground. Other attacks by bands of slavery advocates occurred at Sugar Mound and other Free Soil towns. Amid escalating violence, the Topeka legislature convened on July 4, 1856, to submit a Free State constitution to the U.S. Congress. Under orders from President Pierce, who considered the existence of the Topeka government to be treasonous and a threat to his authority, federal troops broke it up. Despite this action, Congress considered the Topeka Constitution as the basis for admission to the Union. The House passed it later in July, but it failed in the Senate. The failure of the Topeka Constitution and the breakup of the Topeka government proved to be only temporary victories for the proslavery faction in Kansas. The summer of 1856 marked the height of the political dominance of the proslavery forces in the territory. Despite continuing violence, thousands of Free Soil emigrants poured into Kansas from New England and the Ohio Valley. The political balance in the Kansas Territory shifted toward the antislavery faction. The proslavery Lecompton Constitution was voted down by a resounding majority of Free Soil voters in January 1858. With the influx of thousands of northern settlers and the return of exiled Free Soilers driven out earlier by border ruffians, the proslavery community, now in the minority, faced growing harassment and intimidation from these returnees looking to settle scores and take back land they felt had been usurped and bands led by Brown, Lane, James Montgomery, Charles Jennison, and other Free Soil partisan bands who came to be known collectively as “Jayhawkers.” The guerilla war in the Kansas Territory reached its height on May 19, 1858, when a band of 20 to 30 proslavery raiders, many of whom were southerners or Missourians who had been driven from their claims, crossed into Kansas. seized 11 Free-Soil settlers from their homesteads, herded them into a ravine near the town of Trading Post, and fired on them, killing five. They then rode off, leaving all 11 for dead. Miraculously, four were wounded and survived and two were not hit at all (Neely 2007, 68–69). In retaliation for these attacks, gangs of Free Soil raiders, the most active among them the militia headed by James Montgomery, attacked proslavery farms in the Bourbon County area near Fort Scott. On June 7, 1858, Montgomery attacked the town of Fort Scott despite the presence of federal troops in the nearby fort. They inflicted few casualties and did little damage, but still demonstrated that not even the U.S. Army would deter the partisan warfare. By the summer of 1858, the situation in eastern Kansas was growing desperate. Patrolling U.S. troops reported widespread damage from raiders from both sides that threatened to disrupt agricultural production. Dozens of farms were burning or abandoned. Fortunately, cooler heads in both Kansas and Missouri, fearing open warfare between the Kansas Territory and its neighbor, stepped in to assert control.

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In June 1858, a week after Montgomery’s raid on Fort Scott, Kansas governor James Denver (the seventh appointee in four years), traveled to Fort Scott, brought the warring factions together, and negotiated an uneasy truce guaranteeing amnesty for all sides in exchange for an end to the violence. Governor Charles Stewart of Missouri also cracked down on proslavery extremists along the western border to prevent further attacks against Kansas settlers. By 1858, however, the damage had been done. Four years of political violence in “Bleeding Kansas” polarized the entire country as well as the KansasMissouri border. The extent to which the Kansas crisis had inflamed opinion throughout the country was apparent in May 1856 when South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks attacked Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate and nearly beat him to death with a cane. Brooks was enraged by Sumner’s two-day oration on “the crime against Kansas” in which he had used lurid prose to describe how the “slave power” had used force to try to make Kansas a slave state. The violence in Kansas galvanized the new Republican Party and gave it a strengthened sense of identity in the North and Northwest. It contributed to Lincoln’s and the Republican victory in the presidential elections of 1860. On the other hand, the violence perpetrated by Brown, Lane, Montgomery, and other “Jayhawkers” fed fears of abolitionist violence throughout the South. These fears fed the growing secessionist sentiment in the southern and border states and made compromise more difficult. The seeds for the sectional rupture and the ensuing American Civil War were sown in “Bleeding Kansas” in the guerilla war that had occurred in the middle and late 1850s. Kansas was finally admitted as a Free State in January 1861, but Free Soilers could take little solace for the southern states that had earlier opposed Kansas’s admission had seceded. Nor did the uneasy truce along the Kansas-Missouri border survive the onset of the national conflict. The outbreak of the Civil War reignited the border violence and led to even more ferocious partisan violence in western Missouri and eastern Kansas. Ironically, both sides framed the justification for violence in terms of democratic values and individual liberty. In addition, antislavery and proslavery settlers had a great deal in common. Free Soilers were not necessarily abolitionists, or even in sympathy with the slaves or in favor of black equality. (The Topeka Constitution banned free blacks from settling in Kansas). Most small farmers from New England and the Midwest feared competition from large slave-based plantations and from slave labor. They were content to allow slavery to exist in the states where it was already established, but did not want it in their territory. Most Missourians who settled in Kansas or who rode with the “border ruffians” did not own slaves, but feared slave uprisings and the possibility of slave flight as threats to their way of life if Missouri permitted another free state on its borders.

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Neither side saw room for compromise. In this sense, “Bleeding Kansas” reflected the state of the nation in the 1850s. —Walter F. Bell See also all entries under Harpers Ferry Raid (1859).

Further Reading Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854– 1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Neely, Jeremy. The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the KansasMissouri Line. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Rawley, James A. Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1969.

Guerilla Warfare in Kansas and Missouri Guerilla warfare is unconventional warfare involving small groups of irregular combatants using mobile tactics to fight larger conventional armies. Guerilla fighters often come from the local population from which they draw support and shelter. Irregular warfare in the American Civil War was common in the hinterlands of the border states, especially the border region of western Missouri and eastern Kansas, and was marked by savage, no-quarter, partisan fighting. Guerilla war in Kansas and Missouri sprang from local conflicts (often over slavery or Union versus secessionist sentiment) that predated the war’s outbreak. These clashes spawned local self-defense groups that evolved into loosely organized partisan bands who sought to protect their own communities while terrorizing their opponents. The best known of the pro-Confederate guerilla bands (known as “Bushwackers”) were led by William Clark Quantrill and William (“Bloody Bill”) Anderson. Federal militias often exceeded their Confederate counterparts in the atrocities they committed. Most notable among these were the “Redlegs,” raised by the abolitionist U.S. senator from Kansas, James K. Lane, and the “Jayhawkers” raised by Lane’s ally, Charles Jennison. Dozens of these local bands instigated a reign of terror that lasted until the end of the Civil War and often beyond. The pro-southern guerilla activity put the Confederate leadership, both in Richmond and on the state level, in a quandary. On one hand, Confederate partisans disrupted Union communications and supplies and tied down thousands of Union troops. On the other, their individualistic nature and their capacity for uncontrolled violence against Unionist civilians were a constant source of embarrassment. Confederate partisans often resorted to outlawry that indiscriminately victimized any civilians they encountered. Atrocities against Unionists threatened to create a backlash that would hurt the Confederacy politically. As the war went on, guerilla bands became refuges for deserters and individuals wishing to avoid conscription. Legislation enacted by the Confederate Congress aimed at limiting and controlling the guerillas failed due to vague wording and local resistance. Perhaps the worst example of guerilla violence occurred on August 21, 1863, when a large band of partisans, led by Quantrill and Anderson, attacked the Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, killed 148 military-age males, both black and white, and burned most of the town to the ground. They targeted Senator Lane, who barley escaped, along with a number of other Redleg and Jayhawker leaders. Quantrill’s defenders claimed that the raid was a reprisal for atrocities committed against pro-Confederate civilians in Missouri. The Lawrence Raid led to major Union reprisals against the pro-southern communities in western Missouri. The U.S. Army District of the Border in Kansas City

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issued General Order Number 11 on August 25, 1863, which forced all residents in Clay, Bates, and Jackson counties in western Missouri out of their homes and resulted in massive destruction of homes and crops. The guerilla war in Kansas and Missouri left a legacy of violence that continued into the postwar years. Many “Bushwackers”—most notably Jesse and Frank James and Cole Younger—continued in the postwar years as outlaws who justified their crimes as a continuation of the war. As was the case throughout the southern and border states, wartime partisan violence echoed in Missouri with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremisist terror against blacks and Reconstruction Republicans. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Castel, Albert. Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jayhawkers “Jayhawkers” is a term used in reference to Kansas-based Unionist militias who fought proslavery guerillas in the years immediately before the Civil War. After the outbreak of the national conflict in 1861, federal cavalry regiments raised in Kansas continued to use the term in reference to themselves. The sobriquet did not always have positive connotations. Pro-southern settlers in Kansas and western Missouri hated the “Jayhawkers” for the indiscriminate terror and suffering they caused. Like their proslavery/pro-Confederate “Bushwacker” counterparts, these bands began as improvised self-defense units that grew out of the violent political struggle between Free Soilers and slavery supporters for control of the Kansas Territory. The violence began with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 with its provisions that Kansas orientation on slavery would be determined by popular vote—the concept of “popular sovereignty.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act triggered off a wave of immigration by settlers from northern states with encouragement from Abolitionist organizations. Likewise, settlers from neighboring slave states also pored into the territory. They were accompanied by “border ruffians” from neighboring Missouri who crossed

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the Kansas-Missouri border to augment the proslavery vote and to intimidate free state immigrants. Local “Jayhawker” militias arose as Free Soilers sought to defend themselves. The pillaging of the free-state capital of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, galvanized the formation of dozens of local militias who carried out reprisals both in western Missouri and against pro-southern areas in southeast Kansas. This period saw the emergence of militant abolitionist leaders such as James H. Lane, Charles Jennison, and James Montgomery, who were key Jayhawker leaders. Of these individuals, Montgomery was initially the most active. Organizing a large band in the winter of 1857–1858, Montgomery led his Jayhawkers on a series of violent actions against proslavery settlements in Southeast Kansas, which included burnings of farms, the destruction of livestock, and floggings (and frequent killings) of suspected slavery advocates. Following the onset of general war and Kansas’s admission into the Union as a free state in 1861, the state government, with federal support and encouragement, raised a number of cavalry regiments in which Jayhawkers figured prominently. The regiments raised by Lane (now a U.S. senator and a Union general) came to be known as “Redlegs” because of the red leggings worn by their members. The best-known of these officially approved regiments was the Seventh Kansas Cavalry raised and commanded by Charles Jennison, a physician who had moved to Kansas from New York and who had already gained a fearsome reputation for Jayhawking. “Jennison’s Jayhawkers,” earned such a reputation for indiscriminate brutality in the Kansas-Missouri border region that the federal command in St. Louis transferred them out of the theater. Jennison resigned after being passed over for promotion to brigadier general in April 1862. Likewise, in the autumn of 1861, Lane led his Redlegs on a series of bloody raids into southwestern Missouri, which culminated in an attack on Osceola on September 23. In the sacking of Osceola, Lane and his men killed nine men and then burned and looted the entire town. Following the lead of the officially sanctioned Kansas regiments, smaller independent bands of Jayhawkers sprang up all along the border region. They operated outside the formal Union command structure and proved difficult to control as they terrorized pro-Confederate areas throughout the war. Many of these bands included criminals who preyed on Confederate and Union sympathizers alike. “Jayhawking” was part of a cycle of attack and reprisal engaged in by both sides that polarized the people of eastern Kansas and western Missouri. Lane, Jennison, and their henchmen, far from suppressing pro-Confederate sentiment in the region, strengthened it and drove many otherwise peaceful farmers into Confederate partisan bands. —Walter F. Bell

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Further Reading Castel, Albert. Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998. Starr, Stephen Z. Jennison’s Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry Regiment and Its Commander. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

Missouri Compromise (1820–1821) The Missouri Compromise was an agreement reached between the pro- and antislavery factions of the U.S. Congress in 1820 and 1821. It aimed at regulating slavery in the western territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and preserving the political balance between slave and free states. The debate that led to this compromise served as an early warning of the potential divisiveness of the slavery issue and the danger it posed to the Union. The dispute that ended in the Missouri Compromise began when the territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union late in 1818. It was a foregone conclusion that Missouri would enter as a slave state as most of those who had settled the territory were southerners and many owned slaves. Complicating the question was Alabama’s admission as a slave state in 1818, evening the balance between the slave and free states. Missouri’s impending statehood raised concerns among antislavery members of Congress that a new slave state would upset the political balance—particularly in the U.S. Senate—and lead to slavery’s unfettered expansion. Feelings in Congress and the country erupted on February 13, 1819, when, in response to the Missouri statehood bill brought before the House of Representatives, New York Congressman James Tallmadge introduced an amendment banning introduction of new slaves into Missouri and providing for the eventual freedom of all slaves born there. The House members were unprepared for Tallmadge’s action and, as a result, congressmen on both sides of the slavery question exchanged views with an intensity and candor previously unseen. An initial House amendment prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory except for Missouri, but the Senate refused to agree, and the initial effort to reach a compromise collapsed. The question arose again in the next session of Congress. A new element in the maneuvering was Maine’s application for admission as a free state. The Senate decided to link admission of both states. It passed a bill admitting Maine and permitting Missouri to write a state constitution supporting slavery. Congress agreed, and Maine was admitted on March 3, 1820. This became known as the First Missouri Compromise.

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President Franklin Pierce, presidential nominee James Buchanan, Sen. Lewis Cass, and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas force a man down the throat of a giant in an 1856 political cartoon satirizing the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed popular sovereignty in regard to slavery in the two territories. The act nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820. (Library of Congress)

The new compromise was threatened when Missouri lawmakers submitted a constitution prohibiting free blacks from residing in the state. This measure angered antislavery elements in Congress and raised questions concerning the citizenship status of free blacks throughout the country. Henry Clay diffused this second crisis with a proposal that bypassed the question of black citizenship. Congress accepted Clay’s suggestion along with a ban on slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase lands—except for Arkansas. On February 26, 1821, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state. This second Missouri Compromise ended the initial slavery crisis. The Missouri Compromise preserved the political balance between slave and free states for the next 30 years. It prohibited the expansion of slavery in practice while permitting it in principle. The Missouri Compromise, however, failed to address the underlying differences over the nature of slavery and its meaning for American democracy. Developments in the 1840s and 1850s—the acquisition of new territories in the Southwest from Mexico, the organization of the Kansas and Nebraska territories, the rise of “popular sovereignty,” and the violence in “Bleeding

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Kansas”—led to the unraveling of the Missouri Compromise well before the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the Dred Scott case in 1859. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Forbes, Robert Pierce. The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Popular Sovereignty Popular sovereignty was a political concept that held that settlers of U.S. territories were entitled to decide whether they would join the Union as a slave or a free state. It had particularly strong appeal to Democrats from northwestern states, such as Senators Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas, perhaps the dominant Democratic politician of the 1850s, saw popular sovereignty as a device for asserting Democratic supremacy in the territories and uniting southern and western Democrats. In a broad sense, popular sovereignty was the same as local self-government. It emerged as an issue during the slavery debate in 1848 as a possible solution to the problem of slavery in the lands acquired from Mexico. Popular sovereignty, as Douglas and other advocates envisioned it, proposed allowing the people settling any organized territory rather than Congress to determine whether or not to permit slavery before entering the Union. Popular sovereignty was mentioned in the Compromise of 1850, which included admission of California as a free state but permitted organization of the other territories in the Mexican cession with no restrictions on slavery pending a vote by the settlers in these territories. The Compromise of 1850 strengthened the determination of the proslavery elements in Congress to assert southern rights in the organization of any new territories. This stance was to have dire consequences for the debate on the organization of the Kansas-Nebraska territories, which arose when a bill for their organization was submitted in 1854. Proslavery legislators made clear to supporters of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill that they would not support organization unless their concerns were addressed. Senator Douglas seized on popular sovereignty as a solution to the deadlock. Douglas viewed popular sovereignty as a creed that fit his beliefs in democracy, local self-government, and expansion based on democratic principles. He had no reservations about applying popular sovereignty to slavery because he did not consider slavery to be a moral issue. It left open the issue of whether or not North or

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South, slavery or antislavery, would gain in the territories. Douglas considered the Missouri Compromise of 1820–1821, which banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase lands north of Missouri, to be out of date. For their part, southerners found the possibility of introducing slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska territories through popular sovereignty more attractive than an outright prohibition. Many linked popular sovereignty to a possible repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Antislavery northerners, on the other hand, found Douglas’s substitution of popular sovereignty for a ban on slavery difficult to accept not only because of the threat it posed to the political balance between slave and free states, but also because they saw slavery as morally wrong regardless of popular feeling in the territories. Antislavery legislators accused Douglas of breaking faith with the antislavery tradition of the generation of the American Revolution. In addition, many northern abolitionist religious leaders considered slavery a violation of the laws of God. Despite intense opposition, Douglas engineered passage of the KansasNebraska Act including provisions for determining the slave or free status of the territories through popular vote. He managed this feat with a coalition of southern Whigs and Democrats. President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 29, 1854. Senator Douglas and the other supporters of popular sovereignty saw it as the ultimate expression of democracy. They failed to comprehend the depth of feeling in both the pro- and antislavery camps. Douglas’s tragic error was his assumption that, although the provision for voting on slavery reopened the slavery issue in the territories, popular sovereignty was sufficiently flexible in its application to silence any public agitation. He did not understand the divisiveness of the slavery issue or that neither side would simply accept the popular will when principles they held sacred were threatened. The violence surrounding the organization of the Kansas Territory would expose the shortcomings of popular sovereignty. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Pottawatomie Massacre (1856) This incident was a central event in the cycle of political violence between proand antislavery forces in the Kansas Territory, which gave it the name “Bleeding Kansas.” It occurred on May 24 and 25, 1856, when John Brown and a band of

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abolitionist settlers killed five proslavery men near Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County near the Kansas-Missouri border. The massacre was a reprisal for the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas—a stronghold of antislavery sentiment—on May 21 by a proslavery sheriff’s posse led by Franklin County sheriff Samuel Jones sent by the territorial government to arrest several antislavery activists. The raid resulted in the destruction of a newspaper office, the destruction of several private homes, and the burning of a church. Brown learned of Lawrence’s misfortune on May 23 while camped with a company of antislavery militia from Osawatomie on patrol near Lawrence. For him and several of his followers, the attack on Lawrence was the last straw. Brown led a faction of Free Soilers that advocated violence against proslavery elements. Their arguments were strengthened by reports of widespread violence against antislavery settlers by “border ruffians” from Missouri and abuses and fraud in the March 1855 territorial elections that had resulted in the seating of a proslavery territorial legislature. They were also enraged by news of an attack on abolitionist senator William Graham Sumner, who was caned nearly to death by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Brown was enraged not only by violence against free-state settlers but also by what he viewed as a cowardly response by leaders of the antislavery faction who urged their followers to exercise restraint. He regarded them as little more than cowards and traitors to their cause. When they heard about the sack of Lawrence, Brown saw an opportunity to put his advocacy of violence against supporters of slavery into action. On May 23, Brown, along with four of his sons and seven other members of the militia company, set out on a private retaliatory expedition. They targeted several prominent proslavery settlers living in the area near Pottawatomie Creek. The most important among these men was Henry “Dutch Henry” Sherman—a strident proslavery activist. Early in the morning of May 24, they reached the house of James P. Doyle, a well-known member of the proslavery “Law and Order” Party in Franklin County. At gunpoint, they ordered Doyle and his two older sons to come with them as prisoners. When they had gone some distance from the house, Brown had his two sons—Owen and Salmon—to kill their prisoners with broadswords. After watching the hacking to death of their victims, Brown fired a bullet into the senior Doyle’s head to make sure he was dead. Brown and his men went further along until they came to the home of another known proslavery figure, James Wilkinson. There they also discovered James Sherman, the brother of “Dutch Henry.” Like the Doyles, Wilkinson and Sherman were killed with broadswords. Unable to find their main target (“Dutch Henry” Sherman was away on the prairie), Brown ended the expedition and returned to

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the Osawatomie Company on May 25. Shortly thereafter, Brown and his followers disappeared into the brush country. They were never prosecuted for the massacre, although Brown was tried and hanged for treason after the Harpers Ferry Raid in 1859. The Pottawatomie Massacre sent shockwaves throughout Kansas, Missouri, and the rest of the country. Far from deterring further attacks, the Pottawatomie Massacre led to the intensification of guerilla warfare as moderates on both sides of the slavery dispute found it increasingly difficult to control the extremists. Both pro- and antislavery militias multiplied and attacked suspected enemies. Ironically, both sides framed their arguments in terms of democratic values even as they terrorized their opponents. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Topeka Constitution (1855) The dispute surrounding the Topeka Constitution is illustrative of the length to which elements on both sides of the slavery question in the Kansas Territory would go to get their way on Kansas’s status as slave or free. The Topeka Constitution was the product of a convention convened by Kansas Free Staters in Topeka, Kansas, in October 1855. This convention marked the initial effort to establish a government acceptable to free-state advocates and to get Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state. The Topeka Constitution banned slavery in Kansas. Free-state advocates had organized the constitutional convention at Topeka to subvert the creation of the federally sanctioned territorial government and legislature that had been convened at Pawnee (near present-day Fort Riley) following an election on March 30, 1855, that had been marred by widespread violence, voter intimidation, and vote fraud. Free Staters accused proslavery “border ruffians” from Missouri of crossing into Kansas of crossing into Kansas to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate Free Soil settlers. Condemnations of the March election intensified at the Topeka meeting.

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Supporters of the Topeka Constitution were not content to put up an alternative shadow government. They also moved to elect a state government and submit their constitution to the U.S. Congress as an application for admission to the Union as a free state. This was a dangerous move, openly flouting the authority of the legally constituted territorial legislature and threatening a confrontation with the administration of President Franklin Pierce. Despite the dangers, organizers held elections based on the Topeka Constitution on January 15, 1856, in a vote boycotted by most proslavery men. The result was the creation of a free-state legislature and the election of Charles L. Robinson as their territorial governor. The Kansas Territory now had two governing bodies— one proslavery and one that supported a ban. Each considered the other fraudulent. The conflict they carried with violence by militias on both sides inspired the phrase “Bleeding Kansas.” The election of a free-state legislature and Robinson’s election as governor amounted to a direct challenge to the authority of the federal government as well as the proslavery legislature. President Pierce knew that the escalating situation in Kansas posed a threat to the credibility of his administration. On January 24, 1856, the president declared the Topeka Constitution to be “revolutionary” and the Topeka movement to be potentially “treasonable.” He warned that he would use military force against the Topeka Constitution’s supporters if they actually formed a government. Although Pierce condemned violence by both sides, he blamed propaganda from northern abolitionists as the initial source of the trouble and declared that, in spite of irregularities in the March 1855 election, that government was legitimate. Pierce’s address had little impact on either side. Both claimants as territorial governor—Robinson and the newly appointed proslavery governor, David Atchison—remained committed to their respective courses of defending the Topeka Constitution or crushing it. Despite Pierce’s warning, the Topeka legislature met on March 4. When it reconvened on July 4 to submit the Topeka Constitution to Congress for admission to the Union as a free state, it was broken up by federal troops. Despite the breakup of the Topeka government, its constitution was submitted to Congress. The House of Representatives approved it later in July, but it failed in the Senate. With the failure of the Topeka Constitution in Congress, the first effort to gain Kansas’s admission to the Union ended. Free-staters abandoned the Topeka Constitution. Its failure, however, only deepened the divisions and intensified the violence in the Kansas Territory and the nation as a whole. The Topeka Constitution was followed by three more proposals—the proslavery Lecompton Constitution of 1857 and the Free-State Leavenworth Constitution of 1858, both

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of which were rejected; and the Wyandotte Constitution, written in 1859 and passed by Congress in 1861, admitting Kansas as a free state. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Goodrich, Thomas. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

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Portland Rum Riot (1855) The Portland Rum Riot was a shooting incident that occurred when the militia fired on a mob in the city of Portland, in Cumberland County, Maine, on June 2, killing one local man. The mob were essentially demonstrating against the enactment of the “Maine Law,” which had prohibited the consumption, manufacture, or sale of alcohol, and their anger was specifically directed against the town’s mayor, who was most associated with the new law—and who was actually being accused of having bought alcohol himself. The person who was the major force behind the introduction of this law was Neal S. Dow (1804–1897), the mayor of Portland, the largest city in Maine and the state’s original capital before that privilege was given to Augusta. Born in the city from Quaker parents, he had thoughts of entering the law, but took over the family’s successful tanning business and quickly became concerned about the consumption of alcohol in the township. When he was 24, he spoke out against the excessive quantities of liquor consumed at a dinner of the Deluge Engine Company, of which he was then a clerk. Indeed, he became a firefighter to get an exemption from the militia, whose members had a reputation for heavy drinking. While still in his 20s, Dow established the Maine Temperance Union and urged that its members insist on the banning of the drinking of all alcohol including wine. Maine became a state in its own right in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise—prior to that it had been a part of Massachusetts—and in 1837, the first bill to ban alcohol in Maine was introduced but only reached the committee stage. It was 12 years later before another bill was put to the Maine legislature. It was passed, but the governor, John W. Dana, refused to sign it. However in May 1850, John Hubbard, another Democrat, took over as the new governor of the state. In April 1851, Dow was elected as mayor of the city of Portland, and with this extra impetus, Hubbard signed the bill into law on June 2, 1851. Dow had long been worried that a lax judiciary might not enforce the law, and to help with its enforcement, there was a mechanism in the act whereby only three voters could approach a judge who was obliged to issue a search warrant. Dow rapidly became hailed throughout the United States as the “Napoleon of Temperance” and went on many speaking engagements, including becoming the featured speaker in August 1851 at the fourth National Temperance Convention.

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But many people disliked the passing of the “Maine Law” banning the production or sale of alcohol in the state, and Dow lost his bid for reelection as mayor of Portland. Nevertheless, he had become so well known throughout North America that he went on lecture tours of the United States and Canada. In 1854, Dow again lost election as mayor, but was elected again as mayor in 1855 by 47 votes, having gained the support of the newly established Republican Party and also having the secret support of the Know-Nothing Party and many American nativists. However, rumors spread about claims that Dow himself had violated the Maine Law. The new law had allowed for the sale of “medicinal and mechanical alcohol,” and Dow had purchased a shipment of $1,600 worth of alcohol for this purpose, the alcohol being stockpiled for safekeeping in a building in central Portland. That doctors and pharmacists were allowed to stock alcohol was not well known, and some aldermen of Portland also claimed that Dow himself had acted illegally in not getting the council to authorize the spending of this amount of money. The rumors reached members of the Irish community, many of whom were recent immigrants and resented the new law, which they saw as a move specifically against them. Three men appeared in front of a judge, who was then compelled to issue the requisite search warrant. A large crowd gathered in front of the building where the alcohol was being stored during the afternoon of June 2, and by 5:00 p.m., there were at least 200. Soon afterwards, between 1,000 and 3,000 people were gathering in the dusk, some starting to throw stones. Dow was convinced that the police could not control the crowd if a riot began, and he called out the local militia with himself, as mayor, taking command. Worried that the crowd might storm the building and loot the alcohol, Dow ordered the crowd to disperse, and when they did not, he gave the order for the militia to open fire. This the militiamen did, and one man, John Robbins, was killed, with seven others wounded. It seems likely that the militia fired above the heads of the crowd, because otherwise casualties would have been far more. Robbins was an immigrant and the mate of a sailing vessel in Maine. The whole event was referred to by the press the “Portland Rum Riot,” and Dow himself was arrested and charged with illegal sales of liquor. Nathan Clifford, the former U.S. attorney general, was the prosecutor, and William P. Fessenden, another founding member of the Maine Temperance Union, was the defense attorney. Dow himself was acquitted, but the trial had done its damage, and when he contested the gubernatorial elections for Maine, he was defeated. In 1856, the “Maine Law” itself was repealed. During the American Civil War, Neal Dow served as a colonel and then a brigadier general in the Union forces being involved in the capture of New Orleans, and then was put in charge of two captured Confederate forts. Captured by the Confederates, he spent eight months as a prisoner, but was exchanged in 1864 for General

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William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of General Robert E. Lee. His health ruined during his imprisonment, he left the army and devoted his energies to the temperance movement, standing in the 1880 U.S. presidential election as the candidate for the Prohibition Party and coming in fourth with 10,305 votes. He spent his last years writing his memoirs, which were published posthumously. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844); Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Dow, Neal S. The Reminiscences of Neal Dow: Recollections of Eighty Years. Portland, ME: Evening Express Publishing Co., 1898. Rolde, Neal. Maine: A Narrative History. Gardiner, ME: Harpswell Press, 1990. Westerman, W. Randall. “Neal S. Dow.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.

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Immigrants The Portland Rum Riot highlighted differences between the non-Conformists and Quakers, like Neal Dow, and recently arrived Irish migrants, who had left Ireland during the 1840s because of the potato famine and saw new opportunities in states along the East Coast of the United States, including Maine. The first Irish who came to Maine were Scots-Irish migrants from Ulster, with the ship McCallum bringing 20 families in 1718. It was not until after independence that an Irish Roman Catholic community came to be established with St. Patrick’s Church; built in Newcastle, Maine, in 1808, it remains the oldest standing, continuously used Catholic church in New England. Most of the Irish migrants to Maine had left a life of considerable deprivation for North America. When they settled in Maine, many had found some degree of prosperity, and the soil was good for the growing of potatoes. It was not long before a small Irish enclave started to form in Aroostook County, in the north of the state. And for those Irish who remained in Portland, there were plenty of

An 1896 illustration from Harper's Weekly of a New York City neighborhood populated by Chinese immigrants. The population of New York's Chinatown skyrocketed after 1943, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884 was nullified. (Library of Congress)

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taverns and also opportunity to distill their own alcohol. Many of the migrants became aggrieved at the Maine Law, which banned the sale, manufacture, or consumption of alcohol and found the move by the mayor, Neal Dow, for prohibition in the entire state onerous. Many Irish also found themselves living in a state that was heavily non-Conformist and whose governors were all born in New England— indeed, all but one had been born in New England, and most of them had been born in Maine; although mention should be made of Edward Kavanagh, who in 1843 became the first Catholic governor anywhere in New England. Around the time of the Maine Law, there was some hostility between the local people and the Catholic migrants, with the 1854 “tarring and feathering” of Father John Bapst in Ellsworth, and the arson attack on the Old South Church in Bath, which in 1854 was being used for Catholic services. The other tension was political, with the Irish largely supporting the Democrats, but the state steadily becoming more Whig, then controlled by the Know-Nothing Party (which was intensely anti-Catholic), and then becoming staunchly Republican with the election as governor of Hannibal Hamlin in 1857. Hamlin later went on to be Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Connolly, Michael C., ed. They Change Their Sky: The Irish in Maine. Orono: University of Maine Press, 2004. Lucey, William L. The Catholic Church in Maine. Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones, 1957. Mundy, James H. Hard Times, Hard Men: Maine and the Irish, 1830–1860. Scarborough, ME: Harp Publications, 1990.

Temperance The temperance movement had long been active among non-Conformists and Quakers in the United States, and they pointed to the obvious social problems that had been created by excessive consumption of alcohol. In London, William Hogarth’s drawings of gin drinkers were famous, and John Wesley (1703–1791) preached throughout England leading to the establishment of Methodism, in which adherents did not drink alcohol. Some people did feel that there were exceptions, such as the use of communion wine in very limited amounts, or some spirits for medicinal purposes, or indeed for industrial purposes, including its use as a cleaning agent.

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In the United States, as in Britain, the temperance movement was heavily associated with churches, the first temperance organization in the United States having been established in Saratoga, New York, in 1808, and in Massachusetts five years later. Many people had been alerted to the problem by the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and by the early 19th century, with the increasing prosperity of the United States and its own large alcohol producing industries, the problem of drunkenness was becoming noticeable. By 1833, there were as many as 6,000 local temperance societies around the United States, and boys and girls would pledge not to drink any alcohol. Many women supported this move, and in 1851, the Order of Good Templars was established at Utica, New York, the first international temperance organization. Neal S. Dow was undoubtedly influenced by his Quaker background, and he deplored the public drunkenness that was occasionally seen in Portland, especially with the newly arrived Irish community. The issues of law and order, and the social problems that resulted, were obvious to many, and for that reason, Dow’s move to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol in Maine was initially popular. However, Dow’s laws were seen as overbearing, and the ease at which a search warrant could be acquired—as Dow himself found out—showed that the system was open to personal vendettas. Although the “Maine Law” was repealed in 1856, after being on the statute books for only five years, it did show that it was possible to get a majority of people and legislators to agree to prohibition, although Dow’s later contesting the presidential election on that platform showed that when it served as a single issue for a political party, the public would return to their allegiance to the Democrats or the Republicans. In 1888 and in 1892, the Prohibition Party managed only just over 2 percent of the vote on each occasion. However the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was established in 1874 at Cleveland, Ohio, pressure mounted for the enactment of Prohibition in the United States, and the issue was certainly popular on a county and local level. In 1919, the U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale or manufacture of alcohol for consumption anywhere in the United States. Although it did have widespread success, it did lead to the emergence of wealthy gangsters like Al Capone, who smuggled illicit alcohol into the country and sold it at vast profits. Prohibition ended in 1933. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Cherrington, Ernest. Evolution of Prohibition in the United States. Westerville, OH: The American Issue Press, 1926. Clark, Norman H. Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

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Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856) The American Party, commonly called the “Know-Nothing Party,” was a part of the American nativist movement, which became powerful in the period from 1854 until 1856. It was involved in clashes with Roman Catholics, predominantly Irish ones, the worst ones being those involving gangs such as the Plug Uglies and the Rip Raps in Baltimore, Maryland, and also in New York City. There had been rising anti–Roman Catholic sentiment throughout the United States in the 1840s with the influx of many Irish migrants escaping the potato famine. Later, Germans started arriving, with many fleeing the political turmoil in Germany during 1848. People against these migrants started gathering in clubs, with the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner being formed in New York City in secret in 1849, and similar lodges being set up in other major cities. The secrecy of the organization meant that when members were asked about their group, they replied that they knew nothing about it, the name being retained by the nativist supporters, and then by the American Party when it was established in 1855, emerging out of the American Republican Party which had been formed in New York in 1843. Because of its populist background, and because it cut across both the Democrats and the newly established Republican Party, it managed to do well in elections in the early 1850s. This came about because the Democratic Party was divided on the issue of slavery, and with the Republicans firmly against slavery, the Know-Nothing Party managed to get defectors from both parties. As a result, in December 1855, some 43 members of the U.S. House of Representatives were publicly stated to be members of the Know-Nothing Party, with a party convention held in Philadelphia in 1856. As a political organization, the Know-Nothing Party wanted to exclude anybody born outside the United States from voting or holding public office in the country, and also restrict immigration through a residency requirement for citizenship to be extended to 21 years. Obviously drawing support from xenophobic sections of the population, it was not long before members and supporters of the Know-Nothing Party became involved in scuffles with opponents. Much of the initial focus of the party was directed against Irish and German immigrants, and as some states had made it easy to become naturalized, the

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number of Irish and German voters in these states was increasing at a rate far higher than the native-born population. Fearing that these immigrants could form solid voting blocks, attacks began on them in the press, accusing them of spreading crime, drunkenness, and living from begging and vagrancy as well as pushing down wages and raising the cost of renting property. As many as 1.5 million people joined the Know-Nothing Party during the early 1850s, and it quickly came to dominate the political scene in New England with the exception of Vermont and Maine. Riots by supporters of the Know-Nothing Party tended to involve attacks on Roman Catholic churches as Protestants saw that Pope Pius IX had opposed the liberal Revolutions in Europe in 1848 and was therefore an opponent of democracy and personal freedoms. Some of the attacks were isolated, but many were coordinated with help from like-minded politicians and occasionally with the connivance of civic authorities. Some of the rioting and attacks on immigrants took place in Baltimore, Maryland, in October 1856, when Thomas Swann was contesting the election for mayor. Swann, the candidate of the Know-Nothing Party, had the support of three gangs, the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps, and the Wompanoag—the Rip Raps being responsible for an attack on the Democrats in which two Democrats were killed and 20 others were badly injured. In the previous elections in October 1854, the Know-Nothing Party had managed to win a majority on the Baltimore City Council and get Samuel Hinks elected as mayor. However, they had lost support in the municipal elections in 1855 and so were anxious to win in 1856. Swann did indeed win the election, and indeed Millard Fillmore, the former president and the Know-Nothing Party candidate, won Maryland in the presidential elections, the only state he carried. However, the outcry against the election violence was so bad that Swann was forced to change the nature of the police force and also the fire brigade, resulting in the gangs losing the power they had wielded so freely to get Swann elected. Much of this was because of the murder of policeman Benjamin Benton by Henry Gambrill from the Plug Uglies—Gambrill had shot the policeman at point-blank range with a revolver, and was arrested. Many street fights escalated over support or opposition to Gambrill and whether or not his crime was politically motivated. This came at a time when Baltimore was split between the supporters and opponents of slavery. Gambrill himself was found guilty, sentenced to death, and duly hanged. The judge who presided over the trial, Henry Stump, was himself later removed from the bench for unrelated “misbehavior.” There were also riots in New York City, but these are believed to have been greatly affected by some people from Baltimore. The party had already declined by the elections in 1856 as it started to show splits over slavery, which was emerging as the major issue in U.S. politics. The rise of the Republican Party eclipsed

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the Know-Nothing Party, and in the presidential elections, the Know-Nothing Party backed former president Millard Fillmore, although there were doubts over his actual loyalty to the party, and many Know-Nothing members voted for John Fremont of the Republican Party. Although it fielded 48 candidates for sears in six states in the North, only one member of the Know-Nothing Party managed to get elected. On June 1, 1857, there was a small riot when a group of Know-Nothing supporters from Baltimore went to Washington, D.C., to help “influence” voters going to the polls for the municipal elections. Marines opened fire, killing 10 men, but only one of these was from Baltimore. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844); Portland Rum Riot (1855); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992. Billington, Ray A. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Hurt, Payton. “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Know Nothings’ in California.” California Historical Society Quarterly 9 (March–June 1930). Overdyke, W. Darrell. The Know-Nothing Party in the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950.

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Bloody Monday (1855) This name was given to the rioting on August 6, 1855, during the election in the town of Louisville, Kentucky, which saw clashes between supporters of the Democratic Party and the American Party (colloquially called the “Know-Nothing Party”), which saw at least 22 people killed. Members of the Know-Nothing Party were angered at the number of immigrants arriving from Germany and Ireland in the United States during the 1840s and the early 1850s, and the resulting demographic change in many places. Louisville was the 10th largest city in the United States, and in 1850, some 40 percent of the population had been born in Germany, a large rise on the previous census returns. This increase had been noticeable, and it had led to worries of violence in the 1855 state elections, with the mayor, James S. Speed, forced from office by the courts. He had recently married and converted to Roman Catholicism, heightening tensions against Catholics. Rumors had spread that the Irish and German Roman Catholics had managed to interfere with the voting process, and as a result, rioters supported by Know-Nothing Party politicians, and also thugs and looters, attacked Irish and German homes. The Know-Nothing supporters were inflamed by writings by George D. Prentice, an influential Whig, and biographer of Henry Clay, the editor of the Louisville Journal since 1830. He railed against the increasing power of newly arrived migrants and urged for action, although he held back from advocating violence—this did not prevent J. M. Lee from calling him “one of the greatest editors of the middle nineteenth century.” Homes and businesses of Irish and Germans, including those of German Protestants and German Jews, had been the targets of isolated attacks in 1854 and the first half of 1855, with the Know-Nothing Party stockpiling weapons at the Louisville Metro Hall. However on August 6, 1855, there were major attacks on hundreds of homes and businesses, with arsonists setting fire to some of these. The official death toll was placed at 22, but the Roman Catholic bishop, Martin Spalding, put the death toll at over 100. Louisville’s mayor, John Barbee, a member of the Know-Nothing Party, intervened to stop the rioting, and he personally managed to save the Cathedral of the Assumption and also the German St. Martin of Tours church from being burned down. The rioting in Louisville resulted in a mass exodus from the city as many businessmen moved to Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Prairie City, Kansas. There were copycat attacks in Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus, New Orleans, and St. Louis, but these were quickly stopped. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Coulter, E. Merton. The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926. Kleber, John E., ed. The Encyclopedia of Louisville. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Lee, James Melvin. A History of American Journalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917.

Nativism The concept of nativism had been around since at least the late 18th century, emerging out of the American War of Independence in which people in the United States wanted to rule themselves without interference from others. Although most accepted immigration as the only way of swelling the U.S. population, many wanted to limit the right to vote and especially the right to stand for office. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution made it a prerequisite of standing for the presidency that a candidate had to be “a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of the Constitution.” With this requirement, many nativists argued that all they were campaigning for was an extension of this to other elected offices. It was the mass migration initially of Germans in the 1820s and 1830s, and then the Irish in the 1840s, that essentially turned nativism into a major political force. People who described themselves as “defenders of the Protestant faith” were involved in attacks on Catholics and Catholic institutions, especially churches, and in 1834, a convent was burned in an arson attack. These attacks gradually led to the formation of the Native American Party, which was founded in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It wanted to extend the period of naturalization to 21 years, it did not want anybody who was not native born to be nominated for public office, and affirmed that “the Protestant scriptures” should be taught in all schools. As Irish immigration increased in the 1840s because of the potato famine in Ireland, anti-Catholic sentiment spread rapidly, and this was seen in the rise, in the early 1850s, of the Know-Nothing Party. Although the differences mooted by the nativists were largely religious and ethnic, they were exacerbated by another contrast that had begun to appear in U.S. society. Many of the original British and northern European settlers in the United States came to a rural America and settled in villages and townships, where they established farms and workshops. A large number brought with them some money and tools. Most of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1840s were destitute, and settled in urban slums. They worked for low wages in factories, and gangs

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started forming as portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s film The Gangs of New York (2001), set during the Irish-nativist riots that took place in the Five Points area in New York City. These factors combined together, and although nativism was largely against equal rights for people born overseas, it was quickly translated into dislike of urbanism and industrialization as well as immigration. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Fry, Brian N. Nativism and Immigration: Regulating the American Dream. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2007. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Leonard, Ira M., and Robert D. Parmet. American Nativism 1830–1860. New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1971.

Plug Uglies The Plug Uglies were a group who acted as a street gang on the west side of Baltimore, Maryland, from 1854 until 1860. They made a show of force around elections, and as a result, it was important for politicians to get their support to prevent any trouble as voters were heading to the polls. Their main focus was always in Baltimore. There is some evidence that a few of the members also may have operated in New York City, but certainly not there as Plug Uglies, although the term was occasionally freely used by journalists to describe criminal gangs operating in similar guises elsewhere in the United States. Essentially, the Plug Uglies owed their origin to the Mount Vernon Hook-andLadder Company, which operated a private fire brigade. They quickly gained a reputation for the provision of “muscle” in disputes, and soon its members became closely associated with the American (Know-Nothing) Party. They first made a show of force in October 1855, and in October of the following year, they were involved in battles alongside their allies, the Rip Raps and another gang called the Wompanoag, during the Baltimore municipal elections, which saw Thomas Swann, a Know-Nothing candidate, elected as mayor. Members of the group were later involved in fighting in Washington, D.C., during a Know-Nothing riot, during which U.S. Marines were ordered to open fire and shot dead 10 people. They also gained national prominence over press coverage for the arrest and trial of Henry Gambrill, the owner of a public house, for the murder of Benjamin Benton, a Baltimore police officer, on the night of

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Wednesday, September 22, 1858. Benton was with two other policemen trying to arrest two “disorderly characters,” but Gambrill, not one of the two being arrested, intervened and shot Benton dead with a revolver. Benton had been in the police force for eight years, and his death caused consternation. Captain Linaweaver arrested Gambrill, and the coroner found that Gambrill had killed Benton. The sensational press coverage of the trial resulted in much speculation on the state of law and order in Baltimore. Gambrill was sentenced to death and executed. The incident had the side effect of forcing the municipal authorities in Baltimore to have a modern and regulated police force and also a professional fire brigade. The Plug Uglies proved less effective after Thomas Swann introduced reforms in municipal elections in October 1860, and then, with the outbreak of the Civil War, they faded from the political scene. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading “Another Bloody Affray in Baltimore—Police Officer Killed.” New York Times, September 25, 1858, 1. Melton, Tracy Matthew. Hanging Henry Gambrill: The Violent Career of Baltimore’s Plug Uglies, 1854–1860. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2005. Tuska, Benjamin. “Know Nothingism in Baltimore 1854–1860.” Catholic Historical Review 11, no. 2 (July 1925): 217–251.

Rip Raps This street gang operated in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was allied to the Plug Uglies and another gang known as the Wompanoag, all three being supporters of the American (Know-Nothing) Party. In favor of limiting (or ending) immigration, the group was nativist and anti-Catholic. It seems that they took their name from the Rip Rap shoals in the Hampton Roads, and they fought against supporters of the Democratic Party in various elections. In October 1856, during the municipal elections in Baltimore, the Rip Raps were responsible for an attack on the New Market Fire Company headquarters in the Lexington Market, where the Democrats were located—the Rip Raps supporting the candidacy of Thomas Swann of the Know-Nothing Party. The Rip Raps later claimed that there had been provocation, but it seemed that they did not really need this to attack the Democrats in the marketplace, which was followed by the building being set on fire and trashed. Rip Raps were involved in chasing fleeing Democrats around nearby streets where they were beaten up.

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By the time the fighting had subsided, 2 people were killed and 20 were seriously wounded. Thomas Swann did win the election, defeating Wright, the Democrat candidate. Although the Rip Raps were heavily involved in the central fighting, their reputation was largely made by the press coverage that followed. Newspapers in New York and Philadelphia proclaimed that anarchy had broken out in Baltimore, and during the presidential and congressional elections a month later, in November 1856, there was heavy intimidation of voters by the Rip Raps such that in the presidential election, Millard Fillmore, the former president and the candidate for the Know-Nothing Party, managed to win the state by a significant margin over James Buchanan. It was the only state in the Union that Fillmore won, and his victory was credited to the role of the Rip Raps. Pressure was brought on the municipal authorities in Baltimore to crack down on the Rip Raps, and Swann was forced to do this. By the time of the crucial 1860 U.S. presidential election, the gang had lost its power, and it disappeared as a group with the Civil War. Indeed, Thomas Swann used his position as mayor— gained with the support of the Rip Raps—to build up a professional police force and fire brigade, undermining the power of the gangs that had helped in his election. In 1864, Swann was elected governor of Maryland as a Unionist candidate. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Melton, Tracy Matthew. Hanging Henry Gambrill: The Violent Career of Baltimore’s Plug Uglies, 1854–1860. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2005. Tuska, Benjamin. “Know Nothingism in Baltimore 1854–1860.” Catholic Historical Review 11, no. 2 (July 1925): 217–251.

Vigilance Committees The vigilance committees were established in parts of the United States in the 19th century to provide protection for law-abiding citizens when either there was no system of law and order, or the system operating had become corrupted. In the former situation, the vigilance committees operated in areas in the Midwest and also the “Wild West,” but there were occasions when an existing police force was unable to control a situation, and the system of vigilance committees was used to protect people. In the political violence which struck parts of the United States in the 1850s, gangs associated with the American (Know-Nothing) Party such as the Plug

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Uglies and the Rip Raps in Baltimore, Maryland, and similar groups in other states, were involved in assaulting and, in extreme cases, killing supporters of rival political parties, particularly the Democratic Party. The result was that many Irish and other communities of newly arrived immigrants were worried about these attacks, and they formed vigilance committees. The most well known of these were the New York Committee of Vigilance and the New York State Vigilance Committee, both of which operated in New York City. However, the main vigilance committee connected with the Know-Nothing Party was one established in mid-1858 in New Orleans. It was formed by the mayor, Charles M. Waterman, with Captain J. K. Duncan of the U.S. Army as its president. Its stated aim was “freeing the city of New-Orleans of the well-known and notorious ‘Thugs,’ outlaws, assassins, and murderers who infest it.” Certainly, there was fear put around by nativists about rising crime from recently arrived Irish and German migrants, and it was felt that there might be an attempt to disrupt the municipal elections scheduled for June 7. Five days before the polling, Captain Duncan took his men to Jackson Square in central New Orleans, where they occupied the Cabildo, the seat of the city council and also a major courtroom, securing the place for the elections. The place was then secured, and when the elections were held, Gerard Stith of the Native American Party, who was supported by the vigilance committee, defeated Pierre G. T. Beauregard. On the evening of the elections, Duncan wrote an open letter to Brigadier General M. Grivot, the adjutant general of Louisiana, informing him that “we took up the arms which were are about to replace in your hands at the urgent request of our fellow citizens, with the object of freeing our city from the public malefactors who have infested it for these three years past,” from the “Camp of the Vigilance Committee, State Arsenal.” The vigilance committee stood down, and on June 21, Stith was sworn in as mayor. Beauregard went on to become a general in the Confederate Army, leading the attack on Fort Sumter and being the victorious general at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Basso, Hamilton. Beauregard: The Great Creole. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. “New-Orleans Vigilance Committee.” New York Times, June 14, 1858. “The Surrender of the New-Orleans Vigilance Committee.” New York Times, June 17, 1858.

Utah War (1857–1858) The Utah War, often also called the “Mormon War,” was fought from March 1857 until July 1858, mostly in what is now Utah but also in parts of Wyoming. It took place after the U.S. government, under orders from President James Buchanan, sent federal troops to Utah to stop what they saw as a revolt by Mormons there. Buchanan was concerned and then, after more reports, very worried that the Mormons planned to secede from the United States. The region containing the modern-day state of Utah had been acquired from Mexico following the war in 1848, and many of the Mormons went there in the following year, led by their leader Brigham Young, to escape persecution in the eastern states. During the 1850s, the federal government sent administrators to Utah, and these often complained to Washington, D.C., of harassment there. As the Mormons had moved there to escape the problems in the east, they resented the idea of federal authorities trying to control their lives and interfering with their religious beliefs. The administrators, however, viewed the actions by the Mormons as similar to an act of undeclared rebellion. Indeed, in 1854, there were accusations that some Danish Mormons had arrived in Salt Lake City, and when they decided to leave and head to California, they were attacked by other Mormons disguised as Native Americans. In 1857, Buchanan decided to replace the Mormon leader Brigham Young as governor of Utah with Alfred Cumming (1802–1873). Many in Washington, D.C., viewed Young’s governorship essentially as being theocratic, and the region as being a theodemocracy. Cumming by contrast was from Augusta, Georgia, he was not a Mormon, and the Mormons resented his initial appointment. Indeed, Cumming was scared about heading to Salt Lake City without protection. Buchanan then received reports—variously described as erroneous, but certainly exaggerated—that the Mormons were preparing to rebel against the government, and even possibly secede from the Union. At that time, there was constant talk of secession from the southern states over attempts to abolish slavery, and Buchanan was anxious not to preside over the breakup of the country. As a result, Buchanan sent over 2,500 soldiers in an expeditionary force under the command of General William S. Harney. This was composed of the 5th Infantry Regiment, some of the 10th Regiment, the 2nd Dragoons, and two artillery batteries. On July 18, 1857, the soldiers set out from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,

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expecting that this show of force would see the Mormons quickly submit, and the whole of Utah would be under military control by the end of the fall. Captain Stewart Van Vliet (1815–1901), an assistant quartermaster in the U.S. Army (and later a Union general), rode ahead of the main detachment from Kansas to Salt Lake City. They demanded that the citizenry in Utah furnish the soldiers with provisions when they arrived. Halfway through his journey, and worried that he might be attacked as he had a number of soldiers with him, Van Vliet decided to continue on the remainder of the route alone. He reached Salt Lake City on September 8 and met with Young, warning him that soldiers were on the way and hoping to avoid a conflict. Young ensured that Van Vliet was well received—his previous dealing with Mormons in Iowa had been cordial. Young however, did not want Cumming to take over and said that he would feel duty bound to resist. While Van Vliet was meeting with Young, the remainder of the expeditionary force was making slow progress. Young was certainly increasingly worried that the soldiers might try to overrun Utah and impose their will on the Mormons. As a result, he had mobilized the local militia and started preparing for a guerilla war to harass the U.S. soldiers as they marched into Utah. His militia was well experienced, with many having served in the Nauvoo Legion, and a number having had military training and having fought in the Mexican War. With the federal soldiers slowing their advance, on September 11, command was handed over from Harney to General Albert Sidney Johnston (1803–1862), later to become a distinguished officer in the Confederate Army in the American Civil War. By this time, Mormon militia had continued to slow the advance of the federal soldiers, who decided not to risk an open confrontation. Indeed, on the same day that Johnston took command of the federal soldiers, some Mormon militia attacked about 120 settlers who were heading to California. The resulting shoot-out became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which saw 120 men, women, and children massacred. It was a brutal action, with the only survivors being 17 children under the age of eight. The event received much publicity in the local press and quickly caused great worry in the federal camp, who decided to act far more cautiously as they felt that the chances of the Mormons fighting them was obviously high. Subsequent scholarship on the Mountain Meadows Massacre tend to suggest that the event was not directed by the Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City, but was rather carried out by local Mormons, either out of worry about non-Mormon civilians in the region or simply for plunder. They were also fueled by hatred of outsiders. The incident was, however, merged in the public imagination with what became known as the Aiken Massacre. This was quite different, as it involved six wealthy men from California being arrested by Mormon militiamen who suspected that they were spies. The men were soon released but murdered as they left.

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By this time, the federal troops had reached South Pass, and they were approaching the positions held by the Mormon Nauvoo Militia. Also, the Mormon cavalry under Lot Smith was shadowing the U.S. advance. The Mormons were keen not to engage in open warfare with the federal troops as it was felt that this would be totally counterproductive. On the one hand, it might increase the ire of the politicians against the Mormons, and it might encourage a larger force to be sent, but some of the Mormons were worried that they would not be able to hold off the men under Johnston anyway. However, there was sufficient uncertainty in Johnston’s mind as to what the Mormons might do for him to proceed extremely cautiously. There were also a number of other skirmishes, and the Mormon mission at Fort Limhi in the east of Oregon Territory was attacked by Native Americans, and two Mormons killed. Some historians link this to the war as Mormons in the region were collecting supplies, and it was because of this that tensions with the local Native Americans resulted. At this point, Johnston realized that he might not be able to take Salt Lake City that year and the U.S. forces then established a winter camp near Fort Bridger. Nearby, the Mormons started building their fortifications to resist when the fighting was expected to start in the spring of 1858. This “winter intermission” allowed time for Brigham Young to try to use diplomacy to achieve something more for his cause. He contacted Thomas L. Kane of Pennsylvania and asked him whether he could help—he had previously been favorable to the Mormons. It seems that Kane persuaded Young that the Mormons would lose any major conflict, and that the best route forward for Young was to accept Cumming as the governor and allow the federal soldiers into Utah. Kane did not get on at all well with Johnston—the two were to be on opposing sides in the Civil War only three years later—but Kane had managed to work out a diplomatic compromise, in which Cumming traveled to Salt Lake City under a safe conduct pass, but without his military escort. In April 1858, Alfred Cumming was officially sworn in as governor, and both sides decided to compromise. Although Cumming was now governor, Brigham Young was still cautious about the role of federal troops, which were not reinforced by further soldiers dispatched from the east. He had contemplated what was called the “Sevastopol Policy,” in which he would burn down Salt Lake City and he and the Mormons would evacuate the territory, possibly to Mexico. The idea of the evacuation worried the British, who were concerned that he might, in fact, head to Canada, possibly to Vancouver Island. However, there were attacks on Mormons in that region, and the Mormons there started moving south. The seriousness of this plan was shown by the fact that Brigham Young had already, in February of that year, sent exploration parties to the White Mountains

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on the current border between Utah and Nevada, to see whether a new settlement could be established there. But even without Young giving any orders, many Mormons were fleeing ahead of what they expected to be a violent incursion by federal troops. Finally, good sense prevailed on all sides. As a result, in June 1858, President Buchanan authorized peace commissioners to travel to Utah. There they oversaw Brigham Young agreeing that Cumming was the new governor, and undertaking to follow directions by him. In return, the Mormons were all pardoned for “acts of rebellion.” Young accepted the pardon, although he did claim that Utah had never been in an act of rebellion. When U.S. soldiers entered Salt Lake City under Johnston in June 1858, their arrival was greeted with disdain from the locals. However, historians have discovered that there were mixed feelings amongst the soldiers. Johnston himself was reported to have said that he would have liked to “bombard the city for fifteen minutes.” Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferguson Smith (1807–1862), who later served as a Union general in the Civil War, said that he would have liked to hang “every dammed Mormon by the neck.” Philip St. George Cooke (1809–1895), who also later became a Union general and was a distinguished cavalry commander (his son-in-law being the Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart), reacted very differently. Cooke had led the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War. He wrote of his great respect for the Mormons and took off his hat in respect as he rode through the streets. Even though there were no “battles,” and only 38 soldiers were recorded as casualties, with also a number of non-Mormon civilian casualties, it was a very expensive conflict and was the most costly military undertaking by the U.S. Army between the Mexican War and the Civil War. Altogether, it is believed that 150 people died, of whom 120 were in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The war became known as Buchanan’s Blunder, with the press criticizing the president on several fronts. Some felt that the entire expedition was a large waste of money as there was no real evidence that Utah had rebelled. On an operational level, the sending of the soldiers so late in the season, and the failure to adequately resupply them, led to further criticisms for Buchanan. For the Mormons, many of them had had to evacuate their homesteads and put up with, in effect, a military occupation of Utah. One of the consequences for the war was that dissatisfaction with Buchanan was expressed in the 1858 congressional elections, with the Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives. However, they were unable to pass any major bills as these were either rejected in the Senate, or vetoed by the president. This, in turn, led to a split in the Democrats between the Southern Democrats and the Northern Democrats, which would become even more apparent in the

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1860 presidential election. Curiously, the war was to have an unforeseen outcome. Some outfitters, Russell, Majors and Waddell, lost some 52 wagons of goods, which had been burned by Lot Smith and the men of the Nauvoo Legion. The decided to take on a government mail contract to rebuild their business fortunes, and thus was the beginning of the Pony Express. U.S. forces established a large camp at Camp Floyd (now Fort Crittenden). However, they were not there long, as they were withdrawn in 1861 with the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnson went on to serve as a commander of the Confederate forces, and he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. Cumming’s nephew, Alfred Cumming (1829–1910) became a brigadier general in the Civil War. In 1874, indictments were finally issued against some of the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. John D. Lee, a prominent Mormon, was charged in court and convicted, albeit after two trials. A polygamist, he had 19 wives, and 67 children. His defense was that although he was present at the massacre, he had not personally killed anybody. This had seen his first trial end in a hung jury in 1874, but three years later, he was found guilty. Lee was executed by firing squad on the site of the massacre, on March 23, 1877. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Philadelphia Election Riot (1742); Pima Revolt (1751); Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844); Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856).

Further Reading Bannon, John Francis. The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974. Brooks, Juanita. John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1992. Freeman, Robert C., ed. Nineteenth Century Saints at War. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2006. Furniss, Norman F. The Mormon Conflict 1850–1859. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Mackinnon, William P. “Causes of the Utah War.” Fort Douglas Vedette: Newsletter of the Fort Douglas Military Museum Association, Spring 2007. Stott, Clifford L. Search for Sanctuary: Brigham Young and the White Mountain Expedition. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984.

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Buchanan, James (1791–1868) The 15th president of the United States, James Buchanan was elected in 1856 at a time when there were increased tensions over slavery. A Democrat from Pennsylvania, he was essentially a “northerner” with southern sympathies, and this allowed him to hold together the Democratic Party and defeat the Republican Party candidate John C. Fre´mont. Buchanan’s inauguration was quickly followed by the famous Dred Scott verdict, which ruled that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories. Buchanan certainly believed in the rights of slave owners, but he was keen to try to hold the country together. The success of the newly formed Republican Party in 1856 had shaken many Democrats who saw their party as hopelessly divided over slavery. It was in this light when Buchanan, in March 1857, started receiving reports that Brigham Young, the governor of the Utah Territory, was planning a revolt, and he felt he had to act swiftly. Buchanan thought that Young, being a Mormon, might lead a revolt against the central authority, and as president, he saw his duty as being to hold the Union together—the problems in Utah having nothing to do with slavery. Indeed, Buchanan regarded the Dred Scott decision as resolving the issue from a constitutional point of view. A confirmed bachelor, Buchanan was a devout Presbyterian, and an active Freemason. When he was 27, he had ended a short engagement with the daughter of a wealthy businessman—the woman involved was believed by some to have committed suicide. Buchanan personally disliked the Mormons and their belief in polygamy, which he had vigorously denounced during his election campaign. Also, many of them had come from Pennsylvania. Indeed, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church came from Pennsylvania, although Harmony was far from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where Buchanan grew up, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Buchanan died. It was at Harmony that, according to Mormon tradition, Smith was visited by John the Baptist. In the Utah War, Buchanan was decisive as he saw it as an easy way to uphold the power of the presidency in an issue which could unite the “northern” and “southern” politicians, both of whom disliked the Mormons. Certainly as a military operation, it involved officers from both the North and the South working together. After the war in Utah, Buchanan’s presidency became almost fully occupied by the issue of slavery and the possible secession of the southern states. As the Republican Party became stronger, this became more of a probability; and following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in November 1860, South

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Carolina and then other southern states seceded. Buchanan tried to stop this and indeed denied that there was a right to secession. After remaining in Washington, D.C., for Lincoln’s inauguration, he then retired back to Pennsylvania and died on June 1, 1868. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Binder, Frederick Moore. James Buchanan and the American Empire. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1994. Birkner, Michael J., ed. James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1996. Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln. Vol 1: Douglas, Buchanan and Party Chaos, 1857–1859. New York: Scribner’s, 1950. Smith, Elbert B. The Presidency of James Buchanan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established by Joseph Smith after he translated some golden plates into what became the Book of Mormon. Essentially his followers, known as the Mormons, believed in the additional revelations in the Book of Mormon. Thus, although many of their beliefs were the same as Christians, these extra beliefs included Jesus visiting the Americas after his resurrection. Many Christians saw the Mormon beliefs as heretical, and it was not long before they faced persecution in the eastern states where many of them lived—this led to war in 1838. Many moved westward but still faced continual discrimination, especially over the Mormon belief in plural marriage (or polygamy). Indeed, Joseph Smith himself was murdered when a group of men broke into the prison where Smith was held. The remaining Mormons under Brigham Young moved west in 1846 to escape this persecution, and this trek ended when they reached the Great Salt Lake, where they built Salt Lake City in the Utah Territory. By this time, the Mormon beliefs, in particular plural marriage, had attracted the anger of many politicians, especially during the heated debates of the 1856 election.

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For Brigham Young and the Mormons, they had hoped that by moving to Utah, they would be able to govern themselves and follow their own beliefs as their consciences dictated. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was incorporated and became a legal entity, and Brigham Young became, in effect, a theocratic leader. In 1850, he had become governor of the Utah Territory, and Salt Lake City had transformed itself into from a population of 143 to a major trading center, helped by the California Gold Rush with many prospectors stopping there on their way to the West Coast. Although there was a popular outcry against the Mormons practicing polygamy, little was published at the time about their other beliefs. They did not drink alcohol, many were drawn from the temperance movement, and they did not smoke. They also refrained from drinking coffee or tea, although many did drink herbal teas. The press preferred the sensational stories around plural marriages, and also many people rejected the idea that Smith had found the gold tablets, none of which had survived. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Allen, James, and Glen M. Leonard. The Story of the Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1992. Arrington, Leonard K. The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Roberts, B. H. A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, 1965.

Nauvoo Legion This group legion was initially organized as part of the Illinois state militia with the authority of a charter issued by the city of Nauvoo, in Hancock County, Illinois, close to the borders with Iowa and Missouri. Most of its members were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the early 1840s, it was commanded by Joseph Smith Jr. and Brigham Young. Its formation was to prevent attacks on Mormons as had happened in 1838. By 1844, it had a strength of about 2,000, but it also had a very high number of officers. Disbanded in 1845, when the Mormons decided to move west to Utah in 1846, most of the legion members went with Brigham Young. These served to help protect Mormons in Utah. Although some members of the legion served in the Mormon Battalion in the war with Mexico in 1846, most remained in Utah, where

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they helped protect the Mormons from attacks by Native Americans, first in 1849 and then in the “Walker War” against Chief Walkara in 1853–1854. When the Utah War broke out in 1857, members of the legion were quickly called together under the command of Colonel William Horne Dame. Dame had been born in New Hampshire, and he and his wife had been some of the earlier settlers in Utah. Facing a possible invasion, Dame had ordered a brigade to be formed in September 1857, and he started drilling the men. They had all been trained with the Model 1803 Rifle, and also boasted a mountain gun nicknamed “Old Sow,” which still survives on display at the Church Museum of History at Salt Lake City. Alongside Dame, Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Haight commanded the Mormons. However, the Utah War saw no real fighting between the federal soldiers and the Mormons, so the Nauvoo Legion never saw any major action, although individual members were involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Two units of the Nauvoo Legion served in the Civil War, preventing Confederate saboteurs from attacking the telegraph lines. In the Black Hawk War of 1865–1868, some of the Nauvoo Legion also saw action. They were disbanded with the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1894. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Bagley, Will. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Gardner, Hamilton. “Nauvoo Legion, 1840–1845—A Unique Military Organization,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 54 (Summer 1961): 181–197. Roberts, Richard C. Legacy: The History of the Utah National Guard from the Nauvoo Legion Era to Enduring Freedom. Salt Lake City: National Guard Association of Utah, 2003.

Polygamy When men took more than one wife at the same time, this became known as “plural marriage” and later more commonly as polygamy. It was illegal in Britain but had not specifically been outlawed in the United States after American Independence. However, it was a practice that certainly happened in biblical times, and there are many instances of it in the Old Testament. With the emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the members allowed polygamy, and it gained converts from the followers of Jacob Cochran of Maine, who also believed in polygamy. By the 1850s, it was estimated that between a fifth and a quarter of all Mormons were

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living in polygamous households. In most cases, polygamous families were larger than others, and this accounts for the high percentages, with the vast majority of Mormon marriages at the time being in non-polygamous marriages. However the instances of polygamy amongst the Mormons resulted in much criticism of their church. Critics viewed it as a method of oppressing women and allowing immorality to flourish. Indeed a former Mormon in the New York Times in 1852 denounced it as “the demoralization of young women . . . that would almost chill the heart’s blood.” Much information circulated about the number of wives of Joseph Smith—possibly as many as 33—with some being also married to other men. In June 1856, a bill was brought before the House of Representatives by Justice Smith Morrill of Vermont to outlaw polygamy in the territory of Utah. This became the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. Four years later, during the 1856 presidential election, slavery was a major focus of the campaign, but the Republican Party also actively campaigned against polygamy. Indeed, they pledged “to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery.” In an interesting twist, it was the Republican presidential candidate John Fre´mont who had surveyed the Great Salt Lake in 1843 and 1845, giving Brigham Young the idea of settling there. The Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, was also outspoken in his criticism of polygamy. His victory quickly led to a clash between the new president and the Mormons, resulting in the Utah War. By late November 1856, much publicity was given to a sermon by Brigham Young in which he spoke out strongly in favor of polygamy. Indeed, by the end of his life he had 51 wives, and had 56 children by 16 of them. However, although polygamy did cause much anger against the Mormons in the eastern states, it was not the reason why the war took place. The New York Times in 1857 claimed “theoretical polygamy is one thing, but practical polygamy is quite another,” and it urged for indictments against people living in polygamy to be followed up by the grand jury in Utah. The war ended with polygamy illegal, but still practiced. The issue continued with George Q. Cannon being denied a nonvoting seat in the U.S. House of Representatives because he had more than one wife. In March 1882, the Edmunds Act made it illegal for polygamists to hold office, and eight years later, the 1890 Manifesto issued by the Mormons banned plural marriage. Although a very few “Mormon fundamentalists” are still in polygamous marriages, it remains illegal. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading “Bill for the Suppression of Polygamy.” New York Times, June 30, 1856, 3. Hardy, B. Carmon. Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

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Utah War (1857–1858) Hardy, John. “Mormonism Exposed by an Ex-Mormon.” New York Times, February 14, 1852, 6. “Polygamy in Utah—The Progress of Mormonism.” New York Times, November 13, 1856, 2. Van Wagoner, Richard S. Mormon Polygamy: A History. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992. “What Shall We Do with the Mormons?” New York Times, April 21, 1857, 4.

State of Deseret The State of Deseret was proposed as a state of the United States by Mormons in 1849. It existed in a provisional form for nearly two years and it included the vast majority of what was then Utah Territory but followed natural boundaries. Altogether, it included all of Utah and Nevada, as well as large portions of Arizona, California, and also parts of Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wyoming. The name Deseret came from the word for “honey bee” in the Book of Mormon, and after the settlement at Salt Lake City by the Mormons in 1846, Brigham Young petitioned for the establishment of Deseret as a territory. He sent Dr. John Milton Bernhisel, a physician and Mormon—he had, in fact, delivered some of Joseph Smith’s children—to Washington, D.C. However, it soon became apparent that California and New Mexico were trying to gain statehood, and Young changed his plans, urging Bernhisel to try to get statehood for Deseret. Even though the planned land area of Deseret was vast, and some of it had only been taken from Mexico a few years earlier, Young believed he had a chance if he was able to fulfill the requirements for statehood. This required a constitution, and as a result Young and other Mormons drafted it and sent the transcript to Iowa to be printed. At that time, there were no printing presses in Salt Lake City. Many members of Congress did not like the Mormon practice of plural marriage (polygamy), but Brigham Young had some unexpected allies. The southern states were eager that they were not outnumbered by the northern non-slave states in the Senate. To this end, Deseret was so large that it would result in a single free state joining the Union (and the Senate) rather than a large number of smaller states. This was to prove even more popular when there was the idea of combining Deseret with California. However, in the Compromise of 1850, California became a state, and the Utah Territory was created, covering the northern part of the planned Deseret, with Brigham Young as the first governor. The General Assembly of Deseret, a bicameral state legislature, had been established in 1850, but it passed a resolution to

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dissolve the state on April 4, 1851. The idea of revising Deseret was later raised on several occasions, and the worry that it might become independent (rather than becoming a state) was behind the Utah War of 1857–1858. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Allen, James, and Glen M. Leonard. The Story of the Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1992. Morgan, Dale L. The State of Deseret. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987.

Young, Brigham (1801–1877) The leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) after the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led the Mormons from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake in 1846, being president of the church from 1847 until his death thirty years later. Born in Vermont, Young had worked as a carpenter and then as a blacksmith, and then joined the Mormons in 1832. He emerged as the successor to Smith after the founder (Smith) was murdered by mob members in 1844. Recognizing that the members of the Mormon Church were not safe in Illinois, he led a group of them to the Great Salt Lake, where they founded Salt Lake City. A politician, he urged for the creation of the state of Deseret, which would have been dominated by the Mormons, taking advantage of the possible support for the idea from the southern states. However when this failed, he accepted the governorship of the Utah Territory, a much smaller area than Deseret, and managed to get Mormon settlements established throughout the region. Although Joseph Smith founded the Mormon Church, it very much owed its strength to Brigham Young. He managed to hold the community together and help it flourish. He also enabled the infrastructure of the region to be established, including irrigation systems, education, and postal services. He certainly treated African Americans with respect and accepted interracial marriages of Mormons. However, he was best known as a polygamist. Young not only believed in plural marriage, but also had many wives. In fact he is believed to have marred 55 times, and had a large house where they all lived. In 1857, Brigham Young was replaced as governor by Alfred Cumming, and he recognized that this was an attempt by President James Buchanan to try to encroach into the lives of Mormons. In the previous year, both Buchanan and

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Fre´mont, the Republican candidate, had spoken out against polygamy in general, and against Young in particular. When Young heard that federal soldiers were being dispatched to Utah, he rallied his own supporters, some of whom had previously served in the Nauvoo Legion and therefore had military training and experience. However, soon he was told of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This involved the killing of 120 men, women, and children, in an act that shocked people throughout the United States. Although it was claimed by some writers that Young was involved, it seems that the actions were perpetrated by local Mormons, although Young destroyed a cairn that was erected to mark the site of the massacre. Young’s planning held off the U.S. Army during the winter of 1857–1858. He seemed to have planned, as a last resort, to burn Salt Lake City and leave with the rest of the Mormons for Mexico. However, he managed to negotiate with the U.S. authorities and received a pardon. He remained in Salt Lake City until his death in 1877. Brigham Young University was named after him. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Arrington, Leonard J. Brigham Young: American Moses. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Bagley, Will. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Black, Susan Easton, and Larry C. Porter. Lion of the Lord: Essays on the Life and Service of Brigham Young. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1995. Cannon, Frank J., and George L. Knapp. Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1913. Taves, Ernest H. This Is the Place: Brigham Young and the New Zion. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.

Major J. H. Carleton’s Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1859) In September 1857, during the height of the armed dispute between the U.S. government and the Latter-day Saints (Mormon) settlers of Utah known as the Utah War, a group of Mormon militiamen killed more than 120 California-bound settlers in southwestern Utah, in what became known as the “Mountain Meadows Massacre.” Reproduced here is the first report of the killings, which was prepared in 1859 by Major J. H. Carleton, who had been ordered by the U.S. Army to investigate the incident and bury any bodies of the victims that were still exposed. Carleton describes in detail the sequence of events; the victims, including children; and the terrible sights that were still to be seen at the Mountain Meadows site almost two years after the massacre. Carleton’s report was published by Congress in 1902.

Utah War (1857–1858) Camp at Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory, May 25th, 1859 Major: When I left Los Angeles, the 23rd ultimo, General Clarke, commanding the Department of California, directed me to bury the bones of the victims of that terrible massacre which took place on this ground in September, 1857. The fact of this massacre of (in my opinion) at least 120 men, women and children, who were on their way from the State of Arkansas to California, has long been well known. I have endeavored to learn the circumstances attending it, and have the honor to submit the following as the result of my inquiries on this point: Dr. Brewer, United States Army, whom I met with Captain Campbell’s command on the Santa Clara River on the 15th inst., informed me that as he was going up the Platte River on the 11th of June, 1857, he passed a train of emigrants near O’Fallons Bluffs. The train was called “Perkin’s Train,” a man named Perkins, who had previously been to California, having charge of it as a conductor; that he afterwards saw the train frequently; the last time he saw it, it was at Ash Hollow on the North Fork of the Platte. The Doctor says the train consisted of, say, 40 wagons; there were a few tents besides, which the emigrants used in addition to these wagons when they encamped. There seemed to be about 40 heads of families, many women, some unmarried, and many children. A doctor accompanied them. The train seemed to consist of respectable people, well to do in the world. They were well dressed, were quiet, orderly, genteel; had fine stock; had three carriages along, and other evidences which went to show that this was one of the finest trains that had been seen to cross the plains. It was so remarked upon by the officers who were with the doctor at that time. From reports afterwards received, and comparing the dates with the probable rate of travel, he believed this was the identical train which was destroyed at Mountain Meadows. I could get no information of these emigrants of a date anterior to this. Here seems to be given the first glimpse of their number, character, and condition; and an authentic glimpse, too, if the train destroyed was the one seen by the doctor, of which there can hardly be any doubt. The doctor was confirmed in his belief that the train he saw was the one destroyed, by many reasons. Among them one fact seemed to be very convincing. He observed a carriage in the train in which some ladies rode, to whom he made one or more visits as they journeyed along. There was something peculiar in the construction of the carriage and its ornaments its blazoned stag’s head upon the panels, etc. This carriage, he says, is now in the possession of the Mormons. Besides, he afterwards heard as a fact that this train had been entirely destroyed. The people who owned it would not have been likely to have to sell such an important part of their means of transportation midway their journey. The road upon which these emigrants were seen by Dr. Brewer crosses the Rocky Mountains through the South Pass, and thence goes on down into the Great Basin to Salt Lake City, and thence Southward along the western base of the Wasatch Mountains to what is called the rim of the basin. Here the “divide” is crossed, when it descends upon the valley of the Santa Clara affluent toward the Colorado. Fillmore City is upon one of the many streams which run westward down from the Wasatch Mountains into the basin. It is about

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Utah War (1857–1858) 140 miles from Salt Lake City; then upon another stream, 90 miles farther south, is Prawn [Parowan] City; then upon still another stream, 18 miles south of Prawn [Parowan], is Cedar City; then to a settlement on Pinto Creek is 24 miles; thence to Hamblin’s house, on the northern slope of the Mountain Meadows, 6 miles. From Hamblin’s house over the rim of the basin to the southern point of the Mountain Meadows, where there is a large spring, is 4 miles, 1,000 yards. This swell of land or watershed, called the rim of the basin, runs west across nearly midway the valley called the Mountain Meadows. This valley runs north and south; its northern portion is drained into the basin, its southern toward the Santa Clara. Down on the Santa Clara is a Mormon settlement called “The Fort”: here some 30 families reside. It is 34 miles from Mountain Meadows. East of Cedar City, say 18 miles, on the east slope of the Wasatch Range, drained by Virgin River, is the town of Harmony, of 100 families; and farther down the Virgin River, 12 miles from “The Fort,” on the Santa Clara, is Washington City, also of 100 families. The Santa Clara joins the Virgin River near Washington City. The Pah Vent Indians live near Fillmore City. The Pah Ute Indians are scattered along from Parowan southward to the Colorado. The train of emigrants proceeding southward from Fillmore toward the Mountain Meadows are next seen, so far as my inquiries go, by a Mr. Jacob Hamblin, a leading Mormon, who has charge of “the Fort,” on the Santa Clara, and resides there in the winter season, but who has a cattle ranch and a house, where he lives in the summer time, at the Mountain Meadows. I here give what he said, and which I wrote down sentence by sentence, as he related it. He told me he had given the same information to Judge Cradlebaugh: About the middle of August, 1857, I started on a visit to Great Salt Lake City. At Corn Creek, 8 miles south of Fillmore City, I encamped with a train of emigrants who said they were mostly from Arkansas. There were, in my opinion, not over 30 wagons. There were several tents, and they had from 400 to 500 head of horned cattle, 25 head of horses, and some mules. This information I got in conversation with one of the men of the train. The people seemed to be ordinary frontier homespun people, as a general thing. Some of the outsiders were rude and rough and calculated to get the ill will of the inhabitants. Several of the men asked me about the condition of the road and the disposition of the Indians, and where there would be a good place to recruit their stock. I asked them how many men they had. They said they had between forty and fifty “that would do to tie to.” I told them I considered if they would keep a good lookout that the Indians did not steal their animals, half that number would be safe, and that the Mountain Meadows was the best place to recruit their animals before they entered upon the desert, I recommended this spring, and the grazing about here, four miles south of my house, as the place where they should stop. The most of these men seemed to have families with them. They remarked that this one

Utah War (1857–1858) train was made up near Salt Lake City of several trains that had crossed the plains separately, and being Southern people, had preferred to take the southern route. This was all of importance that passed between us, and I went on my journey and they proceeded on theirs. On my way back home, at Fillmore City, I heard it said that that Company, meaning the train referred to, had poisoned a small spring at Corn Creek, where I had met them. There was some considerable excitement about it among the citizens of Fillmore and among the Pah-Vent Indian who live within 8 miles of that place. I was told that eighteen head of cattle had died from drinking the water; that six of the Pah-Vents had been poisoned from eating the flesh of the cattle that died, and that one or two of these Indians had also died. Mr. Robinson, a citizen of Fillmore, whose son was buried the day I got there, said that the boy had been poisoned in “trying out” the tallow of the dead cattle. I am satisfied that he believed what he said about it. I thought at the time that the spring had been poisoned as stated. I encamped that night with a company from Iron County, who told me that the Company from Arkansas had all been killed at Mountain Meadows except seventeen children. I afterwards met, between Beaver and Pine Creek, Colonel Daim [William H. Dame] of Parowan, who confirmed what these people from Iron County had said. He further stated that the Indians were collecting on the Muddy with a determination to “wipe out” another company of emigrants which was several days in rear of the first. He mentioned that the Indians had supplied themselves with arms and ammunition from the train destroyed at the Meadows. After consulting with him, he advised me to go forward and spare no pains in trying to prevent their carrying their purpose into execution, and he gave me an order to press into service any animal I might require for that purpose. I got a horse at Beaver about 8 o’clock that evening, and the next evening at Pinto Creek, 83 miles distant, I met Mr. Dudley Leavett [Leavitt], from the settlements on the Santa Clara. I told him what I had heard. He told me it was true, and that all the Indians in the Southern Country were greatly excited and “All Hell” could not stop them from killing or from at least robbing the other train of its stock. He further stated that several interpreters from the Santa Clara had gone on with this last grain. I told him to return and get the best animal he could find on my ranch and go on as fast as he could and endeavor to stop further mischief being done. That is, if the Indians ran off the stock of the train, for himself and all the interpreters to go and recover it, if possible, and prevent further depredation. He left me under these instructions. The next morning, which, I think, was the 18th of September 1857, I arrived at my ranch, 4 miles from the Meadows. Here I had left my family. I found at the ranch three little white girls in the care of my wife, the oldest six or seven years of age, the next about three, and the next about one. The youngest had been shot through one of her arms below the elbow by a large ball, breaking both bones and cutting the arm half off. My wife, having a young child of her own, and these three little orphans besides, my home appeared to be anything but cheerful. About

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Utah War (1857–1858) one or two o’clock that day I came down to the point where the massacre had taken place, in company with an Indian boy named Albert, who had been brought up in my family. The boy told me that the inhabitants from Cedar City had come down and buried the murdered people in three large heaps, which he pointed out to me; the boy showed me two girls who had run some ways off before they were killed. The wolves had dug open the heaps, dragged out the bodies, and were then tearing the flesh from them. I counted 19 wolves at one of these places. I have since learned from the people who assisted in burying the bodies that there were 107 men, women and children found dead upon the ground. I am satisfied that all were not found. The most of the bodies were stripped of all their clothing, were then in a state of putrefaction, and presented a horrible sight. There was no property left upon the ground except one white ox, which is still at my ranch. The following summer, when the bones had lost their flesh, I reburied them, assisted by a Mr. Fuller. The Indians have told me that they made an attack on the emigrants between daylight and sunrise as the men were standing around the camp fires, killing and wounding 15 at the first charge, which was delivered from the ravine near the spring close to the wagons and from a hill to the west. That the emigrants immediately corralled their wagons and threw up an entrenchment to shelter themselves from the balls. When I first saw the ditch, it was about 4 feet deep and the bank about 2 feet high. The Indians say they then ran off the stock but kept parties at the spring to prevent the emigrants from getting to the water, the emigrants firing upon them every time they showed themselves, and they returned the fire. This was kept up for six or seven days. The Indians say that they lost but one man, killed and three or four wounded. At the end of six or seven days, they say, a man among them who could talk English called to the emigrants and told them if they would go back to the settlements and leave all their property, especially their arms, they would spare their lives, but if they did not do so they would kill the whole of them. The emigrants agreed to this and started back on the road toward my ranch. About a mile from the spring there are some scrub-oak bushes and tall sage growing on either side of the road and close to it. Here a large body of Indians lay in ambush, who, when the emigrants approached, fell upon them in their defenseless condition and with bows and arrows and stones and guns and knives murdered all, without regard to sex or age, except a few infant children, seventeen of which have since been recovered. This is what the Indians told me nine days after the massacre took place. From the position of the bodies this latter part of their story seems to be corroborated, and I should judge that the women and children were in advance of the men when the last attack upon them was made. When I buried the bones last summer, I observed that about one third of the skulls were shot through with bullets and about one third seem to be broken with stones. The train I sent Leavett [Leavitt] to protect had gotten as far as the canyon, 5 miles below the Muddy, when the Indians made a descent upon its loose stock,

Utah War (1857–1858) driving off, as the immigrants have since said, 200 head of cattle. Leavett and the other interpreters recovered between 75 and 100 head, which were brought to my ranch. Of these the Indians afterwards demanded and stole some 40 head, and last January I turned over to Mr. Lane from California, the balance. These are all the facts within my knowledge connected with the destruction of the one and the passing along of the other of these two trains. Mrs. Hamblin is a simple-minded person of about 45, and evidently looks with the eyes of her husband at everything. She may really have been taught by the Mormons to believe it is no great sin to kill gentiles and enjoy their property. Of the shooting of the emigrants, which she had herself heard, and knew at the time what was going on, she seemed to speak without a shudder, or any very great feeling; but when she told of the 17 orphan children who were brought by such a crowd to her house of one small room there in the darkness of night, two of the children cruelly mangled and the most of them with their parents’ blood still wet upon their clothes, and all of them shrieking with terror and grief and anguish, her own mother heart was touched. She at least deserves kind consideration for her care and nourishment of the three sisters, and for all she did for the little girl, “about one year old who had been shot through one of her arms, below the elbow, by a large ball, breaking both bones and cutting the arm half off.” A Snake Indian boy, called Albert Hamblin, but whose Indian name was a word which meant “hungry,” who is now about 17 or 18 years of age, says that Mr. Jacob Hamblin brought him beyond where Camp Floyd is situated and that he has lived with Mr. Hamblin about six years here and about three years up north. He was sent by Mr. Hamblin to my camp at Mountain Meadow on the 20th day of May 1859, and in speaking of the massacre at this place related what follows in very good English: In the first part of September a year and a half ago, I was at Mr. Hamblin’s ranch 4 miles from here. My business was to herd the sheep. I saw the train come along the road and pass down this way. It was near sundown. I drove the sheep home and went after wood, when I saw the train encamp at this spring from a high point of land where I was cutting wood. When the train passed me, I saw a good many women and children. It was night when I got home. Another Indian boy, named John, who lives at the Vegas and talked some English, was with me. He lived with a man named Sam Knight, at Santa Clara. After the train had been camped at the spring three nights, the fourth day in the morning, just before light, when we were all abed at the house, I was waked up by hearing a good many guns fired. I could hear guns fired every little while all day until it was dark. Then I did not know what had been done. During the day, as we, John and I, sat on a hill herding sheep, we saw the Indians driving off all the stock and shoot some of the cattle; at the same time we could see shooting going on down around the train; emigrants shooting at the Indians from the corral of wagons, and Indians shooting at them from the tops of the hills around. In this way they fought on for about a week.

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Utah War (1857–1858) I asked an Indian what he was killing those people for. He was mad, and told me unless I kept “my mouth shut” he would kill me. Three men came down from Cedar City to our house while the fighting was going on. They said they came after cattle. Other men passed to and from Santa Clara to our house during the nights. The three men from Cedar City stayed about the house a while “pitching horseshoe quoits” while the fighting was on, when they afterwards went back to Cedar City. Dudley Leavitt came up from Santa Clara in the night while the emigrants were camped here; but he did not see them. He went on to Cedar City to buy flour. When he got to the house we told him the emigrants were fighting here. One afternoon, near night, after they had fought nearly a week, John and I saw the women and children and some leave the wagons and go up the road toward our house. There were no Indians with them. John and I could see where the Indians were hid in the oak bushes and sage right by the side of the road a mile or more on their route; and I said to John, I would like to know what the emigrants left their wagons for, as they were going into “a worse fix than ever they saw.” The women were on ahead with the children. The men were behind, altogether ’twas a big crowd. Soon as they got to the place where the Indians were hid in the bushes each side of the road, the Indians pitched right into them and commenced shooting them with guns and bows and arrows, and cut some of the men’s throats with knives. The men run in every direction, the Indians after them yelling and whooping. Soon as the women and children saw the Indians spring out of the bushes, they all cried out so loud that John and I heard them. The women scattered and tried to hide in the bushes, but the Indians shot them down; two girls ran up the slope towards the east about a quarter of a mile; John and I ran down and tried to save them; the girls hid in some bushes. A man, who is an Indian doctor, also told the Indians not to kill them. The girls then came out and hung around him for protection, he trying to keep the Indians away. The girls were crying out loud. The Indians came up and seized the girls by their hands and dresses and pulled and pushed them away from the doctor and shot them. By this time it was dark, and the other Indians came down the road and had got nearly through killing all the others. They were about half an hour killing the people from the time they first sprang out upon them from the bushes. Some time in the night Tullis and the Indians brought some of the children in a wagon up to the house. The children cried nearly all night. One little one, a baby, just commencing to walk around, was shot through the arm. One of the girls had been hit through the ear. Many of the children’s clothes were bloody. The next morning we kept three children and the rest were taken to Cedar City; also the next morning the train of wagons went up to Cedar City with all the goods. The Indians got all the flour. Some of it I saw buried this side of Pinto Creek. There were two yoke of cattle to each wagon as they passed up. The rest of the stock had been killed to be eaten by the Indians while the fight was going on, except some which were driven over the mountains this way and that.

Utah War (1857–1858) The Indians stripped naked the dead bodies; that is all the men; some of the women had their underclothes left. There were a good many men who came over from Pinto Creek and about, and stayed around the house while the fight went on. I saw John D. Lee there about the house during that time. He lives in Harmony— and Richard Robinson, Prime Coleman, Amos Thornton, Brother Dickinson, who all live at Pinto Creek. Thornton I saw at the house. When father ( John Hamblin) came back, I came down with him onto the ground. The bodies were all buried then so we could not see them. There were plenty of wolves around. The two girls had been buried also and I did show them to father, the Indians buried the bodies taking spades from the wagons. The people from Cedar City came down three days later, after the massacre, but the Indians had buried all the bodies before they came. This is all I know about it. This Albert Hamblin is nearly a grown man in point of size, and from appearance and bearing has evidently had engrafted upon his native viciousness all the bad traits of the community in which he lives. Two of the children are said to have pointed him out to Dr. Forney as an Indian whom they saw kill their two sisters. His story is artfully made up, evidently part truth and part falsehood. Leavitt could not have passed up from “The Fort” to Cedar City without knowing where the emigrants were besieged, as the road runs near the spring where the corral was, and between it and some hills occupied by the Mormons and Indians. That Albert stayed upon a neighborhood hill “herding sheep” day after day while the fight lasted, and then to the house of nights to go to sleep cannot be true. That Mormons were passing and re-passing upon the road, day and night, and did not know what was going on is simply absurd to one conversant with the surroundings of the place. In this Indian’s statement that some of the Mormons at the house were “pitching horseshoe quoits,” a glance is given at the fiendish levity with which the murdering, day by day, of this artfully entrapped party of gentile men, women and children was regarded. This “pitching of horseshoe quoits” was during the time when dropping shots from the Indians and the other Mormon concealed around the springs and behind the crest of hills kept back the perishing emigrants from water. There was time enough for some to go up to Hamblin’s house for refreshments. No danger of the emigrants getting away. It was all safe in that quarter. “There is time enough for us to have a game of quoits, the other boys will take care of matters down there.” The general will hardly fail to observe the discrepancy between Hamblin’s statement and that of Albert in relation to the burial of the two girls and in relation to the burial of the bodies of the others who had been murdered. Hamblin says the people from Cedar City buried them; Albert that the Indians did it, taking spades from the wagons, not a likely thing for bona fide Indians to do. My own opinion is that the remains were not buried at all until after they had been dismembered by the wolves and the flesh stripped from the bones, and then only such bones were buried as lay scattered along nearest the road.

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Utah War (1857–1858) Albert had evidently been trained in his statement. He gave much of it after crossquestioning, keeping always the Mormons in the background and the Indians conspicuously the prominent figures and actors, as Hamblin and his wife had endeavored to do. It was not until after I told him that Hamblin and his wife had informed me that John D. Lee and other Mormons were there and had asked him how it was possible he had not seen them, that he recollected about “Brother Lee” and “Brothers” Prime Coleman, Amos Thornton, Richard Robinson, and “Brother” Dickinson from Pinto Creek. He too had fallen into the general custom of the people and called every man “brother.” I questioned other Mormons in relation to the massacre, but many of them said they had moved from the northern part of the Territory since it took place; others, that they were harvesting at Parowan, Cedar, and at “The Fort,” and knew nothing of it until it was all over. Even “Brother” Prime Coleman [said] that he was harvesting near Parowan just before that time with Brother Benjamin Nell, but when the massacre took place he was down on the Muddy River with Brother Ira Hatch to keep down disturbances there among the Indians. (The Muddy is 163 miles from Parowan, on the road to California; he had to pass Mountain Meadows to go there.) He said that as he and Hatch were coming back they saw in the sand the tracks of three men who wore fine boots. This was at Beaver Dams (between Mountain Meadows and the Muddy and 50 miles from the Meadows). He and Hatch were frightened at this sign, were afraid of robbers, and did not stop, even for water, until they reached the Santa Clara, 2 miles off. At Pine Valley, near Mountain Meadows, they first heard of the massacre. There is no doubt but that all three of these men were active participants in the butchering at the Meadows. The foregoing is the Mormon story of the Massacre. As it took place on Hamblin’s ranch and within hearing of his family, it was impossible for them to be “out harvesting” or “up north” or “down on the Muddy”; he himself had gone to Salt Lake City. At least he says so; but even this, I think, needs proof. Some account had to be made up, and the one most likely to be believed was that the whole matter had been started by the Indians and carried out by them, because the emigrants had poisoned a spring near Fillmore City. Mr. Rodgers, United States Deputy Marshal, who accompanied Judge Cradlebaugh in his tour to the South, told me that the water in the spring referred to runs with such volume and force “a barrel of arsenic would not poison it.” While the Mormons say the Indians were the murderers, they speak with no sympathy of the suffer[er]s, but rather in extenuation of the crime by saying the emigrants were not fit to live; that besides poisoning the spring “they were impudent to the people on the road, robbed their hen roosts and gardens, and were insulting to the church; called their oxen “Brigham Young,” “Heber Kimball,” etc., and altogether were a rough, ugly set that ought to have been killed anyway.” But there is another side to this story. It is said that some two years since Bishop Parley Pratt was shot in Cherokee Nation near Arkansas by the husband of a woman who had run off with that saintly prelate. The Mormons swore vengeance on the people of Arkansas, one of who was this injured husband. The wife came on to Salt Lake City after the bishop was killed and still lives there.

Utah War (1857–1858) About this time, also, the Mormon troubles with the United States commenced, and the most bitter hostility against the Gentiles became rife throughout Utah among all the Latter-day Saints. It will be recollected that even while these emigrants were pursuing their journey overland to California, Colonel Alexander was following upon their trace with two or more regiments of troops ordered to Utah to assist, if necessary, in seeing the laws of the land properly enforced in that territory. This train was undoubtedly a very rich one. It is said the emigrants had nearly nine hundred head of fine cattle, many horses and mules, and one stallion valued at $2,000; that they had a great deal of ready money besides. All this the Mormons at Salt Lake City saw as the train came on. The Mormons knew the troops were marching to their country, and a spirit of intense hatred of the Americans and towards our Government was kindled in the hearts of this whole people by Brigham Young, Orson Hyde, and other leaders, even from the pulpits. Here, opportunely, was a rich train of emigrants—American Gentiles. That is, the most obnoxious kind of Gentiles—and not only that, but these Gentiles were from Arkansas, where the saintly Pratt had gained his crown of martyrdom. Is not here some thread which may be seized as a clue to this mystery so long hidden as to whether or not the Mormons were accomplices in the massacre? This train of Arkansas Gentiles was doomed from the day it crossed through the South Pass and had gotten fairly down in the meshes of the Mormon spider net, from which it was never to become disentangled. Judge Cradlebaugh informed me that about this time Brigham Young, preaching in the tabernacle and speaking of the trouble with the United States, said that up to that moment he had protected emigrants who had passed through the Territory, but now he would turn the Indians loose upon them. It is a singular point worthy of note that this sermon should have been preached just as the rich train had gotten into the valley and was now fairly entrapped; a sermon good, coming from him, as a letter of marque to these land pirates who listened to him as an oracle. The hint thus shrewdly given out was not long in being acted upon. From that moment these emigrants, as they journeyed southward, were considered the authorized, if not legal, prey of the inhabitants. All kinds of depredations and extortions were practiced upon them. At Parowan they took some wheat to the mill to be ground. The bishop replied, “Yes, but do you take double toll.” This shows the spirit with which they were treated. These things are now leaking out; but some of those who were then Mormons have renounced their creed, and through them much is learned which, taken in connection with the facts that are known, served to develop the truth. It is said to be a truth that Brigham Young sent letters south, authorizing, if not commanding, that the train should be destroyed. A Pah-Ute chief, of the Santa Clara band, named “Jackson,” who was one of the attacking party, and had a brother slain by the emigrants from their corral by the spring, says that orders came down in a letter from Brigham Young that the emigrants were to be killed; and a chief of the Pah-Utes named Touche, now living on the Virgin River, told me that a letter from Brigham Young to the same effect was brought down to the Virgin

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Utah War (1857–1858) River band by a young man named Huntingdon [Oliver B. Huntington], who, I learn, is an Indian Interpreter and lives at present at Salt Lake City. Jackson says there were 60 Mormons led by Bishop John D. Lee, of Harmony, and a prominent man in the church named [Isaac C.] Haight, who lives at Cedar City. That they were all painted and disguised as Indians. That this painting and disguising was done at a spring in a canyon about a mile northeast of the spring where the emigrants were encamped, and that Lee and Haight led and directed the combined force of Mormons and Indians in the first attack, throughout the siege, and at the last massacre. The Santa Clara Indians say that the emigrants could not get to the water, as besiegers lay around the spring ready to shoot anyone who approached it. This could easily have been done. Major [Henry] Prince, Paymaster, U.S.A., and Lieutenant Ogle, First Dragoons, on the 17th inst., stood at the ditch which was in the corral and placed some men at the spring 28 yards distant, and they could just see the other men’s heads, both parties standing erect. This shows how vital a point the Assailants occupied; how close it was to the assailed, and how well protected it was from the direction of the corral. The following account of the affair is, I think, susceptible of legal proof by those whose names are known, and who, I am assured, are willing to make oath to many of the facts which serve as links in the chain of evidence leading toward the truth of this grave question: By whom were these 120 men, women, and children murdered? It was currently reported among the Mormons at Cedar City, in talking among themselves, before the troops ever came down south, (when all felt secure of arrest or prosecution), and nobody seemed to question the truth of it—that a train of emigrants of fifty or upward of men, mostly with families, came and encamped at this spring at Mountain Meadows in September 1857. It was reported in Cedar City, and was not, and is not doubted—even by the Mormons—that John D. Lee, Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higby [Higbee] (the first resides at Harmony, the last two at Cedar City), were the leaders who organized a party of fifty or sixty Mormons to attack this train. They had also all the Indians which they could collect at Cedar City, Harmony and Washington City to help them, a good many in number. This party then came down, and at first the Indians were ordered to stampede the cattle and drive them away from the train. Then they commenced firing on the emigrants; this firing was returned by the emigrants; one Indian was killed, a brother of the chief of the Santa Clara Indians, another shot through the leg, who is now a cripple at Cedar City. There were without doubt a great many more killed and wounded. It was said the Mormons were painted and disguised as Indians. The Mormons say the emigrants fought “like lions” and they saw that they could not whip them by any fair fighting. After some days fighting the Mormons had a council among themselves to arrange a plan to destroy the emigrants. They concluded, finally, that they could send some few down and pretend to be friends and try and get the emigrants to surrender. John D. Lee and three or four others, headmen, from Washington, Cedar, and Parowan (Haight and Higby [Higbee] from Cedar), had their paint washed off and dressing in their usual clothes, took their wagons and drove down toward the emigrant’s corral as they were

Utah War (1857–1858) just traveling on the road on their ordinary business. The emigrants sent out a little girl towards them. She was dressed in white and had a white handkerchief in her hand, which she waved in token of peace. The Mormons with the wagon waved one in reply, and then moved on towards the corral. The emigrants then came out, no Indians or others being in sight at this time, and talked with these leading Mormons with the three wagons. They talked with the emigrants for an hour or an hour and a half, and told them that the Indians were hostile, and that if they gave up their arms it would show that they did not want to fight; and if they, the emigrants, would do this they would pilot them back to the settlements. The migrants had horses which had remained near their wagons; the loose stock, mostly cattle, had been driven off—not the horses. Finally the emigrants agreed to these terms and delivered up their arms to the Mormons with whom they had counseled. The women and children then started back toward Hamblin’s house, the men following with a few wagons that they had hitched up. On arriving at the Scrub Oaks, etc., where the other Mormons and Indians lay concealed, Higby [Higbee], who had been one of those who had inveigled the emigrants from their defenses, himself gave the signal to fire, when a volley was poured in from each side, and the butchery commenced and was continued until it was consummated. The property was brought to Cedar City and sold at public auction. It was called in Cedar City, and is so called now by the Facetious Mormons, “property taken at the siege of Sebastopol.” The clothing stripped from the corpses, bloody and with bits of flesh upon it, shredded by the bullets from the persons of the poor creatures who wore it, was placed in the cellar of the tithing office (an official building), where it lay about three weeks, when it was brought away by some of the party; but witnesses do not know whether it was sold or given away. It is said the cellar smells of it even to this day. It is reported that John D. Lee, Haight, and Philip Smith [Klingonsmith] (the latter lives in Cedar City) went to Salt Lake City immediately after the massacre, and counseled with Brigham Young about what should be done with the property. They took with them the ready money they got from the murdered emigrants and offered it to Young. He said he would have nothing to do with it. He told them to divide the cattle and cows among the poor. They had taken some of the cattle to Salt Lake City merchants there. Lee told Brigham that the Indians would not be satisfied if they did not have a share of the cattle. Brigham left it to Lee to make the distribution. One or two of the Mormons did not like it that Lee had this authority, as they say he swindled them out of their share. Lee was the smartest man of the lot. The wagons, carriages, and rifles, etc., were distributed among the Mormons. Lee has a carriage reported be one of them. The Indians have but few of the rifles. Much of this seems to be corroborated by a man named Whitelock, a dentist, now at Camp Floyd. Whitelock says he was told by a Mormon, who acknowledged that he was present at the massacre, but who is now in California, “that orders to destroy the emigrants first came from above” (Salt Lake City) and that a party of armed men under the command of a man named John D. Lee, who was then a bishop in the church, but who

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Utah War (1857–1858) has since (as Brigham Young says) been deposed, left the settlements of Beaver City, north of Parowan, Parowan City, and Cedar City on what was called a “secret expedition,” and after an absence of a few days returned, bringing back strange wagons, cattle, horses, mules and also household property. There is legal proof that this property was sold at the official tithing office of the church. Whitelock says that this man could not report the details of the massacre without tears and trembling. He said he was so horrified at these atrocities he fled away from Utah to California. The man said he saw children clinging around the knees of the murderers, begging for mercy and offering themselves as slaves for life could they be spared. But their throats were cut from ear to ear as an answer to their appeal. There are now wagons, carriages, and cattle in possession of the Mormons which can be sworn to, it is said, as having belonged to these emigrants by those who saw them upon the plains. Two hundred and forty eight head of cattle were sold on the Jordan River after the arrival of the Army to United States commissaries by Mormons, and it is said that they can be traced as having come through the hands of Lee and [William H.] Hooper, who was Mormon Secretary of State, and were without doubt the cattle taken from the emigrants. Others are seen in the hands of the Mormons which are believed to have been captured at the time of the massacre. The Pah-Ute Indians of the Muddy River said to me that they know the Mormons had charged them with the massacre of the emigrants, but said they, “where are the wagons, the cattle, the clothing, the rifles, and other property belonging to the train? We have not got or had them. No, you find all these things in the hands of the Mormons.” There is some logical reasoning in that, creditable at least to the obscure minds of miserable savages, whatever be the truth. But there is not the shadow of a doubt that the emigrants were butchered by the Mormons themselves, assisted doubtless by the Indians. The idea of letting the emigrants come on to an obscure quarter of the Territory, amid the fastnesses of the mountains, with a formidable desert extending from that point to California, over which a stranger to the country, without sustenance, escape with his life; to a point were the Indians were numerous enough to lend assistance, and who could plausibly be charged with the crime in case, in the future any people should give trouble by asking ugly questions on the subject, exhibits consideration as to future contingencies of which these miserable Indians, at least are entirely incapable. Besides, “fifty men that would do to tie to” in a fight, all well armed and experts in the use of the rifle, could have wiped out ten times their number of Pah-Ute Indians armed only with the bow and arrow. Hamblin himself, their agent, informed that to his certain knowledge in 1856 there were but three guns in the whole tribe. I doubt if they had many more in 1857. The emigrants were to be destroyed with as little loss to the Mormons as possible, and no one old enough to tell the tale was to be left alive. To effect this the whole plans and operations, from beginning to end, display skill, patience, pertinacity and forecast, which no people here at the time were equal to except the Mormons themselves. Hamblin says three men escaped. They were doubtless herding when the attack was made, or crept out of a corral by night.

Utah War (1857–1858) The fate of one of these he had never learned. He must have been murdered off the road or perished of hunger and thirst in the mountains. At all events he never went through to California or he would have been heard from. One got as far as the Muddy River, ninety odd miles from Mountain Meadows. There the Indians cut his throat. The other got as far as Las Vegas, 45 miles still farther towards California, where he arrived totally naked, some Indians having stripped him of his clothes. Hamblin said an acquaintance of his coming from that way had seen marks in the sand where the Indians had thrown him down and where there had been struggling when he was stripped. The Las Vegas Indians cut his throat likewise. The Mormons had a fort at Las Vegas, now abandoned, but which was occupied at that time. Here is something which seems to point to the “tracks in the sand of three men who wore fine boots” which brothers Ira Hatch and Prime Coleman saw at the Beaver Dams, and at which they became so frightened that they didn’t stop to get water, although there was none other within 20 miles. During this “Siege of Sebastapol” or after the final massacre, it was doubtless discovered that the three emigrants had escaped, and Brothers Hatch and Coleman, perhaps two Mormons named Young, were sent in pursuit to cut them off on the desert or to get the Indians to do it. Hatch talks Pah-Ute like a native, and is now an interpreter of their language whenever needed. One of the Youngs, who now lives at Cotton Farm, near the confluence of The Virgin and Santa Clara, tells this story of the emigrants murdered on the Muddy: “He and his brother, each on horseback, and leading a third horse, were traveling from California, as he says, to Utah. Just before they arrived at Muddy River they met one of the emigrants on foot. He had been wounded; was unarmed and without provisions or water. It was at daybreak. He had traveled already nearly 100 miles from the Mountain Meadows. He seemed to be terror stricken. His mind was wandering. He talked incoherently about the massacre and his purposes. Under the awful scenes he had witnessed, the pain of his wound, and the privations he had endured his senses had given away. They told him of the long deserts ahead of which, if he pursued his way, he would certainly perish. They persuaded him to return with them; mounted him on their lead horse, and so came on to the Muddy, where they stopped to prepare breakfast. One of the Young’s laid his coat, containing in its pocket $500 all their money, on a bush. And commenced frying some cakes at a fire which had been kindled. The Indians gathered around in great numbers. The chief would seize the cakes from the pan as fast as they were done, and eat them. At last one of the Youngs struck the chief with a knife, whereupon all the Indians rose to kill the three men. Young says he and his brother drew their revolvers, and holding them on the Indians, kept them at a distance until they got to their horses, had mounted, and were out of arrow shot. They then looked back for the emigrant who had seemed as he sat abstracted by the fire, hardly to comprehend what was going on. He had not left the spot where he sat. Three or four Indians had him down and were cutting his throat. They themselves, then made off, leaving coat, money, and all their provisions.” This is their story, but the truth doubtless was the Youngs, Hatch and Coleman, had followed up the man; had found him beyond the Muddy, brought him back, and then

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Utah War (1857–1858) set the Indians upon him. The fate of these three men seems to close the scenes of this terrible tragedy on all the grown people of that fine train which was seen journeying prosperously forward at O’Fallons Bluffs on the 11th of the preceding June. There were doubtless atrocious episodes connected with the massacre of the women, which will never be known. Mr. Rogers, the deputy marshal, told me that Bishop John D. Lee is said to have taken a beautiful lady away to a secluded spot. There she implored him for more than life. She too, was found dead. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The little children whom we left this John D. Lee distributing at Hamblin’s house after that sad night, have at length been gathered together and are now at Indian Farm, 12 miles south of Fillmore City, or at Salt Lake City in the custody for Dr. Forney, United States Indian agent. They are 17 in number. Sixteen of these were seen by Judge Cradlebaugh, Lieutenant Kearney, and others, and gave the following information in relation to their personal identity, etc. The children were varying from 3 to 9 years of age, 10 girls, 6 boys, and were questioned separately. The first is a boy named Calvin, between 7 and 8 [John Calvin Miller, 6]; does not remember his surname; says he was by his mother [Matilda] when she was killed, and pulled the arrows from her back until she was dead; says he had two brothers older than himself, named James [see below] and Henry, and three sisters, Nancy, Mary [see below] and Martha. The second is a girl who does not remember her name. The others say it is Demurr [Georgia Ann Dunlap, 18 mos.]. The third is a boy named Ambrose Mariam Tagit [Emberson Milam Tackitt, 4]; says he had two brothers older than himself and one younger. His father, mother, and two elder brothers were killed, his younger brother [William Henry, listed below] was brought to Cedar City; says he lived in Johnson County, but does not know what State; says it took one week to go from where he lived with his grandfather and grandmother who are still living in the States. The fourth is a girl obtained of John Morris, a Mormon, at Cedar City. She does not recollect anything about herself [Mary Miller, 4 (see next below)]. Fifth. A boy obtained of E. H. Grove [Joseph Miller, 1, whose older brother, Calvin (above)], says that the girl obtained of Morris is named Mary and is his sister. The sixth is a girl who says her name is Prudence Angelina [Prudence Angeline Dunlap, 5]. Had two brothers, Jessie [Thomas J., 17] and John [John H., 16], who were killed. Her father’s name was William [Lorenzo Dow Dunlap], and she had an Uncle Jessie [ Jesse Dunlap]. The seventh is a girl. She says her name is Francis Harris, or Horne, remembers nothing of her family [Sarah Frances Baker, 3]. The eighth is a young boy, too young to remember anything about himself [Felix Marion Jones, 18 mos.]. The ninth is a boy whose name is William W. Huff [William Henry Tackitt, 19 mos.]. The tenth is a boy whose name is Charles Fancher [Christopher “Kit” Carson Fancher, 5]. The eleventh is a girl who says her name is Sophronia Huff [Nancy Saphrona Huff, 4].

Utah War (1857–1858) The twelfth is a girl who says her name is Betsy [Martha Elizabeth Baker, 5]. The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth are three sisters named Rebecca, Louisa and Sara Dunlap [Rebecca J. Dunlap, 6; Louisa Dunlap, 4; Sarah E. Dunlap, 1]. These three sisters were the children obtained of Jacob Hamblin. I have no note of the sixteenth [Triphenia D. Fancher, 22 mos.]. The seventeenth is a boy who was but six weeks old at the time of the massacre [William Twitty Baker, 9 mos.]. Hamblin’s wife brought him to my camp on the 19th instant. The next day they took him on to Salt Lake City to give him up to Dr. Forney. He is a pretty little boy and hardly dreamed he had again slept upon the ground where his parents had been murdered. These children, it is said, could not be induced to make any developments while they remained with the Mormons, from fear, no doubt, having been intimidated by threats. Dr. Forney, it is said, came southward for them under the impression that he would find them in the hands of the Indians. The Mormons say the children were in the hands of the Indians and were purchased by them for rifles, blankets, etc., but the children say they have never lived with the Indians at all. The Mormons claimed of Dr. Forney sums of money, varying from $200 to $400, for attending them when sick, for feeding and clothing them, and for nourishing the infants from the time when they assumed to have purchased them from the Indians. Murders of the parents and despoilers of their property, these Mormons, rather these relentless, incarnate fiends, dared even to come forward and claim payment for having kept these little ones barely alive; these helpless orphans whom they themselves had already robbed of their natural protectors and support. Has there ever been an act which at all equaled this devilish hardihood in more than devilish effrontery? Never, but one; and even then the price was but “30 pieces of silver.” On my arrival at Mountain Meadows, the 16th instant, I encamped near the spring where the emigrants had encamped, and where they had entrenched themselves after they were first fired upon. The ditch they there dug is not yet filled up. The same day Captain Reuben P. Campbell, United States Second Dragoons, with a command of three companies of troops, came from his camp at Santa Clara and camped there also. Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy Marshall Rogers had come down from Provo with Captain Campbell, and had been inquiring into the circumstances of the massacre. The judge cannot receive too much praise for the resolute and thorough manner with which he pursues him investigation. On his way down past this spot, and before my arrival, Captain Campbell had caused to be collected and buried the bones of 26 of the victims. Dr. Brewer informed me that the remains of 18 were buried in one grave, 12 in another and 6 in another. On the 20th I took a wagon and a party of men and made a thorough search for others amongst the sage brushes for a least a mile back from the road that leads to Hamblin’s house. Hamblin himself showed Sergeant Fritz of my party a spot on the right-hand side of the road where had partially covered up a great many of the bones. These were collected, and a large number of others on the left hand side of the road up the slopes of the hill, and in the ravines and among the bushes. I gathered many of the disjointed

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Utah War (1857–1858) bones of 34 persons. The number could easily be told by the number of pairs of shoulder blades and by lower jaws, skulls, and parts of skulls, etc. These, with the remains of two others gotten in a ravine to the east of the spring, where they had been interred at but little depth, 34 in all, I buried in a grave on the northern side of the ditch. Around and above this grave I caused to be built of loose granite stones, hauled from the neighboring hills, a rude monument, conical in form and fifty feet in circumference at the base, and twelve feet in height. This is surmounted by a cross hewn from red cedar wood. From the ground to top of cross is twenty four feet. On the transverse part of the cross, facing towards the north, is an inscription carved in the wood. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” And on a rude slab of granite set in the earth and leaning against the northern base of the monument there are cut the following words: “Here 120 men, women, and children were massacred in cold blood early in September, 1857. They were from Arkansas.” I observed that nearly every skull I saw had been shot through with rifle or revolver bullets. I did not see one that had been “broken in with stones.” Dr. Brewer showed me one, that probably of a boy of eighteen, which had been fractured and slit, doubtless by two blows of a bowie knife or other instrument of that character. I saw several bones of what must have been very small children. Dr. Brewer says from what he saw he thinks some infants were butchered. The mothers doubtless had these in their arms, and the same shot or blow may have deprived both of life. The scene of the massacre, even at this late day, was horrible to look upon. Women’s hair, in detached locks and masses, hung to the sage bushes and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at least a mile in the direction of the road, by two miles east and west, there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered. A glance into the wagon when all these had been collected revealed a sight which can never be forgotten. The idea of the melancholy procession of that great number of women and children, followed at a distance by their husbands and brothers, after all their suffering, their watching, their anxiety and grief, for so many gloomy days and dismal nights at the corral, thus moving slowly and sadly up to the point where the Mormons and Indians lay in wait to murder them; these doomed and unhappy people literally going to their own funeral; the chill shadows of night closing darkly around them, sad precursors of the approaching shadows of a deeper night, brings to the mind a picture of human suffering and wretchedness on the one hand, and of human treachery and ferocity upon the other, that cannot possibly be excelled by any other scene that ever before occurred in real life. I caused the distance to be measured from point to point on the scene of the massacre. From the ditch near the spring to the point upon the road where the men attacked and destroyed, and where their bones were mostly found, is one mile 565 yards. Here there is a grave where Capt. Campbell’s command buried some of the remains. To the next point, also marked by a similar grave made by Captain Campbell, and where the women and children were butchered; a point identified from their bones and clothing

Utah War (1857–1858) have been found near it, it is one mile, 1,135 yards. To the swell across the valley called the Rim of the Basin, is one mile 1,334 yards. To Hamblin’s house four miles, 1,049 yards. Major Henry Prince, United States Army, drew a map of the ground about the spring where the entrenchment was dug, and embracing the neighboring hill behind which the Mormons had cover. On the crests of these hills are still traces of some rude little parapets made of loose stones and loop holed for rifles. Marks of bullets shot from the corral are seen upon these stones. I enclose this map and also a drawing of the valley as it appears looking northward from a point below the spring and another drawing giving a near view of the monument. These latter are not so good as I could wish for, but they will serve to give a tolerably correct idea of what they are intended to represent. They were made by Mr. Moeller, who has lived many years among the Mormons. In pursuing the bloody thread which runs throughout this picture of sad realities, the question how this crime, that for hellish atrocity has no parallel in our history, can be adequately punished often comes up and seeks in vain for an answer. Judge Cradlebaugh says that with Mormon juries the attempt to administer justice in their Territory is simply a ridiculous farce. He believes the Territory ought at once to be put under martial law. This may be the only practical way in which even a partial punishment can be meted out to these Latter-day devils. But how inadequate would be the punishment of a few, even by death, for this crime for which nearly the whole Mormon population, from Brigham Young down, were more or less instrumental in perpetrating. There are other heinous crimes to be punished besides this. Martial law would at best be but a temporary expedient. Crime is found in the footsteps of the Mormons wherever they go, and so the evil must always exist as long as the Mormons themselves exist. What is their history? What their antecedents? Perhaps the future may be judged by the past. In their infancy as a religious community, they settled in Jackson County, Mo. There, in a short time, from the crimes and depredations they committed, they became intolerable to the inhabitants, whose self preservation compelled them to ride and drive the Mormons out by force of arms. At Nauvoo, again another experiment was tried with them. The people of Illinois exercised forbearance toward them until it literally “ceased to be a virtue.” They were driven thence as they had been from Missouri, but fortunately this time with the loss on their part of those two shallow imposters, but errant miscreants, the brothers Smith. The United States took no wholesome heed of these lessons taught by Missouri and Illinois. The Mormons were permitted to settle amid the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains, with a desert on each side, and upon the great thoroughfare between the two oceans. Over this thoroughfare our Citizens have hitherto not been able to travel without peril to their lives and property, except, forsooth, Brigham Young pleased to grant them his permission and give them his protection. “He would turn the Indians loose upon them.” The expenses of the army in Utah, past and to come (figure that), the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, the unnumbered other crimes, which have been and will yet be committed by this community, are but preliminary gusts of the whirlwind our

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Utah War (1857–1858) Government has reaped and is yet to reap for the wind it had sowed in permitting the Mormons ever to gain foothold within our borders. They are an ulcer upon the body politic. An ulcer which it needs more than cutlery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough extirpation, before we can ever hope for safety or tranquility. This is no rhetorical phrase made by a flourish of the pen, but is really what will prove to be an earnest and stubborn fact. This brotherhood may be contemplated from any point of view, and but one conclusion can be arrived at concerning it. The Thugs of India were an inoffensive, moral, law-abiding people in comparison. I have made this a special report, because the information here given, however crude, I thought to be of such grave importance it ought to be put permanently on record and deserved to be kept separate and distinct from a report on the ordinary occurrences of a march. Some of the details might, perhaps, have been omitted, but there has been a great and fearful crime perpetrated, and many of the circumstances connected with it have long been kept most artfully concealed. But few direct rays even now shine in upon the subject. So that however indistinct and unimportant they may at present appear to be, even the faint side lights given by these details may yet lend assistance in exploring some obscure recess of the matter where the great truths, that should be diligently and persistently sought for, may yet happily be discovered. I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant, James Henry Carleton, Brevet Major, U.S.A., Captain in the First Dragoons. Major W. W. Mackall, Ass’t. Adjutant-General, U.S.A., San Francisco, California. Source: James Henry Carleton, “Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” Document 605. 57th Cong. (House of Representatives), 1st sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902.

Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was the culmination of more than 30 years of abolitionist activism that more and more focused on the use of force to break the fetters of the slave. Although the American Antislavery Society’s 1831 Declaration of Sentiments had rejected “the use of all carnal weapons” against the slave system, it had also declared slavery a form a piracy and argued that the cruelty of the system was greater than the sufferings that had touched off the American Revolution. By the 1840s, when Garrisonian abolitionists adopted a radical pacifist position they called “nonresistance,” other activists, both black and white, had come to believe that violence was justifiable against a system that was itself violent. Prominent among these more “aggressive” abolitionists were black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, and white activists like Gerrit Smith, a wealthy upstate New York landowner, and Theodore Parker, a Boston preacher and radical reformer. Rejecting the notion that slavery in America could be ended solely through a campaign of moral persuasion, these men feared that the slaveholding interest in the United States was growing in wealth and political power. Moral argument and patient politics, they argued, would only strengthen the influence of slaveholders, whose growing control over the Democratic and Whig parties would result in the spread of slavery into the West and perhaps even into the North itself. The 1850s witnessed an accelerating conflict over slavery that confirmed the deepest fears and aggressive vision of those who would eventually support John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for example, touched off violent conflicts between abolitionists and law enforcement officials in cities as far north as Syracuse, New York. Working closely with northern free black communities, abolitionists protected fugitives against recapture and organized dramatic rescues of those who were imprisoned by the authorities. As slaves escaped into the North and told their stories, moreover, they confirmed the notion that slavery was a violent institution and that the slaves themselves were ready and willing to risk death to be free. When vicious fighting broke out between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the Kansas territory, many abolitionists actively supported Free State forces with money and weapons. In John Brown, who had migrated to Kansas with members of his family, these activists

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found a powerful symbol of their own deepest longing to confront and defeat the slaveholding interest. John Brown became a household name for his guerilla fighting against proslavery forces in Kansas and a hero to abolitionists for his bold, if abortive, defense of the antislavery settlement at Osawatomie. Along with his antislavery militancy, Brown also exemplified the biracialism that characterized the more aggressive wing of the American antislavery movement. Granted land by Gerrit Smith in the Adirondack Mountains, Brown had moved to the region in the late 1840s. Brown and his large family lived in North Elba, a community made up largely of free blacks who had also received small landholdings from Smith as part of an experiment in independent black property holding. By all accounts, Brown related to his black neighbors on equal terms, avoiding the paternalistic attitudes that some white abolitionists exhibited toward African Americans. During the decade they resided in North Elba, moreover, the Browns were heavily involved in the Underground Railroad, an informal, biracial network committed to helping fugitive slaves escape from bondage. By 1858, the basic alliance that underwrote the Harpers Ferry Raid had been formed. Like the six abolitionists who supported him, John Brown had come to believe that violence was both a legitimate and necessary weapon against an increasingly powerful and arrogant slave power. By working together, he believed, whites and blacks, enslaved and free, could end the system of slavery and purify the country of its central sin. For the abolitionists, Brown was the man they had been looking for—someone who had a history of working effectively with blacks and who was willing to die if necessary to defeat slavery.

An Antislavery Revolution John Brown’s plan to raid the Harpers Ferry Armory was built firmly upon his experience as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Having concealed scores of fugitive slaves in the mountains of upstate New York, Brown was familiar with the uses of rugged terrain as hiding places and bases of operation. Yet Brown’s vision for the Harpers Ferry operation was also a significant departure from his earlier activities. As historian David Reynolds has argued, Brown intended not simply to use the Appalachian Mountains as a hiding place for small groups of slaves fleeing to the North, but rather to use weapons captured from the armory at Harpers Ferry to create a slave army capable of invading the South itself. Using the mountains as a place of refuge and a base of operations, the new army would target regions of the South where the population of slaves was largest. Once the slaves of these regions were liberated, the army would protect their movement into the mountains, where they would be defended to the last against any attempt at

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recapture. The maroon community established by these repeated raids would become an independent society with its own laws and even its own constitution. Indeed, prior to the raid, Brown had written a “Provisional Constitution” to govern the new society he envisioned. Ultimately, Brown believed, the mass exodus of slaves from the plantation South and the ensuing terror caused by the raids would destroy slavery forever. To consider a maneuver on the scale that Brown envisioned, he needed financial and logistical support as well as a group of men willing to participate in what would be an extremely dangerous operation. More than two years before the raid, Brown had gone to Boston to secure backers among leading abolitionists for a major southern foray. Trading on the fame he had gained for his wars in Kansas, he met with activists like Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Stearns, whose willingness to use violence against the slaveholding South had grown during recent clashes over the Fugitive Slave Act. Along with the New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, these men would become known as the “Secret Six” for their monetary support of Brown’s raid. In addition to their antislavery militancy, many of these men been influenced by transcendentalism, a romantic philosophy that emphasized the priority of the individual conscience over unjust human laws or institutions. In John Brown, these men found a powerful example of someone willing to live out this philosophy. Although several of the backers expressed doubts as Brown revealed the details of his plan over the next two years, his powerful personality and willingness to sacrifice himself for the cause overcame their doubts. They ultimately raised over $4,000 for his venture. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who also knew of Brown’s plan, declined to participate. Although he knew and admired Brown, Douglass regarded the raid as doomed to failure. Brown believed that the Harpers Ferry Armory could be captured by a small group of men, and he assembled a group of 21 willing to follow him into the South. The band included Brown’s sons Owen, Oliver, and Watson, as well as five African Americans. The latter group contained Dangerfield Newby, a former slave whose family was still held in bondage not far from Harpers Ferry, and Shields Green, a fugitive slave who joined the raiders against the advice of Frederick Douglass. The other raiders were recruited by Brown personally during his Kansas activities and on speaking tours throughout the North. But it was only when this small group of men gathered in a rented farmhouse on the Maryland side of the Potomac River that Brown explained the full scope of his plan to them. Citing statistics and pointing to maps showing where the largest concentrations of slaves lived, Brown described his vision of a rolling invasion of the South led by slaves armed with weapons from the armory a few miles away. He also showed them the nearly 1,000 iron pikes that had been sent by an ally as additional weaponry

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for the slave army. Convinced that word of the raid would spread like wildfire, Brown told his men that they were about to participate in the most decisive event in American history since the Revolution.

Events at Harpers Ferry All of these ideas and plans depended upon the successful capture of the Harpers Ferry Armory, the arrival of slaves from the surrounding areas, and their willingness to participate in the liberation system Brown had devised. As the men could tell from their reconnaissance of the area, the town of Harpers Ferry was located in a peninsula of land where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers converged. Despite a secluded appearance, it was easily accessible by road to Baltimore and Washington, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passed by the town on the bridge spanning the Potomac. Though the population was only about 5,000, the community was significant because of a federal arsenal built in the early 19th century that manufactured 10,000 weapons per year for the U.S. military. The narrow main street in the town contained the weapons factories themselves, the arsenal where they were housed, and an engine house where the facility’s firefighting equipment was kept. Some distance away was a rifle works where muskets were produced. On the morning of Sunday, October 16, 1859, Brown told his men that they would attack just after dark that very evening. The raiders would begin by seizing the bridges over the two rivers. Success then depended upon a quick capture of the armory, arsenal, engine house, and rifle works, while other raiders rallied the local slaves. Just after sunset, the raid began. The raid commenced well as Brown’s men secured the bridges, cut the telegraph wires, and seized the armory complex and rifle works with almost no opposition. Several hostages were taken during these initial operations, and Brown planned to use them if necessary to negotiate his own escape and that of his men. At the same time, six of the raiders traveled through the surrounding countryside hoping to spread the news of the event among the local slaves. One of the first hostages taken in this part of the operation was Colonel Lewis Washington, a distant relative of George Washington, and whose plantation was located a few miles away from Harpers Ferry. Washington and his slaves were taken back to Brown’s headquarters at the armory, where he was joined by a neighboring planter and his slaves who had endured the same fate. But if these events unfolded as expected, Brown seemed surprised that the slaves he had liberated were ambivalent at best about what had happened to them. He was also dismayed that there was no evidence of a more general uprising among slaves in the surrounding region. Certain that southern blacks would leap at the chance to strike out against slaveholders, he failed to account for the confusion and fear of reprisal that such

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events inevitably produced in them. This lukewarm response at least temporarily undermined Brown’s faith in the larger plan and seems to have immobilized him. Instead of ordering his men to take what weapons they could carry into the mountains west of Harpers Ferry, Brown delayed and prepared for a dramatic and perhaps final stand against the forces of slavery. A major reason why that final stand came so quickly was that Brown and his men had failed to prevent the Baltimore and Ohio train from carrying the news of the raid east. When the train stopped at the Potomac Bridge in the early hours of October 17, its crew was met with gunfire from raiders Oliver Brown and Stewart Taylor. Yet only two hours later, Brown inexplicably told his men to release the train and its passengers. At the next stop, the conductor wired news of the raid to Baltimore, and from there it spread rapidly over the entire region. By then, the town itself was awake and in the grip of panic over the strange events unfolding in its midst. Church bells rang out a message of danger, and soon the local militia accompanied by hundreds of rifle-toting citizens began gathering around the buildings where Brown and his men were holed up. John Brown himself remained in the armory’s engine house with a group of raiders and some hostages while an even smaller group led by John Kagi had barricaded themselves in the rifle works. The raiders guarding the bridges tried desperately to rejoin their comrades in the town, but most were killed by townspeople before reaching safety. One of them, the former slave Dangerfield Newby, was shot in the street near the armory, and his body was horribly mutilated by enraged passersby. As townspeople and raiders began a full-scale gun battle, the casualty rates began to rise rapidly. Brown sent his son Watson and another raider out to negotiate with the crowd, but they were both immediately shot to death. The rifle works fell to the crowd soon after, and the party of raiders guarding it were gunned down in a hail of bullets as they attempted flee across the river. The options for Brown and his remaining raiders narrowed almost to nothing as state and federal troops arrived at the scene in large numbers. By the late afternoon, exaggerated reports that hundreds of abolitionists were attacking Harpers Ferry had convinced President James Buchanan to send in the U.S. Marines to restore order. The ranking officer was Colonel Robert E. Lee, a Virginian and a hero of the Mexican-American War. Lee was on leave from military duty in Texas when he received the order to take command of the Harpers Ferry mission, and he moved with alacrity. Along with Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, another Virginian, Lee prepared to storm the engine house at dawn on October 18. Before they attacked, Lieutenant Stuart appeared at the engine house door with a note demanding that Brown and his men surrender without conditions. Brown fearlessly demanded that he and his men be allowed to escape, and Stuart gave the signal for the assault to begin.

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Raiders who were still physically capable of firing weapons attempted to fend off the attack, but the marines easily broke into the engine house and took control. Two of Brown’s men were killed at once, and Brown himself sustained a terrible abdominal wound and several lacerations to the head. He and the remaining raiders were quickly taken into custody, and their personal effects from the Maryland farmhouse were confiscated. According to historian Steven Oates, the total death toll from the Harpers Ferry Raid was 17, including 10 raiders, one marine, and three citizens of Harpers Ferry. John Brown’s dream of leading a slave army into the Deep South had ended in a bloody tragedy after just 36 hours.

The Aftermath In late October 1859, John Brown went on trial in Charles Town, Virginia, a few miles from Harpers Ferry. The charge he faced was treason against the state of Virginia, a crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to hang. During his trial, Brown vociferously repudiated attempts by his lawyers to mount an insanity defense. However eccentric his actions might seem to those unsympathetic to his cause, he maintained that a deep commitment to social justice, not insanity, had motivated his plan. He also argued that the liberation of the slaves, not the indiscriminate killing of innocent southern whites, was his ultimate intention. Yet it is also clear from his testimony at the trial that Brown remained convinced that American slavery was destined for a violent end. On the day of his execution, he passed a note to one of his jailers in which he expressed certainty that America’s guilty complicity in slavery could be purged only through blood atonement. The bloody Civil War that followed seemed to bear out his prophecy. The Harpers Ferry Raid indeed helped to fulfill the predictions of its chief architect. In the South, fear of slave insurrection gripped hundreds of communities. When evidence from Brown’s papers showed that his raid had been financed by a conspiracy of six northern abolitionists, southern secessionists argued that their region was no longer safe in the American Union. Only by leaving the United States and creating a new southern Confederacy, they argued, could the threat of a massive slave rebellion, led by northern “fanatics,” be prevented. These arguments gained even greater legitimacy as some prominent writers and journalists in the North expressed admiration for Brown. Well-known New England transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau celebrated his bravery and moral idealism, while prominent northern ministers like Theodore Tilton of New York held him up as a Christian martyr. Although Republican politicians deliberately denounced the raid, the fear generated by events at Harpers Ferry rendered southern whites unable to distinguish between the moderate antislavery principles of a man like Abraham Lincoln and the radicalism of John Brown. The election of Lincoln, just over a year after the Harpers Ferry Raid,

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proved too much for Deep South states to bear. The causes of secession, and the Civil War that followed from it, are deeply linked to the events of October 1859. —Paul E. Teed See also all entries under Bleeding Kansas (1854–1858).

Further Reading Earle, Jonathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. Fellman, Michael. This Terrible War: The Civil War and Its Aftermath. New York: Longman, 2003. Finkelman, Paul. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Harrold, Stanley. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. McKivigan, John R., and Harrold, Stanley, eds. Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist. New York: Knopf, 2005. Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Trodd, Zoe, and Stauffer, John. Meteor of War: The John Brown Story. Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2004.

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Brown, John (1800–1859) John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. His father, Owen Brown, was an intensely religious man who saw God as an angry sovereign demanding repentance and atonement from guilty sinners. From earliest childhood, Owen Brown instilled in John a hatred for sin in all its forms, but he reserved his most powerful denunciations for the system of slavery. When the Brown family moved to the Western Reserve of Ohio in 1805, moreover, they found themselves in one of the most antislavery regions of the United States. Hudson, Ohio, where the family farm was located, was an early center of Underground Railroad activity, and the Browns were among the founders of the Western Reserve Antislavery Society. Along with his father’s influence, Brown’s passionate, even violent opposition to slavery stemmed from a childhood incident in which he had witnessed a young slave boy around his own age beaten viciously by his master with a fireplace shovel. As an adult, John Brown was an ambitious but totally unsuccessful entrepreneur. He had learned tanning, shoemaking, and farming skills from his father, but despite an endless capacity for hard work, his business failures and his debts ranged across four states by the late 1840s. Instead of dampening his ardor for abolitionism, however, historian John Stauffer has shown that Brown’s failures in the marketplace only deepened his identification with the outcast and oppressed peoples. In the late 1840s, he moved his large family to North Elba, New York, a remote location in the Adirondack Mountains where a small community of free black people had been granted land by Gerrit Smith, a radical abolitionist and one of New York’s largest landowners. Brown not only interacted freely and equally with his black neighbors, but he also used his North Elba farm as a station on the Underground Railroad. Working closely with Gerrit Smith and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Brown began to conceive of a larger slave exodus out of the South along a route he called the “Subterranean Pass Way.” The idea of establishing such a route, and of defending it by force, was formed in the context of North Elba’s biracial antislavery alliance, but it would ultimately help to define the objectives of the Harpers Ferry Raid. During the mid-1850s, however, Brown focused much of his energy on defending freedom in the Kansas Territory, where antislavery and proslavery settlers fought to control the future of the region. Believing that the inevitable war over slavery in America had already begun in Kansas, he moved to the territory in 1855 along with his five sons. Enraged when proslavery vigilantes attacked the free-soil capital at Lawrence, Kansas, in May 1856, Brown led a small party of antislavery militants against a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek in

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The execution of John Brown and two of his men who took part in the Harpers Ferry Raid. After he was convicted of treason, murder, and insurrection, Brown was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, and quickly became a martyr in the North. (Library of Congress)

eastern Kansas. The result was grisly as Brown and his men brutally hacked five men to death with broadswords. Over the next two years, Brown remained in Kansas, where he established a reputation as a tough guerilla fighter. Although the actual events were turned to legend by admiring journalists like James Redpath, Brown’s spirited defense of the antislavery settlement of Osawatomie in 1857 won him adulation among eastern reformers. Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, then, must be understood in the context of his lifelong opposition to slavery, his experience in forming biracial alliances against it, and his growing belief in the use of violence to end entrenched oppression. With the financial backing of six well-known northern abolitionists, Brown planned to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. With the rifles and ammunition confiscated from the arsenal, Brown intended to equip a slave army capable of defeating any force sent out against it. Using the mountains as places of concealment and bases of operation, Brown’s slave army would invade the South and lead a massive slave exodus out of bondage. Twenty-one men joined Brown’s raid on October 16, 1859, including three of his sons and five African Americans. Brown’s

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men seized the armory and engine house, but when the buildings were stormed by the U.S. Marines, 10 of the raiders were killed, and Brown himself was wounded. Brought to trial in Charles Town, Virginia, Brown told the court that he was committed to ending slavery even if it meant losing his life and that of his children. On his way to the scaffold on December 2, 1859, he handed his jailer a brief note stating his belief that the sin of slavery in America would require blood atonement. —Paul E. Teed

Further Reading Oates, Steven B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Russo, Peggy A., and Paul Finkelman. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Causes of the Civil War John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 highlights the role of slavery in the coming of the Civil War. Indeed, slavery was the most important source of sectional tension before the war and generated conflict on moral, economic, and political grounds. In the years following the American Revolution, northern states had abolished slavery either by court decisions, as in the 1783 Quok Walker case in Massachusetts, or by gradual emancipation laws that emancipated slaves when they reached adulthood. But at the same time that slavery was draining out of the North, southern states were experiencing an economic revolution based on cotton production that made slavery more profitable than ever before. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made it possible for planters to leverage their land and slaves to produce a high volume of short staple cotton for textile producers in Great Britain and in the North. If slavery had been a national institution in the United States in 1776, it had become an almost exclusively southern one by 1850. As slavery grew in the South in the early 19th century, moral reformers in the North organized to abolish it. The abolitionist movement, led by white activists like William Lloyd Garrison and black leaders like Frederick Douglass, argued that slavery was a sinful institution that robbed slaves of their basic humanity. They called for its immediate abolition, and some, like John Brown, called for violent opposition to

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a system that was itself based on violence. Southern planters rejected the abolitionists’ view that slavery was sinful. Instead, they cited biblical passages that seemed to support slavery and argued that nearly every society since the dawn of human civilization had practiced some form of bonded labor. Using racist arguments about the inferiority of African Americans, planters said that their slaves were childlike and needed the guidance and protection of benevolent, Christian masters. The moral debate over slavery took place alongside an equally explosive political conflict over the spread of slavery into new American territories in the West. Southerners, fearful that the organization of new free states would increase northern power in Congress to the point where their system would be threatened, demanded that slavery be allowed to expand into regions like California, New Mexico, and Kansas. While the vast majority of northern politicians rejected the immediate abolition of slavery, they were nevertheless reluctant to support the creation of new slave states in the West. Not only would new slave states increase the power of the South in Congress, but it would also discourage the migration of free laborers to a region dominated by slavery. In 1856, this debate erupted into outright violence as proslavery and antislavery settlers in the Kansas Territory took up arms to promote their own vision of the territory’s future. Among the antislavery militants in Kansas was John Brown, whose May 1856 massacre of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek demonstrated the escalating brutality of the conflict. The political debate over the extension of slavery into the West also led to the realignment of American politics. The death of the Whig Party in the mid-1850s, for example, was caused by its inability to balance northern and southern views. Its rapid demise paved the way for the emergence of the Republicans, who vehemently opposed slavery’s growth. Southerners viewed the Republicans, who drew support only in the North, with intense suspicion, and they threatened to secede from the Union should a Republican candidate win the presidency. Although Republican John C. Fre´mont fell just short of winning in the 1856 election, a split between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party ensured the victory of the Republicans four years later. Their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was unacceptable to the South not only because he was a Republican, but also because he had publicly stated his view that American could not remain forever “half slave and half free.” The combination of John Brown’s raid and the election of a new president with explicitly antislavery views convinced southern leaders that their region was no longer safe in the United States. Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but his pledge to restrict slavery to the states where it already existed was enough to convince seven states in the Lower South to secede from the Union following his election. When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the southern rebellion after the fall of Fort Sumter, Virginia led four more states in the Upper South into the new Confederacy. By

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the summer of 1861, the Union and the Confederacy were poised to fight a terrible civil war. —Paul E. Teed

Further Reading Freehling, William W. Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Freehling, William W. Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870) The life of Robert E. Lee stands in marked contrast to that of John Brown. Born in Westmoreland Country, eastern Virginia, on January 19, 1807, the young Lee entered a world of social privilege and an America that knew and revered his family name. The son of “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a Revolutionary War hero and a three-term governor of Virginia, Robert grew up among the Tidewater elite of planter aristocrats whose land and slaves had made them the state’s ruling class. Although his father’s notorious financial recklessness and early death undermined the family’s wealth, Robert’s social and political connections as well as his intelligence and personal discipline gained him access to an elite education. Attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he accomplished the herculean feat of graduating without a single demerit. He moved easily among his social equals and demonstrated a gift for mathematics. In 1831, he married Mary Randolph Custis, whose father was the adopted son of George Washington. Lee’s military career before the Civil War was distinguished but not spectacular. He served for three years as the assistant chief engineer of the U.S. Army and contributed to the improvement of American defenses in St. Louis, Baltimore, and New York City. In an army where promotions came very slowly, he became a captain of engineers in 1838, but would have to wait almost two decades longer before achieving the rank of colonel. In the meantime, Lee demonstrated his abilities as a leader under fire during the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. As an engineering officer, he was responsible for reconnaissance and the preparation of transportation routes in advance of the American army. Working closely with commanding general Winfield Scott, Lee was praised for his effectiveness and

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daring at Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, and Mexico City. In 1852, partly in recognition of his service during the war, he was appointed as superintendent of West Point, where he taught young men, like J. E. B. Stuart, who would serve under him as officers in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. But by the mid-1850s, his career seemed stalled. After being promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Second U.S. Cavalry, he spent months at a time cut off from his family while serving in faraway Texas. Lee was home in Virginia on leave when the news of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry reached him. It came in the form of a letter from the U.S. War Department ordering him to take command of a company of Marines and recapture the armory from Brown and his raiders. Lee not only supervised the storming of the armory and the capture of Brown, but he also brought four companies of troops to John Brown’s execution at Charles Town, Virginia, on December 2, 1859. In his report to the military following the episode, Lee described Brown as a “madman or fanatic” whose plan had no chance of succeeding. He exulted that slaves in the surrounding area had not given any assistance to the raiders. During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee served as the commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s largest and most successful military unit. After taking command of the force in the spring of 1862, Lee demonstrated an offensive style of command that repeatedly took his Union counterparts by surprise. At the Seven Days Battles and the Second Battle of Manassas during the summer of 1862, and at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee either neutralized or defeated Union forces much larger than his own. Beyond their military importance, such victories were extremely important in shoring up southern civilian support for the war and in gaining international credibility for the Confederate government. Lee also invaded Union territory twice in the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns with much less success. Despite these defeats, however, Lee’s military daring and his disciplined personal character became central symbols of the Confederate cause for many in the South. Even as his army dwindled in size and effectiveness during the last year of the war, Confederate civilians continued to believe that the cause could be won because Lee remained in the field. After the surrender of his army to General U. S. Grant in April 1865, Lee moved to Lexington, Virginia, where he became president of what would later be called Washington and Lee University. Lee died on October 12, 1870. —Paul E. Teed

Further Reading Freeman, Douglas S. Lee. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Gallagher, Gary W. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) Marrin, Albert. Virginia’s General: Robert E. Lee and the Civil War. New York: Atheneum, 1994. Nolan, Alan T. Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

“Secret Six” The six men who supported John Brown’s plan to raid the Harpers Ferry Armory were all reformers and intellectuals who had considerable experience in the fight against slavery. Two of them, Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, were Unitarian ministers who preached to large, urban congregations in Massachusetts. Parker was the older of the two, and he was one of America’s most controversial religious and social reformers. Both Parker and Higginson were militant opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston, even facing criminal prosecution for their roles in the attempted rescue of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in 1854. Each of them met John Brown for the first time in early 1857, and they had supported his antislavery work in Kansas. Franklin Sanborn and George Luther Stearns were also products of eastern Massachusetts society and culture. Sanborn was a young schoolteacher in Concord, Massachusetts, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists. Idealistic and romantic, Sanborn was deeply interested in Brown’s exploits against proslavery forces in Kansas, which he had read about in the press. In the process of promoting Brown’s cause, Sanborn introduced him to George Luther Stearns, a wealthy Massachusetts mill owner and businessman who had been drawn into the antislavery movement after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. With an income of some $20,000 a year at a time when most working people earned less than $600, Stearns was in a position to do a great deal for Brown’s expedition. The final two members of the group were Samuel Gridley Howe and Gerrit Smith. Howe was a Bay State social reformer with a long history of support for revolutionary movements. As a young man, he had fought for six years in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, and he had received a knighthood for his services. Along with his wife Julia, Howe had also done pioneering work on the education of the blind. But of all the conspirators, Gerrit Smith was closest to John Brown and had the most experience working with him. A wealthy upstate New York landowner, Smith was an abolitionist and a founder of the Liberty Party, an antislavery political organization. In 1848, John Brown had purchased a farm from Smith in North Elba, New York, where the reformist landowner was building a community of free black property owners. Brown and Smith shared a deep belief

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that slavery was a violation of both divine law and the U.S. Constitution, and they remained open to the use of violence to end it. Despite their support for Brown, several of the conspirators were distraught when newspaper reports and a Senate investigation exposed their involvement in the failed raid. Gerrit Smith became so anxious about the possibility of arrest and imprisonment that he was briefly committed to a state mental asylum in Utica, New York. Howe and Stearns fled to Canada even before Brown’s trial commenced. Sanborn joined them there after destroying all correspondence with Brown that might be used in a criminal prosecution. Thomas Wentworth Higginson resisted the temptation to flee and even considered the possibility of trying to rescue Brown before his execution. Instead, Higginson made good on Brown’s legacy by taking up command of a black regiment during the Civil War. The last of the secret six, Theodore Parker, had left the country many months before the raid. Dying of tuberculosis, Parker vainly sought to regain his health in the warmer climates of the Caribbean and southern Europe. In a letter written only a few days before Brown’s execution, however, Parker told a friend that “the road to heaven is as short from the gallows as it is from the throne; perhaps, also, as easy.” —Paul E. Teed

Further Reading Commager, Henry S., ed. Theodore Parker: An Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Renehan, Edward. The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist. New York: Knopf, 2005. Rossbach, Jeffrey. Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six and a Theory of Slave Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

John Brown’s Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution (1859) On November 2, 1859, John Brown made the following statement before the court that condemned him for murder, treason, and incitement of slave rebellion for his actions in the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Also reproduced below is a final written statement that Brown handed to his guards just before his execution on December 2, 1859.

Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free the slaves. I intended, certainly, to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended to do. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite the slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection. I have another objection, and that is that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved— for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greatest portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case—had I so interfered on behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act upon that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have done—in behalf of His despised poor is not wrong but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by the wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments—I say, let it be done! Let me say one thing further. I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous that I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention and what was not. I never had any design against the liberty of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so but always discouraged any idea of that kind. Let me say, also, in regard to the statements made by some of those who were connected with me. I fear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them but as regretting their weakness. Not one but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part at their own expense. A number of them I never saw and never had a word of conversation with till the day they came to me; that was for the purpose I have stated. Now, I am done. Source: Testimonies of Capt. John Brown, at Harpers Ferry, with his Address to the Court, AntiSlavery Tracts, No. 7 (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 15–16.

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Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) Charlestown, Va., 2d December, 1859 I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. Source: Ruchames, L. John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969, p. 126.

Southern Editorial Responses to John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1859) In October 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown led a group of black and white supporters in a raid on the federal arsenal in the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown planned to use the weapons stored there to initiate a slave rebellion across the South. Brown captured several buildings, but he and his men were quickly pinned down in the engine house by the local militia assisted by armed townsmen. Two days later, federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee stormed the engine house, capturing Brown and killing most of his supporters. Brown was convicted of treason and hanged on December 2, 1859. Reproduced here are editorials from several southern newspapers reacting to the raid. Our despatches this morning give us some particulars of a serious outbreak among the employees on the government works at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in which the negros, led on by some infuriated abolitionists, have been forced to co-operate. The trains were stopped and telegraphic wires cut, and, as the despatch informs us, the whole town was in possession of the insurgents. It will be seen, however, that the most active means have been put into execution to quell the disturbance; that several companies of artillery and infantry have proceeded to the scene, and, no doubt, before this reaches the eye of our readers, perfect quiet has been again established. We regret, however, that our telegraphic agent closed his reports so early, as it would have been exceedingly gratifying to learn that the miserable leaders of this unfortunate and disgraceful affair had received their just deserts. Source: Mercury (Charleston, SC), October 18, 1859 The telegraphic despatches in another column, concerning the outbreak at Harper’s Ferry, are stirring enough for ordinary purposes. We believe the affair, however, to be greatly exaggerated, as such occurrences usually are. There is at least no cause for uneasiness elsewhere in the State, notwithstanding the reports concerning the complicity of the negroes in the business.—Indeed, we rather incline to the belief that the entire report of the affair is pretty much of a humbug. That there is something of a riot there, on the part of a few of the operatives, we have no doubt; but the object of the rebels is to take possession of the public funds which were deposited there on Saturday.

Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) Our goodly city was in a state of the liveliest excitement all yesterday evening. The military, particularly, were in great commotion. The Governor, we learn, has ordered the whole volunteer Regiment to the scene of disturbance. Company “F,” under command of Col. Cary left at 8 o’clock last night—the Fredricksburg mail train having been detained for their accommodation. The remainder of the Regiment, consising of six or seven companies, will leave at 6 o’clock this morning. The Governor accompanied Col. Cary’s company last night—and we slightly incline to the opinion that Harper’s Ferry will be captured, and the rebels put down, especially as the military from the surrounding country and Old Point, Baltimore Washington, and Alexandria, have been ordered to the scene of action. We think these are almost enough to put an end to the “war” during the course of the week—provided all hands stand firm, as they no doubt will, with some exceptions. The “soldiers” took leave of their wives and little ones last night amid such weeping and wailing, not expecting ever to see them more! It was a heart-rending scene, to be sure. We endeavored to procure a lock of the hair of several of the “soldiers,” as a memento of them, in case they should fight, bleed and die in the service of their country; but they were too much afflicted by the parting scene to pay any attention to our request. We expect to see half of the “soldiers” back at least. —But good fortune to them all. Source: Whig (Richmond, VA), October 18, 1859.

We publish to-day full telegraphic particulars of the riot at Harper’s Ferry, a briefer outline of which had heretofore appeared in our columns. The first report attributed the riot to the fact that a contractor on the Government works had absconded, leaving his employees unpaid, who had seized the arsenal with the purpose of securing Government funds and paying themselves. Later accounts seem conclusive that it was a concerted attempt at insurrection, aided by leading Northern Abolitionists. The papers of Brown, the leader, are said to have fallen into the hands of Gov. Wise, and to include among them letters from Gerrit Smith, Fred Douglass and others. We shall hear more in a few days, when, no doubt, the whole plot will be disclosed. In the mean time, the facts already before us show that Abolitionism is working out its legitimate results, in encouraging fanatics to riot and revolution. The “harmless republicanism” out of which there is serious talk even here of making a national party, to defeat the Democracy, fosters and sustains, and is formidable only from the zeal of, the class within its ranks who incited this insurrection. Of the capacity of the South to defend and protect herself, we have no doubt. But when called on to do this, as at Harper’s Ferry, she must know who are her friends and who are her enemies. She can have no political association with men who are only watching a safe opportunity to cut the throats of her citizens. It will not do for Northern Republicans to attribute this outbreak to the fanaticism of a few zealots. The Republican party of the North is responsible for it. It is the legitimate result of Sewardism. It is the commencement of what Seward spoke of as the “irrepressible conflict.” The South will hold the whole party of Republicans

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Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) responsible for the blood-shed at Harper’s Ferry. For the fanatics engaged there would never have dared the attempt at insurrection but for the inflammatory speeches and writings of Seward, Greeley, and the other Republican leaders. Waiting for the details before saying more, we refer the reader to the accounts of the insurrection published in another place in this paper. Source: Union and American (Nashville, TN), October 21, 1859.

New York Draft Riots (1863) The largest and deadliest city riots in American history took place in New York on July 13–16, 1863. There was widespread opposition to the institution of the first draft in American history, and draft riots irrupted all over the Union, but none of the riots were as violent or as deadly as the ones in New York. Operating mostly unchecked, rioters first attacked a draft office and then turned their rage on authority figures, the wealthy, and the African Americans in the city. On major lasting effect of the riots was the pushing of African Americans to the edges of the city and, consequently, the future creation of large African American ghettos. Although authorities never declared martial law, the riots did not cease until a large number of troops were called in to restore order. The riots also had longterm effects on American conscription policy. Throughout most of the American Civil War (1861–1865), President Abraham Lincoln struggled with the difficulties of raising enough troops to run the war. States failed to meet their assigned quotas of volunteers, so to make up the difference, Lincoln felt constrained to enforce a draft under the powers he believed were granted to him by the Militia Act of July 17, 1862. Critics questioned the legality of Lincoln’s actions. So, in a show of support for the president, on March 3, 1863, the U.S. Congress passed the first national conscription law in the country’s history, which mandated all males between the ages of 20 and 45 eligible to be drafted into military service. However, Congress was well aware of the popular antagonism that existed regarding the draft, which many felt violated the principal of freedom on which the country was founded, so certain compromises were made and provisions were included to soften the blow. For example, a prospective draftee could avoid serving by buying a substitute or paying a $300 commutation fee. Commutation fees were then used to pay bonuses to volunteers to encourage voluntary enlistment. However, by 1864, the need for troops and popular protests forced the U.S. Congress to repeal commutation. The Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) freed the slaves in the rebelling states as a military necessity. The Proclamation was intended to weaken the South by liberating the Confederate Army’s support system. However, many critics felt that the Proclamation went too far, because it entirely changed the character of the war from a war to save the Union to a war against human bondage. Editorials charged that soldiers would be willing to fight and die to preserve the

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Rioters in New York City lynch an African American in this July 1863 illustration from Harper's Weekly. The passage of the Union Conscription Act in March to recruit soldiers for the Union Army was a hugely unpopular act that led to violent riots in New York City. Many Southern sympathizers focused their attacks on abolitionists and African Americans. (Library of Congress)

Union, but they would not be willing to fight and die to free slaves. Furthermore, news from the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), the bloodiest battle of the entire war, shocked many New Yorkers as they read of the high casualty counts. Consequently, as the draft went from an abstract notion to a reality in New York, many people organized to protest what they saw as an injustice. Ultimately, all federal authorities wanted was to refill the ranks with fighting men; however, the draft served as the spark that set off a chain reaction that unleashed pent-up frustrations and hatred against authority, class, and race. In New York, there was a huge gap between the rich and poor. The lower classes were frustrated by the perceived inequality created by the greater ability of the wealthy to pay for substitutes or commutation. Copperheads, a peace faction, further riled up the people by accusing the Lincoln administration of waging a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Also, Copperheads capitalized on northern racism by claiming that the war would free slaves that would then compete for jobs in the North and drive down wages. The Day Book, Express, Freeman’s Journal, and Daily News were Copperhead publications that continually attacked the draft policy. Many

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opposed the draft because they saw it as a sign of the federal government’s growing power. Some Democratic leaders convinced the working class that they were victims of injustice. Governor Horatio Seymour, for example, publicly denounced conscription as unconstitutional, and he asked the Lincoln administration to postpone conscription in New York. Short on volunteers, Provost Marshall Colonel Robert Nugent began dividing New York into districts. On Saturday morning July 11, Captain Charles Jenkins directed the draft lottery at a district office on the corner of Third Avenue and 46th Street, and the first list of 1,200 names was published in newspapers the next day. There was no sign of violence on Sunday; however, it soon became apparent that some planning was done. On the morning of Monday, July 13, when more names were scheduled to be drawn, many working-class Irish and German recent immigrants did not report to work. Instead, they joined together to form a mob. As they walked through the streets, many more workers left their posts to join the growing mob of men, women, and children, which gathered on Eighth Avenue, Ninth Avenue, and near Central Park and then marched to the draft headquarters, brandishing clubs and stones. The mob, which by this time numbered about 5,000 strong (some estimates range as high as 10,000), waited outside while a group of men went inside to witness the lottery. After the men created a disturbance by shouting curses at the officials, they exited the building and rejoined the large mob outside. Immediately, a shot rang out, and stones began to rain down on the windows. Rioters hit and seriously injured a draft officer in the head with a stone, and injured many other people during the attack. A dozen policemen that were present were unable to subdue the mob. The rioters entered the office and destroyed doors, tables, and other furniture. But their primary targets were the records and lists of draftees, which they tore in pieces and scattered in the street. Officials, who had been conducting the draft, and reporters, who were present to report on the progress of the draft, fled through a back door for fear of violence. Finally, the mob set fire to the office, and it soon spread and consumed the entire block. Firemen arrived on the scene, but were kept from their duty by the rioters. Next, the rioters turned their violence on the rest of the city. The New York State Militia had been sent to lend a hand at the Battle of Gettysburg, which left the defense of the city primarily in the hands of the police force. An attempt to call for police reinforcements failed, because the telegraph wires had been cut. The commotion at the draft office got Police Superintendent John A. Kennedy’s attention, and he rode to the scene to investigate. As soon as rioters recognized him, however, he was powerless against them as they beat him repeatedly. Greatly outnumbered, the police were continually forced to retreat. The Invalid Corps (wounded soldiers) tried to help restore order, but they were also sent running for their lives.

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The rioters attacked government institutions or anything associated with authority. They often targeted notable Republican politicians. Draft offices, a police station, the mayor’s house, and the postmaster’s house were hit. The rioters also struck out against the pro-draft press by burning the first floor of the New York Tribune building. Authorities supplied the New York Times staff with two crankrotated, multibarreled, state-of-the-art Gatling machine guns for their defense. Meanwhile, the mob continued to grow in size and became better equipped, securing swords and guns. It has been estimated that the mob numbered as high as 50,000 at its peak. Therefore, instead of sending policemen in a suicide frontal attack against the mob, the men were deployed in defensive positions at City Hall, police headquarters, banks, and other strategic locations. Furthermore, Mayor George Opdyke called for a temporary volunteer force to supplement the existing 800 policemen, and more than 1,200 men responded to the call and were quickly sworn in. The fact that most of the rioters were Irish and most of the police force was also Irish has prompted some historians to analyze the riots as an Irish civil war. The city was gripped by terror. Rioters attacked well-dressed wealthy men on the street. They raped wealthy women in their homes. They raided, looted, and burned affluent neighborhoods and businesses. During the riots, people stayed home for safety. Factories, stores, schools, and hotels were closed. Public transportation was at a standstill. Entire blocks of the city were burned. Rioters attacked an armory, and the police did everything in its power to try to keep them from getting possession of it. During the struggle, both rioters and policeman were killed and wounded, but, eventually, the policemen were ordered to retreat, and the mob secured weapons and set the armory on fire. In most cases, however, the mobs targeted African Americans. The mob attacked the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children that housed between 600 and 800 children. Aided by firemen, most of the children escaped unharmed, but the orphanage was burned to the ground and hundreds of African American children were left homeless. Rioters burned and looted African American homes and churches, and they terrorized African Americans by beating, lynching, and killing any that they saw. Rioters also attacked abolitionists or anyone who aided African American during the riots. Consequently, even though the exact death toll of the riots is unknown, the majority of dead and injured were African Americans. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the African American population (about 5,000) fled the city during the riots. This African American exodus was a new trend that continued during the next decade in New York and other large cities. Before the riots, African American neighborhoods were integrated in the city. However, after the riots, African Americans were pushed to the suburbs, which later became ghettos. Some moved voluntarily for fear of violence. Many more

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were forced out, because former employers refused to hire them in an effort to avoid future troubles. After the war, Reconstruction efforts were hampered by racism. Furthermore, because of hatred and racism in both the North and the South, the lynching of African Americans continued well into the 1940s. Possibly in an effort to downplay the chaos and better deal with the public embarrassment that the city government faced due to the fact that they were powerless to quell the riots, many official city documents recorded very conservative numbers of dead, injured, and property damages. Consequently, although deaths were actually much higher, the official documents confirm only 105 deaths, which included only six soldiers and three policemen. The documents state that the death toll increased to 119 shortly after the riots, because of untreated injuries and building hazards. The documents also record that 18 African Americans were lynched, five were drowned in rivers, and 70 were reported missing. Property damages were also underestimated, because very often city officials reduced and even denied damage claims made by African Americans. In contrast to the official city documents, the contemporary press and police reports stated that the riots caused more than 1,200 people to lose their lives and thousands of injuries. Contemporaries also calculated the damages at more than $2 million. But, throughout the years, scholars have continually reduced the figure to less than $1 million in damages. Also, although some modern historians still quote the larger contemporary press and police figures, other notable historians have relied heavily on the overly conservative city government reports. However, although very conservative, even the low estimates of death and destruction have remained larger than any other contemporary or future American riot. Late that Monday evening, heavy rain served to disperse most of the rioters and put out some of the fires. However, the riot resumed in full force the next morning. The police force was supplemented by 800 troops from forts in the New York harbor and West Point cadets, but the riots continued unabated. However, Wednesday was a turning point in the riots for several reasons. First, the draft was suspended, and the announcement convinced many rioters to go home. Also, as the size of the mobs began to decrease, the size of the military continued to grow as the New York Militia began to arrive. On Thursday, more troops arrived, and general order, for the first time, began to be restored. By the end of the day, there were thousands of troops in the city, including the 152nd New York Volunteers, the 26th Michigan Volunteers, the 27th Indiana Volunteers, the 74th New York Militia, the 65th New York Militia, and the 7th Regiment New York State Militia. A final battle took place on Thursday evening near Gramercy Park, where many rioters lost their lives, but by Friday morning, order was completely restored. On Friday, John Hughes, Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York and Lincoln supporter, delivered an address aimed at stopping any further hostilities. Governor

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Seymour, however, continued to argue with Lincoln about the draft. Seymour claimed that the quotas set for the city were too high. He accused draft officials of prejudice against certain New Yorkers. He pleaded for extensions so that the quotas could be met with volunteers. But Lincoln remained firm and set the resumption of the draft in New York for August 19, 1863. The riots had dramatic effects on conscription policy. They underscored the existing strong popular disdain to forced service, and they made the reality of violent rebellion in response to a draft a strong concern for the government. For example, New York City, in an effort to avoid future riots, paid more than $300,000 for substitutes and commutation fees so New Yorkers would not be forced to serve in the Civil War. Although the draft was reinstated in New York after the riots without incident, it disappeared after the Civil War, and it did not reappear for more than 40 years, until during World War I. —Rolando Avila See also all entries under Know-Nothing Riots (1855–1856); Harpers Ferry Raid (1859).

Further Reading Barnes, David M. The Draft Riots in New York, July, 1863: The Metropolitan Police, Their Services During the Riot Week, Their Honorable Record. New York: Baker and Godwin, 1863. Berstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Cook, Adrian. The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1974. Headley, Joel Tyler. The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873; Including a Full and Complete Account of the Four Days’ Draft Riot of 1863. New York: Dover, 1971. McCague, James. The Second Rebellion: The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1968. Schecter, Barnet. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America. New York: Walker & Co., 2005. Werstein, Irving. The Draft Riots: July 1863. New York: Julian Messner, 1971.

Civil War (1861–1865) Some major long-term causes of the American Civil War included divergent sectional interests on tariffs, internal improvements, and states’ rights. Some major short-term causes of the war were the breakdown of the political system in the 1860 presidential election, the secession of 11 southern states (The Confederate States of America), and the federal government’s attempt to preserve the Union. The immediate cause of the conflict was the Confederate attack on the federally held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. Sectionalism had been an ever-present problem throughout early U.S. history, but several compromises had been able to smooth out differences. However, by 1861, compromise seemed unattainable. Confederate leaders were appalled by Abraham Lincoln’s election, since 10 out of 11 Confederate states had not cast a single popular vote for him. Consequently, the South felt that it had no real representation, and set out to build a new nation where its values and interests could be better served. Lincoln, however, was dead-set against secession for economic and political reasons. First, the North was dependent on the South for raw materials, such as cotton for northern textile factories. Second, Lincoln believed that, if the South was allowed to leave the Union, it would establish a precedent so dangerous that it would threaten the future integrity of the Union. After the Fort Sumter attack, both the Union and the Confederacy began asking for short-term volunteers to raise armies for what most believed would be a short fight. However, as the war dragged on, the war became increasingly unpopular. Unable to raise the needed troops, Lincoln instituted conscription in the summer of 1863. Ironically, conscription served to make the war even more unpopular, and draft riots broke out in New York. Also, the Copperheads, a political peace faction, opposed the war and pushed for its end. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln transformed the character of the war by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation as a military necessity. The proclamation elevated the struggle from economic and political motivations to a fight against human bondage. The redefining of the war aims led to greater displays of racism in the North. The Proclamation freed slaves in the rebelling states and served as an effective diplomatic weapon by preventing European intervention on behalf of the slaveholding Confederacy. In 1864, the Union adopted a radical military approach by waging total war on the South. On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. In the aftermath of the war, more than 600,000 men lost their lives, slavery was abolished, and the Union was preserved. —Rolando Avila

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Further Reading Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1961–1965. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1958–1974. McPherson, James M. The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Conscription The first attempt in American history to conscript (or draft) an army occurred during the American Civil War (1861–1865). From its inception, conscription was extremely unpopular and was met with protests. Due to strong popular opposition to conscription, the U.S. Congress allowed for exemptions. Consequently, some historians have called the effectiveness of the conscription policy into question, but this issue has remained debatable. Likewise, the question of whether or not conscription policy favored the rich has remained a point of contention. During the first year of the war, conscription had not been necessary, because of the great number of volunteers on both sides. However, by 1862, serious manpower shortages prompted the Confederate States of America to institute conscription. That summer, in an effort to also keep its ranks filled, the Union absorbed state militias into war service. Furthermore, on March 3, 1863, the U.S. Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which instituted national conscription. Many people felt that conscription violated the principle of freedom on which the country was founded. Widespread demonstrations erupted, which included Copperhead opposition and draft riots. In fact, the strong protests prompted Congress to soften the blow of conscription by making allowances for exemptions from service. Under this exemption system, when a man was called to service, he was put through a physical examination. If he passed, he was given 10 days to buy an exemption by paying a $300 commutation fee, and, if the fee was out of reach, the prospective conscript was allowed to pay a substitute to take his place. Government officials used commutation fees to pay bounties for volunteers, but growing desperation for men led Congress to repeal commutation in 1864, which made the price for substitutes rise. Statistics from the first 1863 draft have shown that 190,000 men were excused for reasons of physical disabilities or family hardships, 52,000 men paid for commutation, 26,000 men paid for substitutes, and 14,560 men evaded the draft. So, the first 1863 attempt to conscript 292,441 men

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netted only 9,881. Consequent draft attempts did not fare much better. In fact, by the end of the war, conscripts accounted for only 5.54 percent of the Union Army. For years, scholars have debated the effectiveness of conscription during the Civil War. Some point out that conscription fell short of raising the desired number of men. On the other hand, others argue that, since conscripts were not eligible for bounties, many men who would not have done so otherwise volunteered before they were drafted. Also, while it has been generally accepted that a major cause of the New York Draft Riots was the Irishmen’s inability to pay for commutation or substitutes, recent scholarship has attempted to debunk the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” charge. Throughout the war, it is argued, men of all classes continued to pay for substitutes by various means, and the Union Army remained a fair representation of the North. —Rolando Avila

Further Reading Geary, James W. We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991. Murdock, Eugene C. One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971.

Copperheads The Copperheads were a peace faction within the Democratic Party that developed at the onset of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Labeled traitors by Republicans, Copperheads opposed the policies of Abraham Lincoln’s administration. The Copperhead influence on the home front rose and fell throughout the war based on the fortunes on the battlefields and growing pressures at home. Over the years, scholars have reevaluated the threat that Copperheads posed during the war. During the 1860 presidential election, the Democratic Party split into two camps. One group supported the war effort while the other supported a peace platform, which favored a free Confederate States of America. Republicans considered peace Democrats traitors and, equating them to poisonous snakes, dubbed them “copperheads.” Some Copperheads embraced the title and wore copperhead pennies as badges of honor. They opposed emancipation, because Irish and German immigrants feared losing jobs to freed blacks, and they used the existing racist beliefs of many northerners to gain support for their agenda. Lincoln’s administration responded by shutting down Copperhead newspapers and arresting suspected traitors. Clement L. Vallandigham was by far the most high-profile

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Copperhead. Charged as a traitor, Vallandigham was convicted of treason and banished from Union borders. Copperheads also opposed the administration’s abuse of constitutional rights by revoking civil liberties (such as free speech and press) in some areas. They also opposed the war, because they wanted to avoid bloodshed and destruction of the South and its way of life. Throughout the war, the rise of Copperhead influence was directly tied to the Union Army’s performance on the battlefields. Problems on the home front, like the institution of conscription and draft riots, also increased Copperhead influence. In the 1864 presidential election, Copperheads supported Union general George B. McClellan, who ran on a peace platform. But Union victories leading up to the election diminished Copperhead support, and Lincoln won his bid for reelection. In late 1864, Jefferson Davis wrote Confederate agents instructing them to establish a base in Canada from which they could seek out and work together with Copperheads to weaken northern morale and support for the war. Situations like this that came to light during the war caused contemporaries to take the Copperhead threat very seriously. But after the war, historians downplayed the threat that Copperheads posed. Some accounts portrayed Copperheads more as victims than legitimate opposition. They argued that, in a democracy, the political opposition of peace Democrats to the administration’s war policies did not constitute disloyalty to the Union. Recently, however, historians have reevaluated the role that Copperheads played during the Civil War and concluded that Lincoln’s concerns were not misplaced. —Rolando Avila

Further Reading Curry, Richard O. “The Union as It Was: A Critique of Recent Interpretations of the ‘Copperheads.’ ” Civil War History 13, no. 1 (March 1967): 25–39. Klement, Frank L. Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads of the North. Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1999. Weber, Jennifer L. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Racism Racism is the belief that one race is superior to another, which has led to prejudice and discrimination against the allegedly inferior race. Racism has been a constant fixture in American history. During the American Civil War era, for example,

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individual and institutional racism was practiced against African Americans and immigrants. One of the greatest reasons for antagonism against certain groups was that they were different. They looked different, spoke unknown languages, and held mysterious customs. Africans were imported after 1619 and were enslaved. Studies have shown that racism against African Americans was just as strong in the North as it was in the South before, during, and after the Civil War. Also, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the United States saw the greatest proportional influx of immigrants in its history. It has been estimated that about 2.4 million (or about 14.5 percent of the total population) were recent Irish, German, or Chinese immigrants. The Irish immigrants, escaping famine, accounted for the greatest number of immigrants during this time, and they were discriminated against mostly for their Catholic religion. The Know-Nothing political party, for example, demanded the exclusion of immigrants and Catholics from public office. In some cases, prospective employers shunned Irishmen. Chinese immigrants felt the blunt edge of racism even harder with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration. During the Civil War, the American Colonization Society proposed ridding the United States of what they considered to be the African American problem by freeing as many slaves as possible and then sending them to Africa. This idea was very popular among the ruling class in the North, reformers, and abolitionists. Even Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” supported the relocation plan for the first two years of the war. By late 1862, however, Lincoln abandoned the idea and decided to strike a blow at the core of the Confederate States of America by abolishing slavery in the rebelling states. Copperheads opposed emancipation, because they believed that freed slaves would take jobs away from Irish and German factory workers. After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1, 1863, as a military necessity, many northern cities were overrun with liberated slaves, and northerners exhibited prejudice and racism against the new arrivals. African Americans that served in the Union Army also faced the discrimination of low pay. In the summer of 1863, draft riots erupted in New York, and Irishmen, who could not pay for commutation or substitutes, took out their rage on African American residents. After the war, racism against African Americans and other ethnic groups continued. —Rolando Avila

Further Reading Dain, Bruce. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Joyce, Toby. “The New York Draft Riots of 1863: An Irish Civil War?” History Ireland 11, no. 2 (2003): 22–27.

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New York Draft Riots (1863) Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Schwalm, Leslie A. “ ‘Overrun with Free Negroes’: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest.” Civil War History 50, no. 2 (2004): 145–174.

Excerpts from a New York Times Account of the New York City Draft Riots (1863) In the following excerpt from an article entitled “The Reign of the Rabble,” the New York Times describes in detail the damage and disorder caused by the New York City draft rioters in July 1863. The article contains numerous stories of individuals who were attacked by the rioters. In Roosevelt-street, near Pearl-street, about 4 p.m., an immense crowd reassembled, and it was evident that they required but a spark to enkindle the most angry passions. The character of the population in that vicinity is one well calculated to take the most active and energetic part in the general riot. Several negro habitations have been entirely demolished in that neighborhood, and the poor tenants turned into the streets helpless. The poor creatures look perfectly bewildered—they are unable to designate between friend or foe. Many have lost all they ever had in the world, and some of them may become charges on the county. The crowd carried away the weather boards and every part of the negro habitations that can be detached to make firewood of. . . . At 6 o’clock P.M., the building, No. 64 and 76 Roosevelt-street, occupied by Mr. BEVERLY as a colored seaman’s boarding house, was attacked by the rioters. The inmates were taken from the premises, which were robbed and then set on fire. WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, WM. HEATH and THEODORE TURNER, all boarding there, were badly beaten. They were sent to the New-York Hospital. The colored boarding house of ALBRO LYONS, No. 20 Vandewater-street, was attacked by the rioters about 6 1/2 o’clock P.M., the doors broken open and the windows entirely demolished; nine of the inmates were injured. A man named JAMES SCOTT, aged 40 years, residing at No. 81 Roosevelt-St., in the rear, was badly injured by the rioters; he was taken to the hospital. About the same time THOMAS JOHNSON, a colored man, had one of his arms broken by jumping from the third story window of a house No. 62 Roosevelt-street, while the house was on fire. He was rescued from the rioters by the police and was taken to the station-house. WILLIAM W. HILL, also colored, was dangerously injured by leaping out of a thirdstory window of the same house. MARY WILLIAMS, a colored woman, 24 years old, while being pursued by the infuriated mob, jumped from a window of No. 74 Roosevelt-street to the pavement, and was terribly injured—the building was then on fire. She was taken to Bellevue Hospital. About 7 o’clock P.M. the house No. 2 Dover-street, occupied by WM. P. POWELL, as a Colored Seamens’ House, was attacked by the rioters, the doors and windows broken,

New York Draft Riots (1863) the occupants driven out and the furniture destroyed. The occupants were rescued by the Police and taken to the Station-house for safety. At 6 o’clock P.M. the house No. 11 James-slip, occupied by JAMES E. VALENTINE as a liquor store, was attacked by the riotous mob in consequence of a colored woman taking refuge there; she escaped when the rioters entered the place, who stole and destroyed all the contents. The mob took an iron safe from the store of Mr. BEARELY, No. 74 Roosevelt-street, and Officers PENDERGAST and SWEENY, of the Fourth Ward, took it from them. About 3 o’clock P.M., a mob of from five to seven hundred persons commenced an attack on some colored persons, in Baxter-street, near Park [in the Sixth Ward]. They then went to the dining saloon of Mr. CROOK, Chatham-street, to beat the colored waiters. Capt. JOURDON, sergeants WALSH and McGIVEN, with a platoon of men, were promptly on hand and dispersed the crowd. They then left for the Fourth Precinct. Mr. CROOK was compelled to close his place [and] no persons were assaulted or injured there. At 5 o’clock P.M., a colored woman named ELIZABETH HENNESSY, while standing at the corner of Mott and Pell streets [in the Sixth Ward], was struck on the head by an unknown ruffian, receiving a severe wound. She was taken to the New-York Hospital. A gang of nearly 500 rioters attacked the colored people residing at Nos. 104 and 105 Park street [in the Sixth Ward], drove them into the street, assaulting them with stones and other missiles; the Sixth Ward Police rescued the blacks, and took them to the station-house. Capt. JONEDON, Sergts WALSH, QUINN, and KENNEDY, with a force of men, soon dispersed the mob. JOHN BROWN, a colored man, 40 years of age, of No. 74 Roosevlt-street, was attacked late at night in the own [sic] house by a mob, and severely beaten about his head and face. He escaped from the ruffians and ran to the station-house for protection. Source: Excerpts from “The Reign of the Rabble,” New York Times, July 15, 1863.

A Rioter’s Letter to the New York Times and the Newspaper’s Response (1863) In the following letter to the New York Times, one of the draft rioters attempts to justify his actions by denouncing the unfairness of the draft law, which he believes forces poor men to fight and die in a war that benefits only rich men, who have exempted themselves from military service. In a vigorous response, the editors of the Times defend the draft law and denounce the letter writer as a murderer and arsonist whose actions only harm the country and society. To the Editor of the New-York Times: You will, no doubt, be hard on us rioters tomorrow morning, but that 300-dollar law has made us nobodies, vagabonds and cast-outs of society, for whom nobody cares when we must go to war and be shot down. We are the poor rabble, and the rich rabble is our

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New York Draft Riots (1863) enemy by this law. Therefore we will give our enemy battle right here, and ask no quarter. Although we got hard fists, and are dirty without, we have soft hearts, and have clean consciences within, and that’s the reason we love our wives and children more than the rich, because we’ve got not much besides them, and we will not go and leave them at home for to starve. Until that draft law is repealed, I for one am willing to knock down more such rum-hole politicians as Kennedy. Why don’t they let the niggers kill the slave-driving race and take possession of the South, as it belongs to them. A [illegible] MAN, BUT A MAN FOR ALL THAT Our correspondent is evidently very much in earnest, but he is in a very dense fog on the subject of the draft. It may be very hard that a poor man should be compelled to serve his country as a soldier, but he is not asked to do it gratuitously, and every possible precaution is taken to provide for his wife and children. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of such men have volunteered to defend their country now that its existence is in danger, and have never dreamed that they became either “vagabonds” or a “rabble” on that account. It is true that men who have $300 can purchase exemption from this honorable duty—but their $300 goes into the pockets of the poor men who may volunteer to take their places. Money will purchase exemption from a great many of the labors of life, and there always will be a great many men willing to use it for that purpose; and neither laws nor anything else can change this state of things. But if our correspondent thinks that this justifies him in committing murder and arson, or that he shows his love for his wife and children by plunging the society in which they live into the midst of anarchy and crime, he will live to find out his mistake. Source: New York Times, July 15, 1863.

New Orleans Riot (1866) The riots that took place in New Orleans in 1866 followed moves in Louisiana to give greater freedoms to African Americans. Although the aim of the riot was to try to prevent African Americans from receiving even limited rights, the reaction in the North to the events was to harden opinion in the North behind hard-line radicals who quickly gained enough support to push through far more sweeping moves in favor of equal rights. The Union forces had taken New Orleans in April 1862, and in May, they captured Baton Rouge, although they were then driven back to New Orleans. Fighting continued by New Orleans, and some of the area around it remained in Union hands. As New Orleans had been—and indeed, still was—the most cosmopolitan center in the Confederacy, it was thought that moves to restore Union rule, and also to improve the rights of African Americans, would have a better reception there than elsewhere. On December 8, 1863, Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed, in his “Ten Percent Plan,” that he intended to restore civil rights to any state when essentially onetenth of the 1860 voting population resumed their allegiance to the Union, and this was deemed to be the case for Louisiana. Fighting was continuing in other parts of the state, notably Vicksburg, and Confederates did hold out until May 26, 1865, but for New Orleans, the war was over. As a result, a constitutional convention was held in 1864 in New Orleans to try to draw up plans for a postwar Louisiana. This constitutional convention had been held under the supervision of General Nathaniel P. Banks, who followed Lincoln’s reconstruction objectives. The convention abolished slavery and affirmed civil rights for African Americans, but did not unequivocally establish their right to vote, although those able to read and write were enfranchised. It was in line with the attempt by Lincoln to help the return to civilian rule, with the president hoping that a moderate policy might win back former Confederates. However, radicals within the Republican Party were unhappy with the limited moves made in New Orleans, and they pushed for equal rights for African Americans to be enshrined in law. The elections held in Louisiana in 1865 had seen former Confederates regaining political power at the ballot box, and the radicals were determined that not only should all African Americans be allowed to vote, but that former Confederates should be deprived of the right to vote. The urgency to

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introduce more changes followed the Louisiana government enacting “Black Codes,” which started placing restrictions on new (predominantly black) voters. Indeed John T. Monroe, who had been mayor before the Civil War, was reinstated as acting mayor on May 12, 1866, and the “Black Codes” drawn up by him and his supporters were coming into force. The radicals tried to work out legal moves by which they could regain power in New Orleans, and they decided to use a loophole offered by a resolution that had been passed by the 1864 Convention. This had called for the adjournment of the convention, and although some doubted its legality, it did provide a legal basis for the reconvening of the convention. The maneuver that was used then involved the new Republican governor of Louisiana, James M. Wells, proclaiming that the president of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Judge R. K. Howell, had been president of the 1864 convention. As he had left the convention before it ended, it was declared that he could not have been a member of it with voting rights. This allowed Howell to “recall” the convention two years later, although Judge E. H. Durrell was actually the nominated president of the 1864 convention and had refused to recall it. The original convention had a quorum set at 76, and the Radicals contacted as many of the former delegates as they could. They managed to get 43 of them to meet at the Mechanics’ Institute in New Orleans. Of these 43, only 25 were white delegates, but there were also some 200 supporters, most of these being African American war veterans. On July 27, 1866, some the 25 white members of the former convention prepared to reconvene it inside the Mechanics’ Institute in New Orleans, with a large crowd of supporters being addressed by Anthony Paul Dostie and others outside. Dostie addressed the throng with a stirring speech in favor of voting rights for African Americans, and was followed by George Michael Hahn, a former supporter of Stephen Douglas and the man who had been the U.S. military governor of the state from March 1864 until March 1865. As there were only 25 former members present, Howell declared a recess so that other members could be located to formally enshrine in law the right to vote for African Americans. Many of the Confederates and their supporters saw this reconvening as an attempt to wrest power from them, and they felt that control of the state was slipping from their hands. Democrats in New Orleans had alerted Lieutenant Governor Albert Voorhies, who in turn had sent a message by telegraph to President Andrew Johnson as to what to do. Johnson’s reply was that “the military will be expected to sustain, not obstruct or interfere with, the proceedings of the courts.” Voorhies found this ambiguous and contacted Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, who concurred with Johnson’s view. General Baird, the Union commander

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in the region, had offered use of his troops to protect the convention, but had not expected proceedings to start until 6:00 p.m. The Confederates started mustering their supporters near the Mechanics’ Institute while their leaders worked out how the convention could be halted. The opportunity arose when several hundred African American marchers, some playing fifes or beating drums, arrived at the Mechanics’ Institute. One of the marchers was jostled by a Confederate supporter, and the African American then punched his adversary. The Confederate pulled out a revolver and fired. This alone did not lead to the riot—it was the actions of a nearby white newspaper boy who started taunting the African Americans. One of the policemen nearby grabbed the boy, but one of the African Americans pulled out a pistol and opened fire at the boy, who was being dragged to police lines. The police then opened fire on the African American marchers, and then former Confederates armed with makeshift weapons than charged into the affray, attacking the remaining African Americans and radical Republicans who fled for safety into the Mechanics’ Institute. A large mob of Confederates and police then opened fire at the building, and while some of the supporters of the convention and its members sought refuge in the main hall where the convention was to be held, others fled by leaping out of the building or hiding in cupboards. Some people tried to surrender, and Rev. Dr. Horton held up his white handkerchief offering himself up to be arrested by the police, but the police and the Confederates continued firing at the building, eventually killing Horton and also Dr. Anthony P. Dostie and John Henderson, the main radical Republicans who were in the building. Using chair legs as clubs, three times Confederates forced their way into the main hall, and three times they were driven back. On the fourth occasion, a larger mob managed to force its way into the hall. Finally, soldiers arrived, but by then many people had been killed. The official report stated that 38 were killed (of whom 34 were African Americans), and 146 wounded (of these, 119 were African Americans). All those killed were members of, or supporters of the convention, except one white attacker who was accidentally shot dead by the police. Ten police were wounded, and after the riot, some 261 African Americans and four whites were arrested and jailed for rioting. None of the Confederate supporters or the police were ever arrested or punished. Most of the newspapers were extremely critical of the police actions, although the pro-Confederate papers blamed the rioting on northern demagogues and African Americans. Cyrus Hamlin, the son of former vice president Hannibal Hamlin, felt the slaughter was worse than he had seen on battlefields, and it was the northern newspapers such as the New York Daily Tribune that launched into an attack on the perpetrators of the rioting and the police. Radical Republicans

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blamed the instructions by Andrew Johnson seeking to see him as responsible for the rioting by the delay in using soldiers. As Louisiana was under martial law, Union soldiers were able to restore order in New Orleans itself, and in the November 1866 elections, the Republicans won an overwhelming majority of seats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In spite of Andrew Johnson’s exercising his right of veto, the Reconstruction Bill gained more than two-thirds of Congress and was passed into law and implemented in Louisiana. The law enforced the right to vote for African Americans, but removed the franchise from anybody associated with the New Orleans Riot and closely linked to the Confederate cause. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Bell, Caryn Cosse´. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Hollandsworth, James G. An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Reynolds, Donald E. “The New Orleans Riot of 1866, Reconsidered.” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964): 5–27. Riddleberger, Patrick, W. 1866: The Critical Year Revisited. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Vandal, Gilles. The New Orleans Riot of 1866: Anatomy of a Tragedy. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983.

Carpetbaggers This term or epithet was a derisive one used in the South by southerners to describe northerners who arrived in the South during the period of Reconstruction with their worldly goods wrapped in a carpet. Specifically, it applied to newly arrived politicians or prospective politicians, or businessmen, who arrived in the South with the aim of making their fortune there. It derived from the “carpetbag,” a bag made from carpets, in which one would carry their goods around the United States and elsewhere, and was aimed at showing that the people brought very little with them, and any money they made was essentially from the work of southerners. The people who were labeled as carpetbaggers, and often depicted in cartoons with a large sack slung over their shoulder, varied from those who did arrive to make their fortune in the South, and also many others who were genuinely concerned with the welfare of African Americans who had recently been freed from slavery and enfranchised. Part of the hope of some of these “carpetbaggers” was to help the African Americans adapt to their new freedoms, and with injections of government funds, a small number of the “carpetbaggers” were undoubtedly involved in corrupt practices. In the New Orleans Riot of 1866, the term “carpetbagger” was used to describe the white members and supporters of the constitutional convention in 1864 and those who sought to have it reconvened in 1866. George Hahn had been born in Bavaria, brought up in New York, and had been in New Orleans since the age of 10. He had long been an opponent of slavery. He opposed Louisiana’s secession, and when he renewed his oath as a notary, he omitted the new oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Likewise, Anthony Paul Dostie was also from Louisiana, having been the former state auditor of public accounts; and John Henderson was the son of a former senator from Mississippi. In spite of this, however, the presence of a large number of northern soldiers in the South during Reconstruction allowed many southern politicians to portray most of the officials of the new administration, especially the military members, as northerners with little in common with, and little interest in, the people of the South, and intent only on making money in the South—money that would, undoubtedly, be taken north soon afterwards. The term “scalawag” was often used at the same time to denote southerners who worked with the “carpetbaggers.” —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Current, Richard Nelson. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Martinez, J. Michael. Carpetbaggers, Cavalry and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Overy, David H. Wisconsin Carpetbaggers in Dixie. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1961. Vandal, Gilles. The New Orleans Riot of 1866: Anatomy of a Tragedy. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983.

Reconstruction (1863–1877) Following the start of the Civil War, it became clear that as the Union won back territory, it would have to establish some method of governing over the former southern states in a manner that should be, if possible, democratic; and also allow the freedom of all former slaves and the enfranchisement of as many of them as possible. Abraham Lincoln was so keen to win the war and to show the North as magnanimous victors, that his policy was for the reinstatement of a civilian administration as soon as only 10 percent of the population of any former Confederate state returned to Union hands. Although Lincoln pushed through the immediate abolition of slavery in all the Confederate states, the states were still given some role in deciding on the franchise, as shown by many former Confederate politicians introducing the “Black Codes” to restrict the voting rights of African Americans. Radical Republicans wanted all African Americans to be granted equal rights throughout all of the former Confederacy. After Lincoln’s assassination, the new president, Andrew Johnson, wanted to follow the moderate policies espoused by Lincoln. However, radicals in the Republican Party felt that the coming end of the Civil War was the perfect opportunity to finally push through laws for equal rights, and also to deny the vote to Confederates. Initially, the radical Republicans certainly did not have the support of the majority of people in the northern states, although they had powerful advocates for their cause. In June 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affirmed that U.S. citizenship applied to African Americans, and this sparked disturbances in the South and the introduction of the “Black Codes.” It was the riot in New Orleans in July 1866 that tipped the balance in favor of the radicals. They won a resounding victory in the November 1866 congressional election and were able to embark on what became known as

New Orleans Riot (1866) Political cartoon from 1868 illustrates violent resistance on the part of Southern whites to the post–Civil War Reconstruction Acts. (Library of Congress)

Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877 and saw Republican governors elected in a number of southern states, many of which did not see Republican governors elected again until the 1970s. Among the white population in the South, there was growing resentment against the reconstruction policies. These policies saw the U.S. Army administering most of the southern states, and the states not being readmitted to the Union until they had fulfilled stringent legal requirements, including the acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment, and then later the Fifteenth Amendment, to the U.S. Constitution. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Gao, Chungchang. African Americans in the Reconstruction Era. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Richter, William L. The ABC-CLIO Companion to American Reconstruction, 1862–1877. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1996. Smith, Page. Trial by Fire: A People’s History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.

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Voting Rights In the Confederate states of the South, African Americans did not have the right to vote, and this included not only the slaves who made up the vast bulk of the African Americans in the South, but also freed African Americans, many excluded owing to property qualifications being enforced. During the Confederacy, these rules remained in force. As a result, with the Union victories in the Civil War and the proclamation of the abolition of slavery in the Confederacy in 1863, and throughout the entire nation by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, radical Republicans felt that all African Americans should be allowed to vote. Indeed, most of those African Americans who did vote tended to vote Republican until the rise of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. However, the individual laws regarding the right to vote was addressed on a state basis, and the populations in some states, determined to restrict civil rights for African Americans, introduced the Black Codes. In the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which came into effect in July 1868, citizenship rights were extended to African Americans, and most people assumed that this would enfranchise them. It was not until the Fifteenth Amendment proclaimed on March 30, 1870, which forbade any state to deny the right to vote to any person because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Although it was thought by many legislators that the Fifteenth Amendment would ensure that African Americans could vote, six states in the South introduced educational tests and property qualifications that were applied to all people except those who had voted prior to 1867, or who had ancestors who voted prior to 1867. Because of this latter qualification, it became known as the “grandfather clause.” The idea came from the South Carolina lawyer Edward McCrady Jr., who based his legal views on the nativist move in Massachusetts in 1857, which introduced a literary test for anybody who had not yet been registered to vote as a way of excluding Irish immigrants. This was obviously discriminatory against African Americans, but the rules remained in force until they were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, who found in the judgment Guinn v. United States (1915) that these laws violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision was expected because the grandfather clauses had already lapsed in all the states except Oklahoma. —Justin Corfield

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Further Reading Lewinson, Paul. Race, Class & Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Matthews, Donald R., and Prothro, James W. Negroes and the New Southern Politics. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966. Williamson, Chilton. American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.

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The Molly Maguires were a shadowy and almost mystical organization of Irish coal miners that was active in the six northeastern counties of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region between 1862 and 1876. In two distinct waves of violence, the Molly Maguires were accused of industrial sabotage, armed robberies, physical assaults, and at least 16 murders. On Black Thursday, June 21, 1877, 10 convicted Molly Maguires were hung for murder, and over the next two years, another 10 convicted Irish miners, including John Kehoe, who was considered to be the “King of the Mollies,” were also hung. During the 1870s, the Molly Maguire conspiracy was also blamed for outbreaks of violence in the Illinois and Ohio coal fields. The name and origin of the organization, like most secret societies, remains obscure. In his popular book, The Realities of Irish Life, W. Steuart Trench noted that he had come across the society in County Monaghan, Ireland, during the 1840s and 1850s. In the troubled history of Ireland, local peasant organizations dedicated to the cause of retributive justice against their landlords and their agents were common. From the Whiteboys of the 18th century, to the Ribbonmen of the early 19th century, they have often been portrayed as heroes in romantic, nationalistic histories of Ireland. In his book, Trench tended to link all such societies together, as did James McParlan, the Pinkerton detective hired to penetrate the Molly Maguries in October 1873. In his initial report, McParlan, himself an Ulster Catholic from County Armagh, suggested that the tradition of Ribbonmen violence was brought to the United States, via England, by the Irish workers who committed their acts of violence behind the respectable fac¸ade of such organizations as the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an Irish fraternal society founded in New York City in 1836. Unlike some earlier 18th-century secret societies, the Mollies in the United States did not disguise themselves in woman’s clothes, but their name is said to have represented a mythical Irish woman who had begged for bread for her children during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. Contemporary accounts of the Mollies were almost universally hostile, and the notion that they were murderous sociopaths was continued in early 20th-century histories as well as popular works of fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s

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Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Valley of Fear (1915). More recent popular culture, especially in the Irish and Irish American communities, has transformed them into heroic proletarian revolutionaries or innocent victims caught up in the evil machinations of greedy mine owners. More recent historical research, however, has tempered both these extreme views to the extent that it is now thought that although there were clearly incidents of retributive violence occurring in Pennsylvania, there was probably no Molly Maguire conspiracy. Irish coal workers who faced harsh working conditions and blatant discrimination undoubtedly did react to local conditions in a violent manner, and it is now clear that of the 51 men either accused or convicted of Molly Maguire activities, a similar cultural background was shared by them. The clear majority of the accused came from either County Donegal or north central Ireland. Donegal was a remote and preliterate Gaelic speaking area that, in the 1830s and 1840s, had witnessed an unusual spate of rural violence. This had accompanied new forms of landholding and land usage introduced by the powerful, and often absent, regional aristocracy. This pattern of violence seemed to be replicated in Pennsylvania during two separate outbreaks in June 1862 and September 1875. Mine superintendents, foremen, a policeman named Benjamin Yost, and a justice of the peace, Thomas Gwyther, were murdered by unknown assailants. Even in the United States, which witnessed an increasing amount of industrial violence in the second half of the 19th century, this record of violence in Pennsylvania was unusual. The coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania were an important industrial center, but following an early economic boom in the 1830s, the region suffered a series of economic recessions after the financial collapse of 1837. This cycle of economic decline produced local labor unrest, sporadic violence, and the first strike by the miners in July 1842. The first actual assassination, the murder of Frank W. Langdon in June 1862, was followed by five other murders from 1863 to 1868. Although the nativist editor of the Miners Journal, Benjamin Bannan, had initially blamed the rising violence in the coalfields on the Catholic Irish immigrants in 1857, the early murders were not blamed on the Molly Maguires until the later trials in the 1870s. The ethic antipathy between the Irish coal workers and the Welsh miners undoubtedly heightened unrest in the area, as did the later Irish opposition to the American Civil War after 1862. If the coalfields themselves were never a safe place to work, surprisingly the Avondale Mine disaster of September 1869 brought some respite to the rising violence. Following this disaster, which claimed the lives of over 110 miners, the coalfields witnessed the rapid rise of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), a nonviolent union that had enrolled over 30,000 miner workers into its ranks by 1872. Union membership eased tensions between the Irish and Welsh miners, but the onset of the 1873 depression, together with the provocative actions of Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the

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Philadelphia and Reading Coal Company, rekindled the violence, which began to reappear in 1874. The son of an Irish immigrant, Gowen had risen rapidly as a lawyer in the railroad business, and by 1872, he had become one of the largest coalfield owners in Pennsylvania. He had succeeded in driving many of the smaller owners out of business, and when the price of coal began to fall in 1872, he persuaded the other owners to join the Anthracite Board of Trade, a mine owner’s organization. With unemployment and unrest increasing, Gowen engaged the Pinkerton agents James McParlan and P. M. Cummings to infiltrate respectively the Ancient Order of the Hibernians (AOH) and the WBA, hoping to establish links with the Molly Maguires, the organization he thought was behind the recent unrest. Determined to break the WBA to maximize profits, the Anthracite Board of Trade cut wages by 20 percent in December 1874, which in turn produced a strike that lasted until June 1875. The strike did break the union, but the Irish mine workers associated with AOH refused to return to work and the level of violence suddenly rose. The role of McParlan in the violence itself has been a matter of speculation in that he possibly acted as an agent provocateur, an accusation first suggested at the 1876 trials. Adopting the alias of James McKenna, he found work at Shenandoah in Northumberland County, joined the WBA, and was inducted into the AOH in April 1874. It was his evidence that the AOH was linked to the Molly Maguires that convicted a number of the miners on the notion of guilt by association. However, he certainly knew that some of the attacks would happen before they did, and he also supplied information about suspected Mollies to Gowen, which resulted in vigilante attacks on the some miners and their families. The level of violence, especially the six assassinations of mine officials beginning in July 1875 and ending in September 1875, attracted national attention, and the idea of a Molly Maguire conspiracy was largely generated by Gowen himself. That many of the accused were involved in the crimes is undoubtedly true, but the testimony of paid informants, together with that of McParlan, sealed the fated of a number of the accused. The trails began in January 1876, with Gowen acting as a special state prosecutor. Of the initial 10 convicted defendants, it now seems probable that Thomas Duffy was innocent of the murder of Benjamin Yost, as was the later-convicted James Roarity, but both were convicted on circumstantial evidence. This is also true of John Kehoe, who was convicted of the 1862 murder of Frank Langdon. In 1980, the then-governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, pardoned Kehoe for the murder. Nonetheless, all 20 of the convicted Molly Maguires were publicly hung in what the historian Kevin Kenny has described as powerful, intimidatory rituals. The executions ended the activities of the Molly Maguires, and in the industrial unrest that accompanied the great railroad strike of 1877, the coalfields of eastern

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Pennsylvania remained quiet. The violence at the Pittsburgh railroad yards led to troops shooting upon the strikers, killing 20; and in Scranton, a citizen vigilante group also opened fire on the strikers, resulting in the wounding of 54 and the deaths of 6 others. When the Irish-born Terence Powderly was elected major of Scranton, he was accused of being a Molly Maguire. In December 1889, Franklin Gowen committed suicide, but many thought he had been murdered by the Molly Maguires in revenge. The memory of the Molly Maguires lives on in popular memory, for the Dubliners, the Irish Rovers, and the Irish Balladeers have all recorded songs about them. Later interest in them was also generated by The Molly Maguires, a 1970 film in which Sean Connery played John Kehoe while James Harris gave a powerful, and not altogether unsympathetic, performance as McParlan. —Rory T. Cornish See also all entries under Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike; Lattimer Massacre (1894); Black Patch War; Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Bimba, Anthony. The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1950. Broehl, Wayne G., Jr. The Molly Maguires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Coleman, James W. The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal Region. Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1964. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kenny, Kevin. “The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture.” Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (Summer 1995): 27–46.

Irish Americans One of the earliest accounts of the Irish in America is the legend of St. Brendan, a monastic saint who, with a number of both pilgrims and nonbelievers, set out onto the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland in the early sixth century in search of the Garden of Eden. The result of Brendan’s seven-year voyage was the discovery of “The Isle of the Blessed.” Whether or not this isle was, in fact, America is a matter of great debate. Whatever the case may be, it is a fact that Irish immigration to America reached unprecedented rates by the mid-19th century, due not only to the great potato famine of 1845–1848, but as a result of intense economic displacement and a sharp decline in the standard of living of many by the early 1800s. There were obvious regional differences among the “new” European immigrants of the late 19th century to America. However, there appears to be a common impetus for, and similar patterns of, emigration from their respective homelands throughout Europe. America had the promise of political freedom and economic opportunity that was lacking in many of the European countries, and these were foundations upon which many immigrants hoped to build as they and their families made new lives for themselves in the United States. Patterns of immigration from Ireland to America, however, differed from other Europeans in a variety of ways. By the late 18th century, Ireland was populated more densely than any other European country, and while it is true that there was limited socioeconomic mobility throughout Europe especially in regards to land ownership, the problem in Ireland was much more severe. The Irish constituted approximately 10 percent of the population of the United States in 1790 (Dolan 2008), and while the landless and impoverished constituted a large portion of Irish immigrants to America prior to 1845, small Irish landowners were not able to survive the destructive repercussions of the potato famine. So they, too, fled—not only to America, but to England for those who could not afford transport across the Atlantic. High rents, evictions, limited industrial opportunities, religious divisions, and a variety of other problems plagued the Irish even after the famine, which resulted in continued emigration from Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. The number of Irish immigrants to America peaked at 914,119 during the nineyear period from 1851 to 1860. Thirty years later, however, from 1881 to 1890, the 655,482 Irish was the highest number among any group of immigrants to America— from Europe or otherwise. (Lord and Lord 1972). Although the earliest wave of Irish immigrants settled throughout Appalachia in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the second wave of immigrants tended to settle where they arrived—through the ports of the American northeast in places such as Boston,

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Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. Irish immigrants were conscripted into the American Civil War; they worked in the mines, in the mills, and the factories. Pennsylvania, in particular, provided economic opportunities for the Irish, first in the form of farming, and later in coal mining and industry. —Jacqueline M. Cavalier

Further Reading Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Coffey, Michael, and Terry Golway, eds. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Dolan, Jay P. The Irish Americans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Lord, Clifford Lee, and Elizabeth H. Lord. Historical Atlas of the United States. New York: Holt Publishers, 1972.

Pennsylvania Situated between New York to the north, New Jersey to the east, and Maryland to the south, Pennsylvania on the eve of colonization in the 17th century was home to several Native American tribes including the Shawnee, the Susquehannock, and member tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Although, initially, the Swedes and the Dutch battled over trading rights in the region, by 1676, English laws and civil government were introduced by the Duke of York and, in 1681, by charter granted from the king of England to William Penn, the colony of Pennsylvania was established. A number of groups, including English, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Africans, and many others, came to settle the colony throughout the 18th century and, on the eve of independence from England in 1776, the population of Pennsylvania was approximately 275,000, including 11,000 slaves, which made it the thirdlargest American colony at that time. Traditionally, agriculture proved to be a prosperous economic foundation for the settlers to Pennsylvania. However, an abundance of natural resources made it conducive to the early development of industries such as textile production, sawmills and gist mills, as well as iron manufacture. The lay of the land made the sale and transport of various goods, first by water and later by coach and railroad, relatively easy. Access to waterways such as the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny rivers of the southwest and the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers of the northeast allowed commercial activity to flourish throughout Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia becoming an important center of business and trade by 1776.

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After independence was won from the British and the Constitution of the United States of America came into effect on March 4, 1789, Pennsylvania contributed to the overall economic success of the new nation in a number of ways, due largely to the wealth of natural resources that were concentrated in the state. Coal production, in particular, began in the mid-1700s as a means to support the colonial iron industry, which was of vital importance to the goal of independence. The coal mines of Pennsylvania produce two specific types of coal; anthracite, which is otherwise known as “hard” coal concentrated largely in the counties of eastern Pennsylvania, and bituminous, or “soft” coal, concentrated primarily in the counties of western Pennsylvania. Coal fueled the growth of numerous industries in the United States, and more specifically, in Pennsylvania throughout the 19th century, especially as railroads expanded and the desire for steel rails increased. As railroad, mining, and steel corporations grew, however, industrial strife and labor struggle became a common theme among them. The state legislature of Pennsylvania, for example, did not attempt to pass regulations for the protection of miners until after the American Civil War; therefore, individual operators were permitted to conduct their own affairs as they saw fit. By the mid-19th century, problems with labor organization, coupled with a rising tide of nationalism among the Irish in America, gave rise to a number of secret societies throughout the anthracite coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania, and the most infamous among them were the Molly Maguires. —Jacqueline M. Cavalier

Further Reading Coleman, J. Walter. The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal Region. New York: Arno & the New York Times, 1969. Lord, Clifford Lee, and Elizabeth H. Lord. Historical Atlas of the United States. New York: Holt Publishers, 1972. U.S. Department of Labor. “A Pictorial Walk through the 20th Century: The Irish in Mining.” Report from the U.S. Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, January 30, 2009.

Unionism The anthracite region of Pennsylvania includes the counties of Schuylkill, Carbon, Luzerne, and Lackawanna in the Wyoming Valley region. The mining of anthracite coal began in 1775 near Pittston, Pennsylvania, in Luzerne County. One of the first recorded industrial uses of anthracite coal was in 1788 for the heating

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and drawing of iron for nail production. The first recorded anthracite company, Lehigh Coal Mining Company, was formed in 1820, and in little more than 20 years, the first documented mine strike occurred in 1822. The possibility for success in labor organization was limited. Employer’s opposition, racial and ethnic divisions, and mismanagement or poor leadership were just a few of the reasons for the difficulty in creating a cohesive labor organization. In addition, there were divisions among the miners and the laborers in the mines, particularly in terms of compensation. For example, in 1848, the average wage among miners in the anthracite region was $1.25 per day as compared to a laborer’s wage of $0.83 per day (Bimba 1932, 25). As the demand for labor grew during the American Civil War, wages increased, albeit modestly; however, laborers continued to work at the mercy of the company. They lived in companyowned towns, bought supplies in a company-owned store, and even relied on the company for the most basic necessities. As many immigrant workers in the mining industry continued to live in poverty and discomfort, opposition to the company grew. Because British mines had traditionally attracted Irish laborers, many of the Irish who came to America had not only some mining experience, but had also learned the basics of organizing in the mills and mines of England. The first anthracite labor union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), was formed under the leadership of Irishman John Siney in 1868, and membership grew to include 30,000 miners. Within one year of its conception, the WBA lobbied successfully for the first mine safety law, the Mine Safety Act of 1869, which became a model for mine safety legislation for the next century (U.S. Department of Labor). Although the union succeeded in this regard, the celebration was cut short when 110 workers lost their lives on September 6, 1869, at the Avondale Mine disaster in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The WBA and other labor organizations attempted to bring change to the industry within a political framework. However, the membership of the various secret societies that had formed, such as the Buckshots, Sleepers, and Ribbonmen, considered other ways to bring attention to the plight of the worker and the injustices suffered at the hands of the company. One such group was the Molly Maguires. Named after the 17th-century Irish plotter, Connor Maguire, the true origins and actions of this group have been traditionally surrounded by myth and rumor. The extent to which they were willing to use violence to further their cause, however, was at the center of debate in September 1875, when several Molly Maguires from the coal fields of Glen Carbon, Pennsylvania, were placed on trial for the murder of a mining superintendent. Testimony offered at the trial suggested that the Mollies had an extensive record of violence against mine owners, superintendents, and law officials—not to mention plots of sabotage involving bombs and other lethal

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weapons. The trials lasted for two years and, by 1877, 19 members of the Molly Maguires had been sentenced to die by hanging—10 of whom were hanged simultaneously (U.S. Department of Labor). The validity of the evidence set forth to convict these men has posted lingering questions in history, as there are those who suggest that the events of 1875 to 1877 were nothing more than an attempt to further suppress the labor movement through guilt by association. Or perhaps, due to the membership being overwhelmingly Irish, this was yet another example of the class, racial, and ethnic divisions that came to characterize the labor struggle in America. Whatever the case may be, the Molly Maguires earned their rightful place in history as men willing to take up arms and fight oppression in the coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania. —Jacqueline M. Cavalier

Further Reading Bimba, Anthony. The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1932. Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Coleman, J. Walter. The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal Region. New York: Arno & the New York Times, 1969. U.S. Department of Labor. “A Pictorial Walk through the 20th Century: The Irish in Mining.” Report from the U.S. Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, January 30, 2009.

Excerpts from an Article Describing James McPartland’s Infiltration of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s (1894) The case of the Molly Maguires is a mysterious episode in American labor history. Nineteen men were eventually hanged for involvement in a clandestine Irish American terrorist organization responsible for murder and mayhem in coal mining regions of northeastern Pennsylvania in the 1870s. The actual existence of the Molly Maguires has never been definitively proven. The alleged Mollies were largely condemned on the testimony of Pinkerton agent James McParland, who supposedly infiltrated the organization. Critics of the verdict claim that the organization was a fiction invented by coal and railroad barons as an excuse for crushing the trade-union movement, which threatened the mine owners’ control over their workers. They also point out that McParland was later exposed as a liar in a 20th-century case involving the Western Federation of Miners. The passage below, recounting McParland’s work as a Pinkerton, was written by acclaimed journalist Cleveland Moffett for McClure’s Magazine in 1894. Some twenty years ago five counties in eastern Pennsylvania were dominated, terrorized, by a secret organization, thousands strong, whose special purpose was to rob, burn, pillage, and kill. Find on the map that marvelous mineral country, as large as Delaware, which lies between the Blue Mountains on the south and the arm of the Susquehanna on the

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Molly Maguires (1870s) north, and there you will see what was the home of these banded outlaws, the merciless Molly Maguires. . . . The origin and development of the Molly Maguires will always present a hard problem to the social philosopher, who will, perhaps, find some subtle relation between crime and coal. One understands the act of an ordinary murderer who kills from greed, or fear, or hatred; but the Molly Maguires killed men and women with whom they had had no dealings, against whom they had no personal grievances, and from whose death they had nothing to gain, except, perhaps, the price of a few rounds of whiskey. They committed murders by the score, stupidly, brutally. . . . The men who decreed these monstrous crimes did so for the most trivial reasons—a reduction in wages, a personal dislike, some imagined grievance of a friend. These were sufficient to call forth an order to burn a house where women and children were sleeping, to shoot down in cold blood an employer or fellow workman, to lie in wait for an officer of the law and club him to death. In . . . trial of one of them, Mr. Franklin B. Gowen described the reign of these ready murderers as a time “when men retired to their homes at eight or nine o’clock in the evening and no one ventured beyond the precincts of his own door; when every man engaged in any enterprise of magnitude, or connected with industrial pursuits, left his home in the morning with his hand upon his pistol, unknowing whether he would again return alive; when the very foundations of society were being overturned.” In vain the officials of the Philadelphia and Reading and Lehigh Valley Railroads . . . offered thousands of dollars in rewards for the apprehension of the criminals. In vain Archbishop Wood, of Philadelphia fought the Molly Maguires with the whole power of the Catholic Church. . . . In vain, reputable citizens in almost every town, formed and armed committees of vigilantes who were to take the law into their own hands, inasmuch as the forces of the law were paralyzed. All was of no avail; public offices remained in the hands of ruffians; the same fierce crimes persisted; people were assaulted, robbed, and murdered with increasing frequency. . . . In 1873, Mr. Franklin B. Gowen, then President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, took counsel with Allan Pinkerton in regard to the matter. “It was owing to Mr. Gowen,” says Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton in a recent letter, “that the Molly Maguire organization was broken up. . . . ” [I]n order to protect its interests, and its employees, and the managers and superintendents of the mines . . . [Gowen] consulted Mr. Allan Pinkerton. “I have the very man for you,” said Allan Pinkerton . . . James McParland. A few weeks after the interview between Mr. Gowen and Mr. Pinkerton, James McParland was announced to have sailed for Europe on an important mission. Only two men in the country knew that he had really set out for the terrorized region, with instructions to run down these Molly Maguire bandits. . . . After some weeks of reconnoitering on foot through the coal regions, the young detective arrived in Pottsville, where he established himself in a boarding-house kept by a Mrs. O’Regan. There he met a man named Jennings, who volunteered to show him the sights of the city that same night. Passing a noisy drinking-place called the Sheridan House, McKenna, for that was McParland’s assumed name, proposed going in. Jennings warned him as he valued his life never to cross the threshold of that place. “It’s kept by Pat Dormer,” he said, “the big body-master of the Molly Maguires. . . .”

Molly Maguires (1870s) [McKenna slowly ingratiated himself with Dormer, then moved to Shenandoah, where he met “Muff” Lawler, the Molly Maguires’ body-master for that region, whose life he saved in a barroom dispute.] . . . [H]e made the acquaintance of most of the prominent Mollys, including Jack Kehoe, of Girardville, and “Yellow Jack” Donahue, both of whom were afterwards hanged on his testimony. Everywhere he found that his reputation had preceded him, and he was received by all the Mollys with the respect which ruffians never fail to pay men whom they regard as greater ruffians than themselves. At each new stopping place he came into possession of new secrets touching crimes of the order already committed, and others that were planning, all of which he reported day by day to Allan Pinkerton. . . . He learned that the number of Molly Maguires in the five counties had been much exaggerated in the popular mind, through fear, and that there were not really more than three or four thousand active members of the organization, whereas it had been reported through the State that there were ten times that many. McKenna saw, however, that it was impossible to exaggerate the desperate character of these men. He found that each county was governed by a “county delegate,” his territory being divided into districts, or “patches,” each under a “body-master” or chief officer, who gave out the signs and pass-words to trusted members, and ordered the execution of crimes that had been decided upon. In nearly every case the body-master was the keeper of a saloon near one of the shafts, slopes, or drifts. . . . If any superintendent dared to refuse the request of a body-master to hire or discharge any man, with or without reason, that superintendent’s life was as good as forfeited. “Bosses” were in the same way constrained to give Mollys the best jobs—that is, the easiest—and in case of their failure to do so they were promptly made an example of with clubs or revolvers. Before killing a superintendent or a colliery “boss,” the body-master would usually serve him with a “coffin notice,” a roughly written warning, bearing crudely drawn knives and revolvers, and a large coffin in the center. Woe to the man who allowed such a notice to go unheeded! In nearly every instance he was shot or clubbed to death within a few days by unknown assailants. . . . Early in July 1875, while McKenna was still in Shenandoah, acting as a bodymaster, a shocking murder was committed by Molly Maguires at the town of Tamaqua . . . the east. The victim was Franklin B. Yost, a policeman, and a man who had served honorably in the civil war, and a most peaceful and worthy citizen. Hurrying to the scene of the crime, McKenna addressed himself to “Powder Keg” Carrigan, the body-master of that patch. . . . McKenna was not long in learning that “Powder Keg” himself was the man at whose instigation the murder had been committed. Carrigan explained to him that they had killed the wrong man, his grievance having been not against Yost, but against another policeman, Bernard McCarron, who had aroused “Powder Keg’s” enmity years before by frequently arresting him for disorderly conduct. Carrigan nursed the memory of this treatment, and when he had became a body-master at once proceeded to arrange for the killing of McCarron. Having applied to Alexander Campbell, the body-master of Landsford, Carbon County . . . for two men to do a “clean job,” he brought the men to a retired spot on McCarron’s beat. Later in the night, when a policeman passed by, the two men shot him, according to orders, and then started for their homes. But on that

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Molly Maguires (1870s) night McCarron had exchanged beats with Yost, who accordingly came to a violent death, although neither the Mollys nor anyone else in the region had any but kind feelings toward him. Carrigan showed McKenna the revolver, a weapon of thirty-two caliber, with which the policeman had been killed, and explained that it had been borrowed from a Molly named Roarity by the two men, Hugh McGehan and James Doyle, who with others had done the murder. McGehan was the man who fired the fatal shot. McKenna secured the names of every man concerned in the crime, and ultimately, on his evidence, it was punished by the hanging, in Pottsville, of Hugh McGehan, Thomas Duffy, James Roarity, James Carl, and James Doyle. . . . Following closely upon the murder of Yost, there came in August, 1875, a “Bloody Saturday,” as it was called by the Mollys, when they killed on that one day, Thomas Guyther, a justice of the peace, at Gerardville, and, at Shenandoah, Gomer James, the same whose life had been saved a few weeks before by McKenna’s intervention. James was a desperado himself, having some time before, while drunk, shot down an Irishman named Cosgrove, and this offense the Mollys had sworn to avenge. . . . The Shenandoah firemen were giving a banquet in a public hall, and Gomer James was serving as bartender. A little before midnight, when the gaiety was at its height, Thomas Hurler left his mother, who was sitting on a bench near the bar, and going up to James ordered a glass of beer. James served him promptly, whereupon Hurley threw down a nickel, and lifting the glass in his left hand, pretended to drain it. but he held a pistol, ready cocked, in the right-hand pocket of his sack coat, and while the glass was at his lips, he pulled the trigger. Then, quite unconcerned, he finished his beer, and affected to join in a search for the murderer. . . . Toward the end of 1875, the strain under which McParland had been working for eighteen months began to tell upon him and he appealed to Allan Pinkerton to be allowed to strike the final blow. . . . Allan Pinkerton and his assistants . . . concluded that the evidence McParland had secured was sufficient, and steps were forthwith taken to close in on the murderers. McParland had still, however; many dangers to face; first from fellow members of the order who were beginning to believe he had played them false, and then from outraged citizens, who regarded him as a monster of crime whose unceremonious killing would be a service to the State. One night, in Tamaqua, bands of armed men searched for him from house to house until morning, and would certainly have discovered and lynched him, had he not, by pretending to fall into a drunken sleep, succeeded in remaining all night in the house of a respectable citizen who was not suspected of harboring him. . . . Jack Kehoe, the county delegate whose influence in the order was very great, was now busily reporting his suspicion that “James McKenna” was a detective. To meet this danger McParland boldly went straight to Kehoe, accused him of treachery and demanded an immediate investigation. As county delegate, Kehoe instructed McKenna, who was at that time county secretary, to write notices to all the body-masters in the county to meet at Shenandoah at a given date, to conduct the investigation. He was writing the notices in a room over Kehoe’s saloon, where Mrs. Kehoe was sewing, when

Molly Maguires (1870s) Kehoe came in suddenly with a glass of soda for his wife, and a hot whiskey for McKenna. Having placed the two glasses on the table, he left the room. . . . As soon as he had gone, Mrs. Kehoe, who was a good woman at heart, and devoted to McKenna, took up the hot whiskey, threw it into the stove, and then burst into tears. . . . It is certain that the whiskey was poisoned. A second attempt to poison McKenna was made the day before his trial at Shenandoah. He was lifting the drugged glass to his lips when an instinctive suspicion moved him to set it down. On the day of the trial Jack Kehoe did not appear. He was expecting that there would be no trial; for he had engaged sixteen men to murder McKenna, and had even advanced several of them twenty-five dollars each for the service. McKenna’s life was probably saved by the personal devotion of a Molly Maguire named Frank McAndrew, who told him of the plot to kill him, and swore to stand true to him. . . . By McAndrew’s aid he stole away and returned to Philadelphia, where he was warmly welcomed by Allan Pinkerton and the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, Mr. Gowen. . . . And here the services of McParland (alias McKenna) as a detective in the Molly Maguire cases ended; but he had still a most important service to render as a witness. . . . [O]n May 6, 1876 a number of arrests were made, [and] the trials that followed were highly dramatic. Held as they were at the very center of the lawless district, there was more or less danger that persons engaged in them would themselves suffer the fraternity’s vengeance. The result of the trials—which is to say the result of McParland’s dangerous investigations and subsequent testimony—was the complete extermination of the order of Molly Maguires. A score or more of the desperadoes were condemned to longer or shorter terms in the penitentiary. Nineteen were hanged. Among the latter was Jack Kehoe, who had been among the first to suspect McParland of being a detective, and had expended all his power and ingenuity to get him killed and well out of the way. Source: Cleveland Moffett, “The Overthrow of the Molly Maguires,” McClure’s Magazine, 1894.

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Women’s Movement (1870s) The 19th-century women’s movement emerged from Americans’ efforts to define the social and political roles of women in the new republic. Early reformers concentrated on improving women’s education and heightening women’s public influence through organized benevolence. The movement gathered steam after the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848; mid-century reformers sought to expand women’s employment opportunities and reform divorce, child custody, and property laws. After the Civil War, the women’s movement increasingly focused on securing the right to vote. The battle for suffrage unfolded state by state, beginning in the West; it was more than half a century from the enfranchisement of Wyoming women in 1869 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. During the American Revolution, the rhetoric of equality and the process of designing a new government brought the question of women’s position to the fore. In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams admonished her husband, “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” Women’s suffrage was not unknown in Adams’s day; some colonies permitted propertied women to vote, and New Jersey retained this practice until 1807. Adams’s chief concerns, however, were social equality and expanded legal protections for women. In this, she anticipated the interests of the first generation of women reformers. In the wake of the Revolution, Americans embraced “republican womanhood”—the idea that virtuous, well-educated women could strengthen the republic by rearing virtuous, well-educated children and gently counseling their husbands toward responsible citizenship. One of the consequences, especially for middleclass women, was a sharp improvement in educational opportunities. From northern New England to the Deep South, entrepreneurs opened academies that promised to groom young women for republican citizenship by teaching them history, philosophy, foreign languages, mathematics, and science, as well as conventional accomplishments such as music. The most rigorous academies offered what

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was essentially a college curriculum, shorn of its classical emphasis. Oberlin, the nation’s first coeducational college, opened in 1833, and Mount Holyoke, the nation’s first women’s college, opened in 1837. The new academies did not explicitly promote women’s rights—Emma Willard, founder of Troy Female Seminary, opposed women’s suffrage, while Catharine Beecher, founder of Hartford Female Seminary, was indifferent—but they incubated the women’s movement by training young women in composition and public speaking and encouraging them to engage social issues. In their commencement orations, young women frequently advocated social equality and expanded public roles for women. In keeping with these values, alumni of women’s seminaries were prominent in organized benevolence, embracing causes as varied as reforming prostitutes, managing charity schools and orphanages, and ending slavery. To a large extent, the women’s movement emerged within the antislavery movement. When the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was founded in 1833, its leaders permitted women to attend and speak at the convention but not to join the society. Female abolitionists responded by organizing the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and then, in 1837, the National Female Anti-Slavery Society. Yet female abolitionists continued to struggle with social constraints. Women’s activism ran contrary to the cult of true womanhood, which linked women’s moral purity to their separation from the public sphere. Women’s public speaking was highly controversial. Sarah and Angelina Grimke´ , whose antislavery lectures included allusions to sexual violence against female slaves, were pelted with fruit, threatened with brickbats, and censured by the Congregationalist Church for addressing mixed audiences. The climax was reached in 1838, when an angry mob torched a meeting hall in which Angelina had just lectured. In 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society split over the question of whether women should be allowed to represent the society at antislavery conventions. When Lucretia Mott, an AASS delegate to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, was relegated to an observation gallery, she and fellow attendee Elizabeth Cady Stanton resolved to organize a convention on women’s rights. The Seneca Falls Convention transformed reformers’ wide-ranging discussion of women’s condition into a coherent movement. Three hundred men and women gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848, and produced the Seneca Falls Declaration, a substantial manifesto modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The Seneca Falls Declaration outlined the agenda of the women’s movement: the expansion of educational and employment opportunities; equal pay for equal work; reform of divorce and property laws; and the right to address public meetings. The convention’s participants were divided on whether to call for women’s suffrage, a demand some considered too radical, but a suffrage plank ultimately made its way into the document.

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Though modest in size, the Seneca Falls Convention was well publicized. In subsequent years, reformers organized similar meetings in several states, and Lucy Stone convened the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. Women’s rights activists drew inspiration from the tactics of the antislavery and temperance movements. They circulated petitions in favor of married women’s property rights and women’s suffrage. They even launched feminist newspapers—Amelia Bloomer’s Lily (1849–1856) and Pauline Wright Davis’s Una (1853–1854)—modeled on abolitionist newspapers such as The Liberator. Yet the antebellum women’s movement retained a weak organizational structure. Its fluid, makeshift character spared the antebellum movement the organizational infighting that bedeviled the women’s suffrage campaign in the last third of the 19th century. The leaders of the women’s movement that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s shared several characteristics. Most, though not all, hailed from New England. Most came from middling-to-affluent backgrounds; it was the middle-class tone of the movement that provoked Sojourner Truth’s 1851 query (possibly apocryphal) “ar’n’t I a woman?” Many women’s leaders belonged to liberal Protestant denominations such as the Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Quakers; all of these denominations were sympathetic to social reform, and the Quakers had a long tradition of female preaching and leadership. Many had been educated at the new academies; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, studied at Troy Female Seminary, while Lucy Stone was an alumna of Mount Holyoke and Oberlin. Others had received similarly rigorous educations at home. Virtually all began their activism in other reform movements, usually antislavery or temperance, and their efforts to expand women’s rights were part of a larger critique of American society. Several prominent male abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, also supported women’s rights. The antebellum women’s movement melded 18th-century natural rights philosophy, 19th-century liberalism, and prevailing ideas about gender difference. The Seneca Falls Declaration emphasized that women as well as men derived certain rights from nature; natural rights philosophy led many reformers to see close parallels between the emancipation of African American slaves and the emancipation of women. The middle-class liberals who led the antebellum women’s movement focused on securing freedoms for individual women rather than fostering a comprehensive women’s political agenda. This was not because they believed women’s priorities to be indistinguishable from men’s; most believed in essential gender differences. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the movement’s most prolific and eloquent theorists, argued that society flourished when governments reflected the contrasting but complementary views of women and men. She also noted, more mundanely, that women’s suffrage was essential because women’s interests

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sometimes differed from men’s, and they could not count on men to represent them adequately when writing property and child custody laws. Though the quest for suffrage gradually became the centerpiece of the women’s movement, reformers of the 1840s and 1850s sought myriad other reforms in women’s social, legal, and political position. One of the movement’s most basic themes was the need to expand employment opportunities for women. Reformers sought to professionalize teaching and nursing, making them both more respectable and more remunerative, and to open careers in medicine, law, and the clergy to women. Elizabeth Blackwell became the United States’ first female physician in 1849; her sister Emily followed her into the field a few years later, and together they founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. Their sister-in-law Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who was ordained in the Congregational Church in 1853, was the first female pastor in a mainstream Protestant denomination. Many of the landmark writings of the early women’s movement focused on the contributions women could make to society if they gained access to better education and a broader range of careers. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) encouraged women to develop their intellects as fully as men did, while Caroline Dall’s The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867; originally delivered as lectures in 1859–1861) called for a massive expansion of economic opportunity. Another question that absorbed antebellum women’s leaders was how women could preserve their individual identity within the context of marriage. Some early feminists omitted the promise to obey from their marriage vows, as Amelia Jenks did when she married Dexter Bloomer in 1840. The power couple Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell went further. At their 1855 wedding, they read a statement in which they critiqued the laws that constrained married women’s authority over their own bodies, property, and children. Blackwell formally renounced his superior privileges as husband, granting Stone control of her body and the freedom to live where she wished. Stone retained her maiden name. The “Wedding Protest” was printed in the papers, just as Stone and Blackwell hoped. One of the most important ways in which married women could retain distinct legal identities was by winning the right to control the property they brought to marriage and the wages they earned while married. The first married women’s property acts, passed in Arkansas Territory in 1835, in Mississippi in 1839, and in several other states in the 1840s, merely stated that wives’ property could not be sold to pay their husbands’ debts. These laws appear to have been passed in response to the Panic of 1837 and the widespread economic uncertainty that ensued. Wives’ right to maintain separate estates was first legislated in New York in 1848; in 1855, Massachusetts became the first state to grant married women

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the right to keep their own earnings. Ernestine Rose, who as a teenager in Poland had gone to court to recover property left her by her mother, and subsequently promised away by her father as her dowry in an arranged marriage, was an early leader of the effort to reform property law. Economic rights were intertwined with the question of divorce, as economic pressures could keep women in unhappy or violent marriages even if the law did not. Most states (with the exception of South Carolina) permitted divorce, but the grounds for divorce were few, and state legislatures granted divorces on an ad hoc basis. Jane Swisshelm, a newspaper editor who divorced her husband in 1857, was an early advocate of more liberal divorce laws, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote articles for the feminist periodicals Una and Lily in which she advocated women’s right to divorce. Stanton’s writings drew fire from more conservative reformers such as Horace Greeley, who supported women’s suffrage but feared that easier access to divorce would pave the path to free love and social chaos. Antoinette Brown Blackwell likewise condemned divorce even as she called for women’s suffrage and improved educational and career opportunities. The antebellum women’s movement did not achieve a consensus in favor of divorce rights as it did on other prominent issues, such as education, married women’s property rights, and suffrage. The Civil War was a major turning point in the history of the women’s movement. It spawned conflicts over strategy and race that fractured the movement for at least a generation. In the 1850s and early 1860s, leaders of the women’s movement campaigned aggressively to end slavery. During the war years, the Women’s Loyal National League (founded by Susan B. Anthony, Stanton, and Stone, among others) collected 400,000 signatures on a petition to outlaw slavery by constitutional amendment. Once slavery had been abolished, women’s leaders expected political rights for women to advance in tandem with political rights for freedmen. Lucy Stone founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which aimed to advance political rights for all Americans. Its members were chagrined that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, penalized states that denied suffrage to male citizens but not those that denied suffrage to women, and that the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, forbade restricting suffrage on the basis of “race, color, or pervious condition of servitude” but was silent on the subject of gender. Women’s leaders, nearly all of whom had been active in the antislavery movement, split bitterly over the question of whether to support the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869, during the fight for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony withdrew from the AERA and organized the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which denounced the Fifteenth Amendment and urged its replacement with a constitutional

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amendment that would enfranchise both men and women of all races. Lucy Stone, the Blackwell clan, and Julia Ward Howe retaliated by organizing the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported the Fifteenth Amendment as a step in the process toward universal suffrage for all Americans. AWSA was generally more moderate than NWSA and, unlike NWSA, welcomed both men and women as members. It aimed to secure women’s suffrage by lobbying state legislatures to extend voting rights to women. NWSA had a more radical approach, one it dubbed the “New Departure.” Stanton and Anthony, following the lead of Victoria Woodhull, reasoned that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments clearly linked voting rights to citizenship. Since women as well as men were citizens, the Civil War amendments had tacitly granted women the right to vote. Employing this theory, Anthony attempted to cast a ballot in Rochester, New York, in 1872. Other women’s rights activists, including Virginia Minor of Missouri, made similar attempts. Minor’s case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Minor v. Happersett (1875) that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause did not grant women the right to vote. Philosophical conflict between NWSA and AWSA, and interpersonal conflict between the organizations’ leaders, hampered the women’s movement throughout the final third of the 19th century. This rivalry should not obscure the fact that NWSA and AWSA agreed not only in their basic goal—universal suffrage—but also in prioritizing women’s suffrage above the other aims of the antebellum women’s movement. To some extent, this development reflected the progress that had been made since 1848: coeducational public high schools, women’s colleges, and coeducational state universities proliferated in the late 19th century, and women gained access to a wider range of occupations, including new fields such as typing, stenography, and social work. One state after another granted married women the right to control the property they brought to their marriages and the wages they earned while married. Many states codified divorce law and simplified the process of obtaining a divorce; divorce proceedings increasingly went through the courts rather than through state legislatures. By the 1870s, a few law schools admitted women, and in 1879, Belva Ann Lockwood became the first woman admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court. But women’s leaders’ redoubled focus on suffrage also reflected their growing conviction that, in a democratic nation, voting rights were a necessary precondition to securing other legal reforms. The spread of universal white male suffrage in the Jacksonian era, followed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, made voting rights an essential component of citizenship, and women could not enjoy full and equal citizenship until they secured the right to vote.

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Unfortunately, postbellum women’s leaders faced a political landscape unfriendly to their cause. Federal power, which had expanded during the Civil War and Reconstruction, retreated swiftly after the Compromise of 1877. Neither of the two major parties cherished a very coherent political ideology; much power was concentrated in the hands of urban- and state-level political machines; and federal authorities were reluctant to impose new regulations on the states. The nation went nearly half a century, from 1870 to 1913, without ratifying a single new amendment to the Constitution. Thus AWSA’s state-by-state strategy initially proved more practical than the national strategy espoused by NWSA. Suffragists won their earliest victories in the West. Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote in 1869, Utah Territory in 1870. (Congress, disappointed that Utah women had failed to vote against polygamy, revoked Utah women’s suffrage in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. Utah restored women’s suffrage after statehood.) By 1900, four western states had granted women full voting rights: Wyoming, Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896). There are several reasons why western states and territories led the way to women’s suffrage. The rough-and-ready nature of frontier life sometimes heightened women’s economic independence, and some territories offered the vote as an incentive for women to immigrate. The Populists’ endorsement of women’s suffrage helped win women the right to vote in Colorado and Idaho. Most importantly, the process of writing territorial and state constitutions forced westerners to confront new ideas about citizenship and suffrage. While inertia stalled the women’s movement elsewhere, the question of women’s suffrage could not be elided in the newly forming western states. Meanwhile, a dynamic new organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), launched a broader campaign for social reform that would include, but not be limited to, women’s suffrage. Nineteenth-century Americans often perceived temperance as a women’s issue, because male alcoholism left a trail of domestic violence and poverty in its wake. Founded in 1874 as a women’s temperance organization, the WCTU built on the tradition of women’s benevolent clubs to become the largest women’s organization in the late-19th-century United States. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, it expanded its mission to embrace women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, and early childhood education, among other causes (Willard cherished a “do everything” philosophy). The WCTU’s support for women’s suffrage was crucial in making what had once been a radical position mainstream. By the 1890s, women’s suffrage enjoyed wide support among middle-class and working-class American women. In 1887, Lucy Stone called for a merger of AWSA and NWSA. The negotiations were byzantine, but in 1890, the two groups finally merged into the

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National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). For most of the 1890s, Susan B. Anthony served as president and Anna Howard Shaw as vicepresident. In spite of able leadership, the movement stalled in the 1890s. NAWSA was slow to adjust to new social realities. Burgeoning immigration created a large pool of urban working women, many of whom had been politicized by contact with the labor movement and were eager to gain the vote; black women formed another pool of potential supporters. But in their zeal to attract middle-class white southern women to the movement, NAWSA’s leaders tacitly accepted their racism; black women were permitted to join NAWSA but not to attend its conventions. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in writing that the nation must enfranchise educated women to counteract the ignorant votes of male immigrants and freedmen, reflected the elitist mindset of many late-19th-century suffragists. Such attitudes persisted even after a new generation of leaders took the helm. Carrie Chapman Catt, a charismatic speaker and talented administrator, served as president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920. Catt enjoyed advantages, including a college education and a year’s study of law, that had eluded the earlier generation of women’s leaders, and she cherished a wider vision, recognizing commonalities in women’s legal and social oppression around the world. In 1902, Catt founded the International Woman Suffrage Association. Yet Catt’s outlook was relentlessly middle class; she was relatively unaware of the struggles of working women and was slow to take her message to working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. Others, particularly settlement house luminaries such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, took the lead in recruiting working-class women to support suffrage. Another innovator was Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriott Stanton Blatch, who, after a long residence in England, founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later renamed the Women’s Political Union) in 1907 and organized the United States’ first suffrage parades. The Progressive Era saw a reinvigorated women’s suffrage movement win fresh victories in Washington (1910), California (1911), and Oregon (1912). By 1914, most Western states had enfranchised women. But even at the height of the Progressive era, women’s suffrage initiatives failed more often than they won. In some cases—notably in the 1912 Michigan referendum—election fraud defeated women’s suffrage. This led many of the younger suffragists to question the merits of NAWSA’s state-by-state strategy. How long, they wondered, would it take for a nation of 48 states to win women’s suffrage one state at a time? In 1913, Alice Paul split with NAWSA to found the Congressional Party (later called the National Woman’s Party), which would pursue the goal of national women’s suffrage by constitutional amendment. Like Harriott Stanton Blatch,

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Paul had lived in England, where the suffrage movement was far more militant than it was in the turn-of-the-century United States. While in England, Paul had been imprisoned several times for her activities under the auspices of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Paul’s organization adopted the reasoning of British suffragists: the political party in power must be held responsible for failing to enfranchise women. Members of the National Woman’s Party used attention-getting tactics such as parades, hunger strikes, and picketing the White House to publicize their views, to the consternation of the more conservative leaders of NAWSA. World War I paved the way for universal women’s suffrage in the United States, as well as in Canada, Britain, and several other European countries. President Woodrow Wilson, a southern-born Democrat who had long opposed women’s suffrage, announced his support for enfranchising women in 1918, citing women’s contributions to the war effort as the reason for his change of heart. After threequarters of a century of active campaigning, women throughout the United States finally secured suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment, which was proposed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 26, 1920. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment permitted American women to vote in the presidential election of 1920. The first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, had already served her term (1917–1919). The first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, and the first woman member of the Cabinet, Frances Perkins, would follow in 1933. (Two women, including Caraway, served in the Senate by appointment before 1933.) Yet for some, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was anticlimactic; reformers were disappointed to find that women did not turn out to vote in large numbers, and that those who did vote generally voted like their male relatives, rather than composing a discernible women’s bloc. Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park transformed NAWSA into the League of Women Voters, launching an ambitious program of citizenship education and promoting laws that would benefit women, including the provision of prenatal care and, in the 1930s, social security. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the women’s movement receded for a generation. By 1920, most of the goals set out in the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848 had been achieved: women could vote and hold public office throughout the United States; married women could maintain control of their property; divorce was readily available; and women had access to secondary and higher education and to the professions. The movement needed time to regroup and define new goals. One of the movement’s most ambitious visionaries was Alice Paul, who drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was first proposed in Congress in 1923. But many women’s leaders opposed the ERA, which

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would invalidate Progressive laws designed to protect working women, and the amendment languished until a new incarnation of the women’s movement sprang to life in the late 1950s. —Darcy R. Fryer See also all entries under Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s).

Further Reading Adams, Katherine H., and Michael L. Keene. Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996. Ginzberg, Lori D. Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hoffert, Sylvia D. When Hens Crow: The Women’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Isenberg, Nancy. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Kugler, Israel. From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Marilley, Suzanne. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. 6 vols. Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, Charles Mann, 1881–1922. Ward, Geoffrey C. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) The American Woman Suffrage Association was founded in 1869 by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Josephine Ruffin, prominent leaders in the women’s rights movement and of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). The AWSA was established as a reaction to the development of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Since the first woman’s rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, women’s rights advocates had been working as a singular body to achieve equal rights under the law for women, including woman suffrage. However, during the post–Civil War Reconstruction period a divide emerged over ideals. Many—including Stanton and Anthony—were outraged by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined U.S. citizenship as “male” and extended citizenship to newly freed male slaves and thereby excluded women from the privileges of U.S. citizenship. In addition, the Fifteenth Amendment, which in 1869 was being considered by Congress, threatened to further exclude women from the voting process by asserting that states could not allow voting discrimination based upon race, yet still did not mention sex. These two amendments and Elizabeth Stanton’s growing exhibition of racist views served to widen an already existing divide within the AERA. Stanton and Anthony first struck out on their own, forming the NWSA. The establishment of the AWSA, asserting opposing ideals, quickly followed. While the end goal of both the AWSA and the NWSA was the same—women’s suffrage—their tactics and principles were quite different. AWSA membership was open to all—women and men, as well as black reformers. The core focus of the AWSA was achieving women’s suffrage; they did not advocate other women’s issues such as divorce, property rights, education, or employment. They believed once women were granted the vote, they could then affect change on other important women’s issues at the ballot box. With headquarters in Boston, the founders and members of the AWSA supported both the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments. They joined the growing consensus that enfranchising both freedmen and women at the same time would be too much change for politicians and other opponents to handle at once. However, they believed once black males achieved suffrage rights, women’s suffrage would follow suit. The AWSA strategy for achieving women’s suffrage was based on state-level campaigns, rather than federal-level campaigns. They lobbied and campaigned across the country for referendums granting women’s suffrage to be placed on election ballots and to be passed by state legislatures. In an effort to get their message out, AWSA officers

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and members, including their president, Henry Ward Beecher, lectured across the country. Through their weekly publication the Woman’s Journal, edited by Lucy Stone, they were able to extend their reach to all corners of the country and abroad. By 1890 the AWSA had affected little change to the state of women’s suffrage; the NWSA had no better success. The two groups realized that their efforts were best served in unity, rather than opposition. The two reconciled and merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and together continued their crusade for women’s suffrage. —Dawn M. Sherman

Further Reading Baker, Jean H. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Clift, Eleanor. Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. McMillen, Sally G. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995.

Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906) Susan B. Anthony was the most famous advocate of women’s suffrage in the 19thcentury United States. She helped organize the women’s movement and, after the Civil War, spearheaded the national campaign to gain suffrage by means of a constitutional amendment. Anthony’s support for women’s rights was forged in the crucible of financial distress. Her father, who managed a cotton mill, lost his livelihood in the Panic of 1837, and Anthony, who had been educated at a Quaker seminary near Philadelphia, taught school for more than 10 years to support her parents and siblings. She quit in 1849 to manage her family’s farm near Rochester, New York. Through her family, Anthony met reformers who were active in the antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights movements, including Frederick Douglass and—in 1851— Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony’s reform career blossomed after she and Stanton founded the Women’s New York State Temperance Society in 1852. Anthony and Stanton fused temperance with women’s rights by emphasizing that women needed the right

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton (right) and Susan B. Anthony, American pioneers in the women's rights movement. (Library of Congress)

to vote on social issues and to divorce alcoholic husbands. Anthony also worked to secure married women’s property rights, divorced women’s custody rights, and the expansion of women’s employment opportunities. She remained active in other reform movements as well, serving as the principal New York State agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1856 to 1861. During the Civil War years, Anthony campaigned nationally to secure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery throughout the United States. Soon after the Civil War, Anthony’s relationship with the freedmen’s civil rights movement turned sour. She was disappointed that the Civil War amendments did not enfranchise women and, in some of her writings, cast the enfranchisement of black men as a potential threat to the safety of white women. In the late 1860s and 1870s, Anthony diffused her energy among several endeavors, acting as corresponding secretary of the American Equal Rights Association, publishing a newspaper, The Revolution, and running the National Woman Suffrage

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Association, which she and Stanton founded in 1869. In 1872, Anthony attempted to vote in Rochester, arguing that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had tacitly enfranchised women by linking citizenship to suffrage. Though her activities were controversial and slow to bear fruit, Anthony gradually became a celebrity on the lecture circuit. Even relatively conservative organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union welcomed her as a speaker. Anthony served as president of the combined National-American Woman Suffrage Association in the 1890s, but the real work of her old age lay in chronicling the movement. She and Stanton published three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage between 1881 and 1886; later, she collaborated with Ida Husted Harper on the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898) and a fourth volume of History of Woman Suffrage (1902). Though she died before national suffrage was achieved, Anthony was the towering figure of the women’s movement, keenly aware of the implications of suffrage and of her own place in history. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Sherr, Lynn. Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. New York: Times Books, 1995.

Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887) Dorothea Dix rose to prominence as an inveterate campaigner for humane treatment of the mentally ill. As superintendent of U.S. Army nurses during the Civil War, she became one of the nation’s foremost authorities on public health. The daughter of an impoverished Maine clergyman, Dix began teaching school at the age of 14. Her pupils included the daughters of William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister who became her mentor in the world of reform. As a young woman, Dix contracted tuberculosis, and illness frequently disrupted her teaching career. In 1836, she suffered severe hemorrhaging and lost the use of a lung. Channing arranged for her to recuperate on an extended visit to a Liverpool friend whose grandfather, William Tuke, had founded a home for the mentally ill. After Dix returned to the United States in 1837, a modest inheritance freed her of the need to support herself by teaching. In 1841, she visited a jail in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked to inspect the cells in which the insane were held. The experience shocked her. With Channing’s encouragement, Dix recruited

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the support of influential reformers such as Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and Samuel Gridley Howe. She toured the state of Massachusetts to gather information about the treatment of the mentally ill, who were sometimes kept in cages or chained to walls. In 1843, Dix published her findings in a Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature. Her campaign led the Massachusetts legislature to fund the Worcester State Hospital for the mentally ill. Dix soon expanded her efforts into the mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, the Midwest, and eastern Canada. Around 1848, Dix launched a campaign to persuade the federal government to set aside revenues from the sale of western lands to create a national fund for the care of the mentally ill, deaf, blind, and mute. Congress passed Dix’s bill in 1854, but President Franklin Pierce vetoed it. Undaunted, Dix sailed for Europe, where she won the support of such luminaries as Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX. In 1856, she returned to the United States and redoubled her political efforts. In 1860, Congress passed “Miss Dix’s bill,” and President James Buchanan signed it into law. Dix’s national reputation led Congress to appoint her superintendent of U.S. Army nurses on June 10, 1861. She trained approximately 180 army nurses. After the war, Dix resumed lobbying for better treatment of the mentally ill. Her efforts bore fruit as far away as Japan; a Japanese diplomat who met Dix in Washington, D.C., persuaded his government to found a mental asylum in Kyoto. Dix stood apart from the women’s movement, especially after the Civil War, when it increasingly focused on obtaining the vote. In keeping with the cult of true womanhood, Dix believed that women should shape society by moral suasion rather than by suffrage. She preferred to use the ideology of women’s moral superiority as a springboard for expanding women’s roles in education and public health. —Darcy R. Fryer

Further Reading Brown, Thomas J. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gollaher, David. Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. New York: Free Press, 1995.

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed in 1869 by two of America’s earliest and most prominent women’s rights activists and members of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA)—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.

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Anthony. The NWSA was born out of a schism within the ranks of the AERA. Prior to the Civil War, women’s rights activists declared their goals at the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They strived to work in unison to achieve the vote for women, in addition to other issues such as women’s property rights, the right to sue for divorce, child custody rights, and the right to enter into contracts as well as equal educational and employment opportunities. Once the Civil War ensued, the quest for women’s suffrage was put on the back burner as activists rallied to support the war effort and their soldiers. However, as the Civil War came to an end, the battle for women’s suffrage had just begun. During the period of Reconstruction, women’s issues continued to be overshadowed by the newly won rights of freedmen. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was a victory for abolitionists, many of whom were also women’s rights activists. However, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments sent many of those abolitionists, women’s suffragists, reeling—granting freedmen citizenship and the right to vote yet still denying women the same privileges. Many suffragists felt betrayed by the enfranchisement of freedmen and the continued disenfranchisement of women, particularly those like Stanton and Anthony, who had for so long advocated for the abolition of slavery and who had called for equal treatment for all citizens. At this point, fissures already existing within the ranks of the women’s movement widened, and a break within the organization followed. Two factions within in the women’s movement resulted—the National Woman Suffrage Association founded by Stanton and Anthony, based in New York, and the American Woman Suffrage Association founded by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Josephine Ruffin, based in Boston. The NWSA was founded on what was viewed by many suffragists—particularly members of the AWSA—as radical and aggressive principles. When first organized, the NWSA allowed only female members. The NWSA did not support the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments because they excluded women. While both Stanton and Anthony had advocated for universal suffrage in the past, they resented the fact that black men and immigrants—whom they deemed less intelligent than white women—received voting rights over white women. This racist attitude was considered radical and was rejected by their rival organization. While its ultimate goal was an amendment granting women’s suffrage, the NWSA’s platform continued to encompass numerous women’s issues, including divorce rights, property rights, and other issues initially embraced at Seneca Falls. The NWSA concentrated its efforts at the federal level, lobbying Congress for a constitutional amendment. In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in New York—she was sent to trial and sentenced to pay a fine, but she never paid the fine. A few years later, in 1878, Anthony penned the Susan B.

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Anthony Amendment calling for women’s suffrage. The amendment was debated in committees for eight years when in December 1886, it was sent to the floor for a vote. In 1887, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was defeated 34 votes to 16. Stanton and Anthony traveled the country giving lectures, recruiting new members and drumming up support for the constitutional amendment. The NWSA also sponsored two news publications over the years, the National Citizen and Ballot Box and the Woman’s Tribune, selling subscriptions to raise money and awareness. By 1890, neither the NWSA nor the AWSA had achieved the goal of women’s suffrage. The two organizations reconciled and collectively became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Under a unified front, the members of the NAWSA continued their tireless fight for women’s suffrage, carrying it into a new century. —Dawn M. Sherman

Further Reading Baker, Jean H. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. McMillen, Sally G. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995.

Nineteenth Amendment (1920) The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution simply states that “The right of all citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The plight for women’s suffrage endured for 72 years, until victory prevailed with the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment—extending the vote to all women. The seeds of battle were first sewn in July 1848 at the first women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the driving forces behind the meeting and the ensuing struggle for equality, demanding equal rights under the law for women. Key issues included property rights for married women, divorce and child custody rights, equal educational and employment opportunities, and—most radical of all—woman suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered her “Declaration of Sentiments” asserting equal rights for women as citizens of the

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republic, as directed by the U.S. Constitution. Once the call for equal rights and women’s suffrage was made, many prominent 19th-century reformers joined the cause, including Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Frederick Turner, Sojourner Truth, Julia Ward Howe, Catherine Beecher, Henry Beecher, and Susan B. Anthony. Together, as members of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), these activists lobbied Congress to pass a constitutional amendment enfranchising women. In 1869, two groups emerged that both fought for woman suffrage, albeit using fundamentally different tactics. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Julia Ruffin founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWSA concentrated their efforts on the passage of a constitutional amendment. In 1878, Susan B. Anthony wrote an amendment, named for her, and submitted it to Congress. After committees debated the amendment for eight years, it was sent to the floor in December 1886 for a vote. In 1887, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was defeated by a 34–16 margin. The amendment was introduced every year for the next nine years, to no avail. The AWSA then began concentrated their efforts at the state level rather than the federal level. They were successful in getting referendums for women’s suffrage on several state election ballots, but were unable to achieve suffrage at the state level. In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), to unite and centralize their activities. Still the movement remained stagnate. Although the movement began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, and several inroads were made during the 19th century, it did not gain significant momentum until the 20th century. At the turn of the century, new life was breathed into the movement. Women like Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Paul, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett brought a new and fresh perspective. These women shifted the crusade for woman suffrage from a middle-class, passive movement to a more aggressive movement that encompassed and organized working-class and African American women. Carrie Chapman Catt served as the president of the NAWSA as well as organized the Woman Suffrage Party, championing her “Winning Plan.” She was a master organizer, reaching women not only on the state level, but in cities and small towns. She reached out to women’s clubs and even the corners of the tight-knit South. Harriot Stanton Blatch— Elizabeth’s daughter—founded the Women’s Political Union, reaching out to trade unions. Alice Paul implemented radical militant tactics, similar to those used in Great Britain, staging protests against President Wilson and his hypocrisy. Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized African American women in Chicago. Together, these women changed the nature of the struggle for women’s suffrage. They also applied

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more political pressure than at any time prior in the movement. Women’s suffrage coupled well with the Progressive Movement. One goal was to organize states that had already granted women’s suffrage with the intent of those enfranchised women voting out the party in power if they did not support the amendment for women’s suffrage. President Wilson finally accepted that suffragists were not going to back down and endorsed women’s suffrage. The amendment went to the House and Senate, which approved the bill, and in 1919, it went to the states for ratification. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. Women were finally victorious in their long and hard fought battle for their natural right as U.S. citizens to vote. —Dawn M. Sherman

Further Reading Baker, Jean H. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. McMillen, Sally G. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995.

Congressional Debate on Women’s Suffrage (1866) Reproduced here are excerpts from an 1866 Senate debate on women’s suffrage. Despite the growing agitation in the country for granting women the right to vote, male attitudes toward the issue, as exemplified by this debate, were strongly against voting rights for women. In the following selection, Senator George H. Williams of Oregon declares that he would support women’s suffrage only if women were soldiers and sailors, trade or businesspersons, occupations that they, according to the senator, were not fitted by nature to undertake. Despite the fact that approximately 400 women actually saw some duty as soldiers during the Civil War, Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, in his comments, largely agrees with Senator Williams.

A. Senator George H. Williams Mr. President, to extend the right of suffrage to the negroes in this country I think is necessary for their protection; but to extend the right of suffrage to women, in my judgment, is not necessary for their protection. When women ask Congress to extend to them the right of suffrage it will be proper to consider their claims. Not one in a thousand of them at this time wants any such thing, and would not exercise the power if it was granted to them. Some few who are seeking notoriety make a feeble clamor for the right of suffrage, but they do not represent the sex to which they belong.

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Women’s Movement (1870s) Sir, it has been said that, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”; and there is truth as well as beauty in that expression. Women in this country by their elevated social position can exercise more influence upon public affairs than they could coerce by the use of the ballot. When God married our first parents in the garden according to that ordinance they were made “bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh”; and the whole theory of government and society proceeds upon the assumption that their interests are one, that their relations are so intimate and tender that whatever is for the benefit of the one is for the benefit of the other; whatever works to the injury of the one works to the injury of the other. I say, sir, that the more identical and inseparable these interests and relations can be made, the better for all concerned; and the woman who undertakes to put her sex in an adversary position to man, who undertakes by the use of some independent political power to contend and fight against man, displays a spirit which would, if able, convert all the now harmonious elements of society into a state of war, and make every home a hell upon earth. Women do not bear their proportion and share, they cannot bear their proportion and share, of the public burdens. Men represent them in the Army and in the Navy; men represent them at the polls and in the affairs of the Government; and though it be true that individual women do own property that is taxed, yet nine tenths of the property and the business from which the revenues of the Government are derived are in the hands and belong to and are controlled by the men. Sir, when the women of this country come to be sailors and soldiers; when they come to navigate the ocean and to follow the plow; when they love to be jostled and crowded by all sorts of men in the thoroughfares of trade and business; when they love the treachery and the turmoil of politics; when they love the dissoluteness of the camp and the smoke and the thunder and the blood of battle better than they love the affections and enjoyments of home and family, then it will be time to talk about making the women voters; but until that time, the question is not fairly before the country.

B. Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen Sir, I confess a little surprise at the remark which has been so frequently made in the Senate, that there is no difference between granting suffrage to colored citizens and extending it to the women of America. The difference, to my mind, is as wide as the earth. As I understand it, we legislate for classes, and the women of America as a class do vote now, though there are exceptions from the peculiar circumstances of individuals. Do not the American people vote in this Senate to-day on this question? Do they not vote in the House of Representatives? So the women of America vote by faithful and true representatives, their husbands, their brothers, their sons; and no true man will go to the polls, and deposit his ballot without remembering the true and loving constituency that he has at home. But, Mr. President, besides that, the women of America are not called upon to serve the Government as the men of America are. They do not bear the bayonet, and have not that reason why they should be entitled to the ballot; and it seems to me as if the God of

Women’s Movement (1870s) our race has stamped upon them a milder, gentler nature, which not only makes them shrink from, but disqualifies them for the turmoil and battle of public life. They have a higher and a holier mission. It is retiracy, to make the character of coming men. Their mission is at home, by their blandishments and their love to assuage the passions of men as they come in from the battle of life, and not themselves by joining in the contest to add fuel to the very flames. Mr. President, it seems to me that the Christian religion, which has elevated woman to her true position as a peer by the side of man, from which she was taken; that religion which is a part of the common law of this land, in its very spirit and declarations recognizes man as the representative of woman. The very structure of that religion which for centuries has been being built recognizes that principle, and it is written on its very door-posts. The woman, it is true, was first tempted; but it was in Adam that we all died. The angel, it is true, appeared to Mary; but it is in the God-man that we are all made alive. Source: Congressional Globe, December 11, 1866, 56, 65.

Sojourner Truth Urges Women to Continue the Fight for Equal Rights for All Women, White and Black (1867) Although women had made great contributions during the Civil War, raising funds and nursing the wounded, Congress excluded women from the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave voting rights only to newly freed black male slaves. Many women felt betrayed, since in the antebellum years, they had suspended advocacy of women’s rights to concentrate on the cause of abolition. Prominent women’s rights advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who stated that she would rather “cut off [her] right arm” than work “for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” were bitter and angry. But in the following passage, black suffrage advocate Sojourner Truth urges activists to remember the forgotten black woman when seeking women’s rights and encourages all women to continue the fight for their full rights. My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting

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Women’s Movement (1870s) up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food. I want you to consider on that, chil’n. I call you chil’n; you are somebody’s chil’n, and I am old enough to be mother of all that is here. I want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there. I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free, and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do; I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women. They work in the field and do as much work, but do not get the pay. We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much. I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked. What we want is a little money. You men know that you get as much again as women when you write, or for what you do. When we get our rights we shall not have to come to you for money, and may be you will ask us for money. But help us now until we get it. It is a good consolation to know that when we have got this battle once fought we shall not be coming to you any more. You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again. I have been in Washington about three years, seeing about these colored people. Now colored men have the right to vote. There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom. I am going to talk several times while I am here; so now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here. Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 193–194.

Address of Victoria C. Woodhull to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives (1871) Victoria Claffin Woodhull (1838–1927), a social reformer and women’s rights activist, was, with her sister Tennessee Claffin, one of the first women brokers on Wall Street. In the 1870s, the sisters published Woodhull and Claffin’s Weekly, a journal that promoted a variety of reformist causes, including unionism, socialism, and women’s suffrage. In 1872, the Equal Rights Party convention nominated Woodhull as its presidential candidate, making her the first woman in U.S. history to achieve that distinction. She was also the first woman to address a congressional committee. Reproduced here is an excerpt from her 1871 address to Congress, in which she describes the legal, moral, and political contradictions associated with denying women the vote.

Women’s Movement (1870s) The public law of the world is founded upon the conceded fact that sovereignty can not be forfeited or renounced. The sovereign power of this country is perpetually in the politically organized people of the United States, and can neither be relinquished nor abandoned by any portion of them. The people in this republic who confer sovereignty are its citizens; in a monarchy the people are the subjects of sovereignty. All citizens of a republic by rightful act or implication confer sovereign power. . . . As sovereignty can not be forfeited, relinquished, or abandoned, those from whom it flows—the citizens—are equal in conferring the power, and should be equal in the enjoyment of its benefits and in the exercise of its rights and privileges. One portion of citizens have no power to deprive another portion of rights and privileges such as are possessed and exercised by themselves. The male citizen has no more right to deprive the female citizen of the free, public, political, expression of opinion than the female citizen has to deprive the male citizen thereof. The sovereign will of the people is expressed in our written Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. The Constitution makes no distinction of sex. The Constitution defines a woman born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, to be a citizen. It recognizes the right of citizens to vote. It declares that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Women, white and black, belong to races, although to different races. A race of people comprises all the people, male and female. The right to vote can not be denied on account of race. All people included in the term race have the right to vote, unless otherwise prohibited. Women of all races are white, black, or some intermediate color. Color comprises all people, of all races and both sexes. The right to vote can not be denied on account of color. All people included in the term color have the right to vote unless otherwise prohibited. . . . The citizen who is taxed should also have a voice in the subject matter of taxation. “No taxation without representation” is a right which was fundamentally established at the very birth of our country’s independence; and by what ethics does any free government impose taxes on women without giving them a voice upon the subject or a participation in the public declaration as to how and by whom these taxes shall be applied for common public use? . . . The American nation, in its march onward and upward, can not publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained. As the world has advanced into civilization and culture; as mind has risen in its dominion over matter; as the principle of justice and moral right has gained sway, and merely physical organized power has yielded thereto; as the might of right has supplanted the right of might, so have the rights of women become more fully recognized, and that recognition is the result of the development of the minds of men, which through the ages she has polished, and thereby heightened the lustre of civilization. . . .

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Women’s Movement (1870s) Therefore, Believing firmly in the right of citizens to freely approach those in whose hands their destiny is placed under the Providence of God, your memorialist has frankly, but humbly, appealed to you, and prays that the wisdom of Congress may be moved to action in this matter for the benefit and the increased happiness of our beloved country. Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 444–448.

The Comstock Law, Enacted to End the Circulation of Obscene and Immoral Literature (1873) The Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use was known as the Comstock Law because Congress passed it largely due to political pressure from an intense anti-obscenity campaign led by Anthony Comstock (1844– 1915) during the 1870s. When many states followed the federal example, the Comstock Law limited access to birth control information and other materials that were considered pornographic. The measure was also a reaction to the increase in abortions since the 1840s, a trend that threatened the demographic balance between the socially and economically established, who were seeking to limit childbearing, and newly arriving immigrants, who often had many children. The law also reflected the view that abortion contradicted God’s will and the natural function of women as mothers and homemakers. Finally, it was part of an attempt by men to gain control of the practice of abortion, which was then dominated by women, who could interfere with male ability to prevent or control abortion. Reproduced here is part of the text of the Comstock Law. Be it enacted . . . That whoever, within . . . the jurisdiction of the United States . . . shall sell, . . . or shall offer to sell, or lend, or give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing . . . or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article, whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of these articles in this section . . . can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof . . . shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court. Source: “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” in Acts and Resolutions of the United States of America Passed at the Third Session of the Forty-Second Congress, December 2, 1872–March 3, 1873 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1873), 234–236.

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U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony: The Sentencing of Anthony for Voting Illegally (1873) In 1872, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), a leader of the women’s rights movement, violated the law by voting in Rochester, New York. Arrested and charged with voting illegally, which carried a potential jail term of three years, Anthony argued that under the Fourteenth Amendment, all “persons born and naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States,” and thus women were eligible to vote. The judge did not allow her to testify and, at the conclusion of her attorney’s defense, read an opinion prepared before the trial to the all-male jury, which was instructed to bring in a guilty verdict. When Anthony’s attorney protested and asked that the jurors be polled, the judge dismissed the jurors. Reproduced here are excerpts from the trial transcript that indicate what happened the next day when the judge imposed sentence. In 1875, in the case of Minor v. Happersett (88 U.S. 162), the Supreme Court decided that women are citizens and thus entitled to “the privileges and immunities of citizens,” but the right to vote was not considered part of those privileges and immunities. Judge Hunt [ordering the defendant to stand up]: Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced? Miss Anthony: Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually but all of my sex are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called republican form of government. Judge Hunt: The Court can not listen to rehearsal of argument which the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting. Miss Anthony: May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence can not, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law; therefore, the denial of my sacred right to life, liberty, property and— Judge Hunt: The Court can not allow the prisoner to go on. Miss Anthony: But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this high-handed outrage upon my citizen’s rights. May it please the Court to remember that, since

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Judge Hunt: Miss Anthony:

Judge Hunt: Miss Anthony:

Judge Hunt:

the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury— The prisoner must sit down—the Court can not allow it. Of all my prosecutors, from the corner grocery politicians who entered the complaint, to the United States marshal, commissioner, district-attorney, district-judge, your honor on the bench—not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Under such circumstances a commoner of England, tried before a jury of lords, would have far less cause to complain than have I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon a jury, and no woman is entitled to the franchise, so none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain admission to the bar—hence, jury, judge, counsel, all must be of the superior class. The Court must insist—the prisoner has been tried according to the established forms of law. Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men and against women; and hence your honor’s ordered verdict of guilty, against a United States citizen for the exercise of the “citizen’s right to vote,” simply because that citizen was a woman and not a man. But yesterday, the same man-made forms of law declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six months’ imprisonment to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread or a night’s shelter to a panting fugitive tracking his way to Canada; and every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing. As then the slaves who got their freedom had to take it over or under or through the unjust forms of law, precisely so now must women take it to get their right to a voice in this government; and I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every opportunity. The Court orders the prisoner to sit down. It will not allow another word.

Women’s Movement (1870s)

Miss Anthony:

Judge Hunt:

Miss Anthony:

Judge Hunt:

When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments, which should declare all United States citizens under its protecting aegis—which should declare equality of rights the national guarantee to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. But failing to get this justice— failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers—I ask not leniency at your hands but rather the full rigor of the law. The Court must insist [Here the prisoner sat down.] . . . The prisoner will stand up. [Here Miss Anthony rose again.] The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of $100 and the costs of the prosecution. May it please your honor. I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a debt of $10,000, incurred by publishing my paper—The Revolution—the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, which tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while denying them the right of representation in the government; and I will work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” Madam, the Court will not order you to stand committed until the fine is paid.

Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 687–689.

Bradwell v. Illinois: The Rights and Privileges of a Citizen (1873) On April 15, 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Bradwell v. Illinois. An excerpt from that opinion is reproduced here. Myra Bradwell, a suffragist and women’s rights advocate, had passed the Illinois examination for admission to the bar in 1869, but was not allowed to practice law by the Illinois courts solely because she was a woman. Arguing that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state shall “deny to any person under its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law” or “shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” made such a sex-based prohibition unconstitutional. She appealed the Illinois decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also denied her the right to practice, on the grounds that such a right was not one of the privileges or immunities of national citizenship.

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Women’s Movement (1870s) The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, women’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of the common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state; and, notwithstanding some recent modifications of this civil status, many of the special rules of law flowing from and dependent upon this cardinal principle still exist in full force in most States. One of these is, that a married woman is incapable, without her husband’s consent, of making contracts which shall be binding on her or him. This very incapacity was one circumstance which the Supreme Court of Illinois deemed important in rendering a married woman incompetent fully to perform the duties and trusts that belong to the office of an attorney and counsellor. It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon the exceptional cases. The humane movements of modern society, which have for their object the multiplication of avenues for woman’s advancement, and of occupations adapted to her condition and sex, have my heartiest concurrence. But I am not prepared to say that it is one of her fundamental rights and privileges to be admitted into every office and position, including those which require highly special qualifications and demanding special responsibilities. In the nature of things it is not every citizen of every age, sex, and condition that is qualified for every calling and position. It is the prerogative of the legislator to prescribe regulations founded on nature, reason, and experience for the due admission of qualified persons to professions and callings demanding special skill and confidence. This fairly belongs to the police power of the State; and, in my opinion, in view of the peculiar characteristics, destiny, and mission of woman, it is within the province of the legislature to ordain what offices, positions, and callings shall be filled and discharged by men, and shall receive the benefit of those energies and responsibilities, and that decision and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex. Source: 83 U.S. 130 (1873).

Women’s Movement (1870s)

Excerpts from Susan B. Anthony’s “Social Purity” Speech (1875) Speaking in Chicago in 1875, women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) argued that the widespread social ills that affected women, such as spousal abuse, prostitution, and rape and other sex crimes stemmed from women’s dependence on men. The best way to overcome these evils, said Anthony, was to grant women equal rights, and particularly the right to vote. Reproduced here are excerpts from that address, which was entitled “Social Purity.” Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far the greater sufferers from these evils. Compelled by their position in society to depend on men for subsistence, for food, clothes, shelter, for every chance even to earn a dollar, they have no way of escape from the besotted victims of appetite and passion with whom their lot is cast. They must endure, if not endorse, these twin vices, embodied, as they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son, employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend. . . . The roots of the giant evil, intemperance, are not merely moral and social; they extend deep and wide into the financial and political structure of the government; and whenever women, or men, shall intelligently set themselves about the work of uprooting the liquor traffic, they will find something more than tears and prayers needful to the task. Financial and political power must be combined with moral and social influence, all bound together in one earnest, energetic, persistent force. . . . The prosecutions in our courts for breach of promise, divorce, adultery, bigamy, seduction, rape; the newspaper reports every day of every year of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shootings, of abortions and infanticides, are perpetual reminders of men’s incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society. The statistics of New York show the number of professional prostitutes in that city to be over twenty thousand. Add to these the thousands and tens of thousands of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and all our cities, great and small, from ocean to ocean, and what a holocaust of the womanhood of this nation is sacrificed to the insatiate Moloch of lust. And yet more: those myriads of wretched women, publicly known as prostitutes, constitute but a small portion of the numbers who actually tread the paths of vice and crime. For, as the oft-broken ranks of the vast army of common drunkards are steadily filled by the boasted moderate drinkers, so are the ranks of professional prostitution continually replenished by discouraged, seduced, deserted unfortunates, who can no longer hide the terrible secret of their lives. . . . Nor is it womanhood alone that is thus fearfully sacrificed. For every betrayed woman, there is always the betrayer, man. For every abandoned woman, there is always

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Women’s Movement (1870s) one abandoned man and oftener many more. It is estimated that there are 50,000 professional prostitutes in London, and Dr. Ryan calculates that there are 400,000 men in that city directly or indirectly connected with them, and that this vice causes the city an annual expenditure of $40,000,000. . . . Man’s legislative attempts to set back this fearful tide of social corruption have proved even more futile and disastrous than have those for the suppression of intemperance—as witness the Contagious Diseases Acts of England and the St. Louis experiment. And yet efforts to establish similar laws are constantly made in our large cities, New York and Washington barely escaping last winter. . . . The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it. These causes are said to be wholly different with the sexes. The acknowledged incentive to this vice on the part of man is his own abnormal passion; while on the part of women, in the great majority of cases, it is conceded to be destitution—absolute want of the necessaries of life. . . . In the olden times, when the daughters of the family, as well as the wife, were occupied with useful and profitable work in the household, getting meals and washing the dishes three times in every day of every year, doing the baking, the brewing, the washing and the ironing, the whitewashing, the butter and cheese and soap making, the mending and the making of clothes for the entire family, the carding, spinning and weaving of the cloth—when everything to eat, to drink and to wear was manufactured in the home, almost no young women “went out to work.” But now, when nearly all these handicrafts are turned over to men and to machinery, tens of thousands, nay, millions of the women of both hemispheres are thrust into the world’s outer market of work to earn their own subsistence. Society, ever slow to change its conditions, presents to these millions but few and meager chances. Only the barest necessaries, and oftentimes not even those, can be purchased with the proceeds of the most excessive and exhausting labor. . . . Clearly, then, the first step toward solving this problem is to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves, in marriage or out, for bread and shelter. To do that, girls, like boys, must be educated to some lucrative employment; women, like men, must have equal chances to earn a living. If the plea that poverty is the cause of woman’s prostitution be not true, perfect equality of chances to earn honest bread will demonstrate the falsehood by removing that pretext and placing her on the same plane with man. Then, if she is found in the ranks of vice and crime, she will be there for the same reason that man is and, from an object of pity, she, like him, will become a fit subject of contempt. From being the party sinned against, she will become an equal sinner, if not the greater of the two. Women, like men, must not only have “fair play” in the world of work and self-support, but, like men, must be eligible to all the honors and emoluments of society and government. Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life. That equality of rights and privileges is vested in the ballot, the symbol of

Women’s Movement (1870s) power in a republic. Hence, our first and most urgent demand—that women shall be protected in the exercise of their inherent, personal, citizens’ rights to a voice in the government, municipal, state, national. Alexander Hamilton said one hundred years ago, “Give to a man the right over my subsistence, and he has power over my whole moral being.” No one doubts the truth of this assertion as between man and man; while, as between man and woman, not only does almost no one believe it, but the masses of people deny it. And yet it is the fact of man’s possession of this right over woman’s subsistence which gives to him the power to dictate to her a moral code vastly higher and purer than the one he chooses for himself. Not less true is it, that the fact of woman’s dependence on man for her subsistence renders her utterly powerless to exact from him the same high moral code she chooses for herself. . . . Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals. Therefore, we must have women employers, superintendents, committees, legislators; whenever girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there must be some woman. Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers, doctors—that wherever women go to seek counsel—spiritual, legal, physical—there, too, they will be sure to find the best and noblest of their own sex to minister to them. . . . Fathers should be most particular about the men who visit their daughters, and, to further this reform, pure women not only must refuse to meet intimately and to marry impure men, but, finding themselves deceived in their husband, they must refuse to continue in the marriage relation with them. We have had quite enough of the sickly sentimentalism which counts the woman a heroine and a saint for remaining the wife of a drunken, unmoral husband, incurring the risk of her own health and poisoning the lifeblood of the young beings that result from this unholy alliance. Such company as ye keep, such ye are! must be the maxim of married, as well as unmarried, women. . . . In a western city the wives conspired to burn down a house of ill-fame in which their husbands had placed a half-dozen of the demimonde. Would it not have shown much more womanly wisdom and virtue for those legal wives to have refused to recognize their husbands, instead of wreaking their vengeance on the heads of those wretched women? But how could they without finding themselves, as a result, penniless and homeless? The person, the services, the children, the subsistence, of each and every one of those women belonged by law, not to herself, but to her unfaithful husband. . . . It is worse than folly, it is madness, for women to delude themselves with the idea that their children will escape the terrible penalty of the law. The taint of their birth will surely follow them. For pure women to continue to devote themselves to their man-appointed mission of visiting the dark purlieus of society and struggling to reclaim the myriads of badly-born human beings swarming there, is as hopeless as would be an attempt to ladle the ocean with a teaspoon; as unphilosophical as was the undertaking of the old American Colonization Society, which, with great labor and pains and money, redeemed from slavery and transported to Liberia annually 400 negroes, or the Fugitive Slave Societies, which succeeded in running off to Canada, on their “under-ground railroads,” some 40,000 in a whole quarter of a century. While those good men were thus toiling to rescue the 400 or the 40,000 individual victims of slavery, each day saw hundreds and each

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Women’s Movement (1870s) year thousands of human beings born into the terrible condition of chattelism. All see and admit now what none but the Abolitionists saw then, that the only effectual work was the entire overthrow of the system of slavery; the abrogation of the law which sanctioned the right of property in man. . . . [W]herever you go, you find the best women, in and out of the churches, all absorbed in establishing or maintaining benevolent or reform institutions; charitable societies, soup-houses, ragged schools, industrial schools, mite societies, mission schools—at home and abroad—homes and hospitals for the sick, the aged, the friendless, the foundling, the fallen; asylums for the orphans, the blind, the deaf and dumb, the insane, the inebriate, the idiot. The women of this century are neither idle nor indifferent. They are working with might and main to mitigate the evils which stare them in the face on every side, but much of their work is without knowledge. It is aimed at the effects, not the cause. . . . The tap-root of our social [ills] lies deep down at the very foundations of society. It is woman’s dependence. It is woman’s subjection. Hence, the first and only efficient work must be to emancipate woman from her enslavement. The wife must no longer echo the poet Milton’s ideal Eve, when she adoringly said to Adam, “God thy law; thou, mine!” She must feel herself accountable to God alone for every act, fearing and obeying no man, save where his will is in line with her own highest idea of divine law. . . . I am a full and firm believer in the revelation that it is through woman that the race is to be redeemed. And it is because of this faith that I ask for her immediate and unconditional emancipation from all political, industrial, social and religious subjection. . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Men are what their mothers made them.” But I say, to hold mothers responsible for the character of their sons while you deny them any control over the surroundings of their lives, is worse than mockery, it is cruelty! Responsibilities grow out of rights and powers. Therefore, before mothers can be held responsible for the vices and crimes, the wholesale demoralization of men, they must possess all possible rights and powers to control the conditions and circumstances of their own and their children’s lives. Source: Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Hollenback Press, 1898), 1004–1012.

Declaration of Rights for Women (1876) During the centennial summer of 1876, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) sought a way to incorporate its ideas into the national commemoration. At a large Fourth of July celebration in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where no woman was scheduled to speak, women’s rights activist and NWSA representative Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) handed the following document, the Declaration of Rights for Women, to the program chairperson, Thomas W. Ferry, president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate. Later, Anthony read the declaration outside Independence Hall to a growing throng of listeners.

Women’s Movement (1870s) While this nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note, on this one-hundredth anniversary of our country’s birth. When subjects of kings, emperors, and czars, from the old world join in our national jubilee, shall the women of the republic refuse to lay their hands with benedictions on the nation’s head? Surveying America’s exposition, surpassing in magnificence those of London, Paris, and Vienna, shall we not rejoice at the success of the youngest rival among the nations of the earth? May not our hearts, in unison with all, swell with pride at our great achievements as a people; our free speech, free press, free schools, free church, and the rapid progress we have made in material wealth, trade, commerce and the inventive arts? And we do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government. Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the corner stones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement. The history of our country the past hundred years has been a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over woman, in direct opposition to the principles of just government, acknowledged by the United States as its foundation, which are: First—The natural rights of each individual. Second—The equality of these rights. Third—That rights not delegated are retained by the individual. Fourth—That no person can exercise the rights of others without delegated authority. Fifth—That the non-use of rights does not destroy them. And for the violation of these fundamental principles of our government, we arraign our rulers on this Fourth day of July, 1876, —and these are our articles of impeachment: Bills of attainder have been passed by the introduction of the word “male” into all the State constitutions, denying to women the right of suffrage, and thereby making sex a crime—an exercise of power clearly forbidden in article I, sections 9, 10, of the United States constitution. The writ of habeas corpus, the only protection against lettres de cachet and all forms of unjust imprisonment, which the constitution declares “shall not be suspended, except when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety demands it,” is held inoperative in every State of the Union, in case of a married woman against her husband—the marital rights of the husband being in all cases primary, and the rights of the wife secondary. The right of trial by a jury of one’s peers was so jealously guarded that States refused to ratify the original constitution until it was guaranteed by the sixth amendment. And yet the women of this nation have never been allowed a jury of their peers—being tried in all cases by men, native and foreign, educated and ignorant, virtuous and vicious. Young girls have been arraigned in our courts for the crime of infanticide; tried, convicted, hanged—victims, perchance, of judge, jurors, advocates—while no woman’s voice could be heard in their defense. And not only are women denied a jury of their peers, but in

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Women’s Movement (1870s) some cases, jury trial altogether. During the war, a woman was tried and hanged by military law, in defiance of the fifth amendment, which specifically declares: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases . . . of persons in actual service in time of war.” During the last presidential campaign, a woman, arrested for voting, was denied the protection of a jury, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a fine and costs of prosecution, by the absolute power of a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. Taxation without representation, the immediate cause of the rebellion of the colonies against Great Britain, is one of the grievous wrongs the women of this country have suffered during the century. Deploring war, with all the demoralization that follows in its train, we have been taxed to support standing armies, with their waste of life and wealth. Believing in temperance, we have been taxed to support the vice, crime and pauperism of the liquor traffic. While we suffer its wrongs and abuses infinitely more than man, we have no power to protect our sons against this giant evil. During the temperance crusade, mothers were arrested, fined, imprisoned, for even praying and singing in the streets, while men blockade the sidewalks with impunity, even on Sunday, with their military parades and political processions. Believing in honesty, we are taxed to support a dangerous army of civilians, buying and selling the offices of government and sacrificing the best interests of the people. And, moreover, we are taxed to support the very legislators and judges who make laws, and render decisions adverse to woman. And for refusing to pay such unjust taxation, the houses, lands, bonds, and stock of women have been seized and sold within the present year, thus proving Lord Coke’s assertion, that “The very act of taxing a man’s property without his consent is, in effect, disfranchising him of every civil right.” Unequal codes for men and women. Held by law a perpetual minor, deemed incapable of self-protection, even in the industries of the world, woman is denied equality of rights. The fact of sex, not the quantity or quality of work, in most cases, decides the pay and position; and because of this injustice thousands of fatherless girls are compelled to choose between a life of shame and starvation. Laws catering to man’s vices have created two codes of morals in which penalties are graded according to the political status of the offender. Under such laws, women are fined and imprisoned if found alone in the streets, or in public places of resort, at certain hours. Under the pretense of regulating public morals, police officers seizing the occupants of disreputable houses, march the women in platoons to prison, while the men, partners in their guilt, go free. While making a show of virtue in forbidding the importation of Chinese women on the Pacific coast for immoral purposes, our rulers, in many States, and even under the shadow of the national capitol, are now proposing to legalize the sale of American womanhood for the same vile purposes. Special legislation for woman has placed us in a most anomalous position. Women invested with the rights of citizens in one section—voters, jurors, office-holders— crossing an imaginary line, are subjects in the next. In some States, a married woman may hold property and transact business in her own name; in others, her earnings belong to her husband. In some States, a woman may testify against her husband, sue and be

Women’s Movement (1870s) sued in the courts; in others, she has no redress in case of damage to person, property, or character. In case of divorce on account of adultery in the husband, the innocent wife is held to possess no right to children or property, unless by special decree of the court. But in no State of the Union has the wife the right to her own person, or to any part of the joint earnings of the co-partnership during the life of her husband. In some States women may enter the law schools and practice in the courts; in others they are forbidden. In some universities girls enjoy equal educational advantages with boys, while many of the proudest institutions in the land deny them admittance, though the sons of China, Japan and Africa are welcomed there. But the privileges already granted in the several States are by no means secure. The right of suffrage once exercised by women in certain States and territories has been denied by subsequent legislation. A bill is now pending in congress to disfranchise the women of Utah, thus interfering to deprive United States citizens of the same rights which the Supreme Court has declared the national government powerless to protect anywhere. Laws passed after years of untiring effort, guaranteeing married women certain rights of property, and mothers the custody of their children, have been repealed in States where we supposed all was safe. Thus have our most sacred rights been made the football of legislative caprice, proving that a power which grants as a privilege what by nature is a right, may withhold the same as a penalty when deeming it necessary for its own perpetuation. Representation of woman has had no place in the nation’s thought. Since the incorporation of the thirteen original States, twenty-four have been admitted to the Union, not one of which has recognized woman’s right of self-government. On this birthday of our national liberties, July Fourth, 1876, Colorado, like all her elder sisters, comes into the Union with the invidious word "male" in her constitution. Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him. The judiciary above the nation has proved itself but the echo of the party in power, by upholding and enforcing laws that are opposed to the spirit and letter of the constitution. When the slave power was dominant, the Supreme Court decided that a black man was not a citizen, because he had not the right to vote; and when the constitution was so amended as to make all persons citizens, the same high tribunal decided that a woman, though a citizen, had not the right to vote. Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people. . . . And now, at the close of a hundred years, as the hour-hand of the great clock that marks the centuries points to 1876, we declare our faith in the principles of selfgovernment; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself—to all the opportunities and advantages life affords for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the

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Women’s Movement (1870s) centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man—her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will. We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 31–34.

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1881) The many frustrations and disappointments experienced by suffragists and women’s rights activists, and the anger, pain, and sadness that arose from those experiences, are vividly expressed in the following letter written to Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) in 1881. This letter also exhibits a spirit of determination, conviction about woman’s capacity for self-determination, and a resolution to depend on no one but women in the search for equality. After the question of a free State seemed settled, we who had thought and talked on woman’s rights before we came to Kansas, concluded that now was the woman’s hour. We determined to strive to obtain Constitutional rights, as they would be more secure than Legislative enactments. On the 13th of February, 1858, we organized the Moneka Woman’s Rights Society. There were only twelve of us, but we went to work circulating petitions and writing to every one in the Territory whom we thought would aid us. Our number was afterwards increased to forty; fourteen of them were men. We sent petitions to Territorial Legislatures, Constitutional Conventions, State Legislatures, and Congress. Many of the leading men were advocates of women’s rights. Governor Robinson, S. N. Wood, and Erastus Heath, with their wives, were constant and efficient workers. . . . When the question was submitted in 1867, and the men were to decide whether women should be allowed to vote, we felt very anxious about the result. We strongly desired to make Kansas the banner State for Freedom. We did all we could to secure it, and some of the best speakers from the East came to our aid. Their speeches were excellent, and were listened to by large audiences, who seemed to believe what they heard; but when voting day came, they voted according to their prejudices, and our cause was defeated. . . . So utterly had the women been deserted in the Kansas campaign by those they had the strongest reason to look to for help, that at times all effort seemed hopeless. The editors of the New York Tribune and the Independent can never know how wistfully, from day to day, their papers were searched for some inspiring editorials on the woman’s amendment, but naught was there; there were no words of hope and encouragement, no eloquent letters from an Eastern man that could be read to the people; all were silent. Yet these two papers, extensively taken all over Kansas, had they been as true to woman as to the negro, could have revolutionized the State. But with arms folded, Greeley,

Women’s Movement (1870s) Curtis, Tilton, Beecher, Higginson, Phillips, Garrison, Frederick Douglass, all calmly watched the struggle from afar, and when defeat came to both propositions, no consoling words were offered for woman’s loss, but the women who spoke in the campaign were reproached for having “killed negro suffrage.” We wondered then at the general indifference to that first opportunity of realizing what all those gentlemen had advocated so long; and, in looking back over the many intervening years, we still wonder at the stolid incapacity of all men to understand that woman feels the invidious distinctions of sex exactly as the black man does those of color, or the white man the more transient distinctions of wealth, family, position, place, and power; that she feels as keenly as man the injustice of disfranchisement. Of the old abolitionists who stood true to woman’s cause in this crisis, Robert Purvis, Parker Pillsbury, and Rev. Samuel J. May were the only Eastern men. Through all the hot debates during the period of reconstruction, again and again, Mr. Purvis arose and declared, that he would rather his son should never be enfranchised, unless his daughter could be also, that, as she bore the double curse of sex and color, on every principle of justice she should first be protected. These were the only men who felt and understood as women themselves do the degradation of disfranchisement. . . . And here is the secret of the infinite sadness of women of genius; of their dissatisfaction with life, in exact proportion to their development. A woman who occupies the same realm of thought with man, who can explore with him the depths of science, comprehend the steps of progress through the long past and prophesy those of the momentous future, must ever be surprised and aggravated with his assumptions of leadership and superiority, a superiority she never concedes, an authority she utterly repudiates. Words can not describe the indignation, the humiliation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement. . . . It was not from ignorance of the unequal laws, and false public sentiment against woman, that our best men stood silent in this Kansas campaign; it was not from lack of chivalry that they thundered forth no protests, when they saw noble women, who had been foremost in every reform, hounded through the State by foul mouthed politicians; it was not from lack of money and power, of eloquence of pen and tongue, nor of an intellectual conviction that our cause was just, that they came not to the rescue, but because in their heart of hearts they did not grasp the imperative necessity of woman’s demand for that protection which the ballot alone can give; they did not feel for her the degradation of disfranchisement. The fact of their silence deeply grieved us, but the philosophy of their indifference we thoroughly comprehended for the first time and saw as never before, that only from woman’s standpoint could the battle be successfully fought, and victory secured. “It is wonderful,” says Swift, “with what patience some folks can endure the sufferings of others.” Our liberal men counseled us to silence during the war, and we were silent on our own wrongs; they counseled us again to silence in Kansas and New York, lest we should defeat “negro suffrage,” and threatened if we were not, we might fight the battle alone. We chose the latter, and were defeated. But standing alone we learned our power; we repudiated man’s counsels forevermore; and solemnly vowed that there

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Women’s Movement (1870s) should never be another season of silence until woman had the same rights everywhere on this green earth, as man. . . . We would point for them the moral of our experiences: that woman must lead the way to her own enfranchisement, and work out her own salvation with a hopeful courage and determination that knows no fear nor trembling. She must not put her trust in man in this transition period, since, while regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic. . . . Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 451.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s "Solitude of Self" Address (1892) On January 18, 1892, women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) addressed the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. In an address known as “Solitude of Self,” excerpts of which follow, Stanton spoke of the essential isolation of the human soul and its need for self-sovereignty to ensure human development and dignity. The speech is one of the most important political statements of the late 19th-century American women’s rights movement. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment—our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness. Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government. Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same—individual happiness and development. Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, that may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman’s sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison, and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations some of which a large class of women may never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill. Moreover, he would be better fitted for these very relations, and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread, by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual.

Women’s Movement (1870s) Just so with woman. The education that will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do. The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass stand at the wheel; watch the wind and waves and know when to take in sail, and read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman. . . . To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of grass alike, and no one will ever find two human beings alike. . . . To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property, like cutting off the hands. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare’s play of Titus and Andronicus [sic] contains a terrible satire on woman’s position in the nineteenth century—“Rude men” (the play tell[s] us) “seized the king’s daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands.” What a picture of woman’s position. Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection. . . . How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible. . . . Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s

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Women’s Movement (1870s) self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded; a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment, by inheritance, wealth, family, and position. Seeing, then, that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. . . . Source: Address delivered before the United States Congressional Committee on the Judiciary, Monday, January 18, 1892.

Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (1895) Reproduced here are excerpts from The Woman’s Bible, which was published in 1895. Produced by a committee that included Stanton, The Woman’s Bible was meant to correct the failure of the traditional Bible to reflect the experience of women. Stanton believed that women would never receive equal rights so long as the Bible, which so much influenced every fiber of civil and religious society, remained a male-oriented document. Not everyone within the women’s rights movement agreed with Stanton. In 1896, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, at its 28th annual convention in Washington, D.C., passed a resolution disassociating itself from any official connection with The Woman’s Bible. From the inauguration of the movement for woman’s emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in the “divinely ordained sphere,” prescribed in the Old and New Testaments. The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea. . . . The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home. Here is the Bible position of woman summed up. Those who have the divine insight to translate, transpose and transfigure this mournful object of pity into an exalted, dignified personage, worthy our worship as the mother of the race, are to be congratulated as having a share of the occult mystic power of the eastern Mahatmas.

Women’s Movement (1870s) The plain English to the ordinary mind admits of no such liberal interpretation. The unvarnished texts speak for themselves. The canon law, church ordinances and Scriptures, are homogeneous, and all reflect the same spirit and sentiments. These familiar texts are quoted by clergymen in their pulpits, by statesmen in the halls of legislation, by lawyers in the courts, and are echoed by the press of all civilized nations, and accepted by woman herself as “The Word of God.” So perverted is the religious element in her nature, that with faith and works she is the chief support of the church and clergy; the very powers that make her emancipation impossible. When, in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, women began to protest against their civil and political degradation, they were referred to the Bible for an answer. When they protested against their unequal position in the church, they were referred to the Bible for an answer. This led to a general and critical study of the Scriptures. Some, having made a fetish of these books and believing them to be the veritable “Word of God,” with liberal translations, interpretations, allegories and symbols, glossed over the most objectionable features of the various books and clung to them as divinely inspired. Others, seeing the family resemblance between the Mosaic code, the canon law, and the old English common law, came to the conclusion that all alike emanated from the same source; wholly human in their origin and inspired by the natural love of domination in the historians. Others, bewildered with their doubts and fears, came to no conclusions. While their clergymen told them on the one hand, that they owed all the blessings and freedom, they enjoyed to the Bible, on the other, they said it clearly marked out their circumscribed sphere of action: that the demands for political and civil rights were irreligious, dangerous to the stability of the home, the state and the church. Clerical appeals were circulated from time to time conjuring members of their churches to take no part in the anti-slavery or woman suffrage movements, as they were infidel in their tendencies, undermining the very foundations of society. No wonder the majority of women stood still, and with bowed heads, accepted the situation. Listening to the varied opinions of women, I have long thought it would be interesting and profitable to get them clearly stated in book form. To this end six years ago I proposed to a committee of women to issue a Woman’s Bible, that we might have women’s commentaries on women’s position in the Old and New Testaments. It was agreed on by several leading women in England and America and the work was begun, but from various causes it has been delayed, until now the idea is received with renewed enthusiasm, and a large committee has been formed, and we hope to complete the work within a year. Those who have undertaken the labor are desirous to have some Hebrew and Greek scholars, versed in Biblical criticism, to gild our pages with their learning. Several distinguished women have been urged to do so, but they are afraid that their high reputation and scholarly attainments might be compromised by taking part in an enterprise that for a time may prove very unpopular. Hence we may not be able to get help from that class. Others fear that they might compromise their evangelical faith by affiliating with those of more liberal views, who do not regard the Bible as the “Word of God,” but like any other book, to be judged by its merits. If the Bible teaches the equality of Woman, why

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Women’s Movement (1870s) does the church refuse to ordain women to preach the gospel, to fill the offices of deacons and elders, and to administer the Sacraments, or to admit them as delegates to the Synods, General Assemblies and Conferences of the different denominations? They have never yet invited a woman to join one of their Revising Committees, not tried to mitigate the sentence pronounced on her by changing one count in the indictment served on her in Paradise. The large number of letters received, highly appreciative of the undertaking, is very encouraging to those who have inaugurated the movement, and indicate a growing selfrespect and self-assertion in the women of this generation. But we have the usual array of objectors to meet and answer. One correspondent conjures us to suspend the work, as it is “ridiculous” for “women to attempt the revision of the Scriptures.” I wonder if any man wrote to the late revising committee of Divines to stop their work on the ground that it was ridiculous for men to revise the Bible. . . . Others say it is not politic to rouse religious opposition. This much-lauded policy is but another word for cowardice. How can woman’s position be changed from that of a subordinate to an equal, without opposition, without the broadest discussion of all the questions involved in her present degradation? For so far-reaching and momentous a reform as her complete independence, an entire revolution in all existing institutions is inevitable. . . . To women still believing in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, we say give us by all means your exegesis in the light of the higher criticism learned men are now making, and illumine the Woman’s Bible, with your inspiration. Bible historians claim special inspiration for the Old and New Testaments containing most contradictory records of the same events, of miracles opposed to all known laws, of customs that degrade the female sex of all human and animal life, stated in most questionable language that could not be read in a promiscuous assembly, and call all this “The Word of God.” The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek, in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman. My standpoint for criticism is the revised edition of 1888. . . . But the verbal criticism in regard to woman’s position amounts to little. The spirit is the same in all periods and languages, hostile to her as an equal. . . . The canon law, the Scriptures, the creeds and codes and church discipline of the leading religions bear the impress of fallible man, and not of our ideal great first cause, “the Spirit of all Good,” that set the universe of matter and mind in motion, and by immutable law holds the land, the sea, the planets, revolving round the great centre of light and heat, each in its own elliptic, with millions of stars in harmony all singing together, the glory of creation forever and ever. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Source: The Woman’s Bible (New York: European Publishing Co., 1895), 7–13.

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Muller v. Oregon: The Weakness of Women (1908) In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law that prohibited employment of women in any mechanical establishment, factory, or laundry. Although the Court had earlier, in Lockner v. New York (1905), declared unconstitutional a New York law that set a 10-hour limit on how long all workers—men and women—could work per day in bakeries, in Muller v. Oregon, the Court ruled solely on the basis of prevailing attitudes regarding the physical weakness and inferiority of women. Reproduced here is an excerpt from the Court’s decision. That woman’s physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. Even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon the body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race. Still again, history discloses the fact that woman has always been dependent upon man. He established his control at the outset by superior physical strength, and this control in various forms, with diminishing intensity, has continued to the present. As minors, though not to the same extent, she has been looked upon in the courts as needing especial care that her rights may be preserved. Education was long denied her, and while now the doors of the school room are opened and her opportunities for acquiring knowledge are great, yet even with that and the consequent increase of capacity for business affairs it is still true that in the struggle for subsistence she is not an equal competitor with her brother. Though limitations upon personal and contractual rights may be removed by legislation, there is that in her disposition and habits of life which will operate against a full assertion of those rights. She will still be where some legislation to protect her seems necessary to secure a real equality of right. Doubtless there are individual exceptions, and there are many respects in which she has an advantage over him; but looking at it from the viewpoint of the effort to maintain an independent position in life, she is not upon an equality. Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained. It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that she still looks to her brother and depends upon him. Even though all restrictions on political, personal and contractual rights were taken away, and she stood, so far as statutes are concerned, upon an absolutely equal plane with him, it would still be true that she is so constituted that she will rest upon and look to him for protection; that her physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal functions—having in view not merely her own health, but the well-being of the race—justify legislation to protect her from the greed as well as the passion of man. The limitations which this statute places upon her contractual powers, upon her

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Women’s Movement (1870s) right to agree with her employer as to the time she shall labor, are not imposed solely for her benefit, but also largely for the benefit of all. Many words cannot make this plainer. The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing, the influence of vigorous health upon the future well-being of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights, and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence. This difference justifies a difference in legislation and upholds that which is designed to compensate for some of the burdens which rest upon her. We have not referred in this discussion to the denial of the elective franchise in the State of Oregon, for while it may disclose a lack of political equality in all things with her brother, that is not of itself decisive. The reason runs deeper, and rests in the inherent difference between the two sexes, and in the different functions in life which they perform. Source: 208 U.S. 421 (1908).

Excerpts from History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910) In 1908, Congress authorized an investigation into the conditions of working women in the United States. This action led to the publication of a 19-volume study entitled Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, which was completed in 1911. Reproduced below are excerpts from Volume 9, entitled History of Women in Industry in the United States. The history of women in industry in the United States is the story of a great industrial readjustment, which has not only carried woman’s work from the home to the factory, but has changed its economic character from unpaid production for home consumption to gainful employment in the manufacture of articles for sale. Women have always worked, and their work has probably always been quite as important a factor in the total economy of society as it is to-day. But during the nineteenth century a transformation occurred in their economic position and in the character and conditions of their work. Their unpaid services have been transformed into paid services, their work has been removed from the home to the factory and workshop, their range of possible employment has been increased and at the same time their monopoly of their traditional occupations has been destroyed. The individuality of their work has been lost in a standardized product. The story of woman’s work in gainful employments is a story of constant changes or shiftings of work and workshop, accompanied by long hours, low wages, unsanitary conditions, overwork, and the want on the part of the woman of training, skill, and vital interest in her work. It is a story of monotonous machine labor, of division and subdivision of tasks until the woman, like the traditional tailor who is called the ninth part of a

Women’s Movement (1870s) man, is merely a fraction, and that rarely as much even as a tenth part, of an artisan. It is a story, moreover, of underbidding, of strike breaking, of the lowering of standards for men breadwinners. In certain industries and certain localities women’s unions have raised the standard of wages. The opening of industrial schools and business colleges, too, though affecting almost exclusively the occupations entered by the daughters of middle-class families who have only recently begun to pass from home work to the industrial field, has at least enabled these few girls to keep from further swelling the vast numbers of the unskilled. The evil of long hours and in certain cases other conditions which lead to overstrain, such as the constant standing of saleswomen, have been made the subject of legislation. The decrease of strain due to shorter hours has, however, been in part nullified by increased speed of machinery and other devices designed to obtain the greatest possible amount of labor from each woman. Nevertheless, the history of woman’s work in this country shows that legislation has been the only force which has improved the working conditions of any large number of women wage-earners. Aside from the little improvement that has been effected in the lot of working women, the most surprising fact brought out in this study is the long period of time through which large numbers of women have worked under conditions which have involved not only great hardships to themselves but shocking waste to the community.

Changes in Occupations of Women The transfer of women from nonwage-earning home work to gainful occupations is evident to the most superficial observer, and it is well known that most of this transfer has been effected since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1870 it was found that 14.7 per cent of the female population 16 years of age and over were breadwinners, and by 1900 the percentage was 20.6 per cent. During the period for which statistics exist, moreover, the movement toward the increased employment of women in gainful pursuits was clear and distinct in all sections of the country and was even more marked among the native-born than among the foreign-born. It must be borne in mind, however, that even in colonial days there were many women who worked for wages, especially at spinning, weaving, the sewing trades, and domestic service. Many women, too, carried on business on their own account in the textile and sewing trades and also in such industries as the making of blackberry brandy. The wage labor of women is as old as the country itself and has merely increased in importance. The amount, however, of unremunerated home work performed by women must still be considerably larger than the amount of gainful labor, for even in 1900 only about one-fifth of the women 16 years of age and over were breadwinners. Along with the decrease in the importance of unremunerated home labor and the increase in the importance of wage labor has gone a considerable amount of shifting of occupations. Under the old domestic system the work of the woman was to spin, to do a large part of the weaving, to sew, to knit; in general, to make most of the clothing worn by the family, to embroider tapestry in the days and regions where there was time for art, to cook, to brew ale and wine, to clean, and to perform the other duties of the

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Women’s Movement (1870s) domestic servant. These things women have always done. But machines have now come in to aid in all these industries—machines which in some cases have brought in their train men operatives and in other cases have enormously increased the productive power of the individual and have made it necessary for many women, who under the old regime, like Priscilla, would have calmly sat by the window spinning, to hunt other work. One kind of spinning is now done by men only. Men tailors make every year thousands of women’s suits. Men dressmakers and even milliners are common. . . . Before the introduction of spinning machinery and the sewing machine the supply of female labor appears never to have been excessive. But the spinning jenny threw out of employment thousands of “spinsters,” who were obliged to resort to sewing as the only other occupation to which they were in any way trained. This accounts for the terrible pressure in the clothing trades during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Later on, before any readjustment of women’s work had been effected, the sewing machine was introduced, which enormously increased the pressure of competition among women workers. Shortly after the substitution of machinery for the spinning wheel the women of certain localities in Massachusetts found an outlet in binding shoes—an opportunity opened to them by the division of labor and by the development of the readymade trade. But when the sewing machine was introduced this field, at least for a time, was again contracted. Under this pressure, combined with the rapid development of wholesale industry and division of labor, women have been pressed into other industries, almost invariably in the first instance into the least skilled and most poorly paid occupations. This has gone on until there is now scarcely an industry which does not employ women. Thus woman’s sphere has expanded, and its former boundaries can now be determined only by observing the degree of popular condemnation which follows their employment in particular industries.

Attitude of the Public Toward the Employment of Women The attitude of the public toward the employment of women has, indeed, made their progress into gainful occupations slow and difficult, and has greatly aggravated the adjustment pains which the industrial revolution has forced upon woman as compared with those of man, whose traditional sphere is bounded only by the humanly possible. This attitude has, moreover, been an important factor in determining the woman’s choice of occupations. . . .

Causes of the Entrance of Women into Industry Machinery, combined with division of labor and the substitution of water, steam, and electric power for human muscles, has certainly made it possible to employ the unskilled labor of women in occupations formerly carried on wholly by men. Machinery, however, has as yet affected only slightly the broad lines of division between woman’s work and man’s work. And especially upon its first introduction the sex of the employees is rarely at once changed to any considerable extent. Thus when spinning machinery was first introduced women and children were employed to operate it. Later women became the power-loom weavers. The sewing machine, too, has always been operated largely

Women’s Movement (1870s) by women. On the other hand, most of the machinery of the iron and steel industry is operated by men. . . . Division of labor, indeed, which has always accompanied and frequently preceded machinery, is probably even more responsible than the latter for the introduction of women into new occupations. The most striking single tendency in manufacturing industries has been toward the division and the subdivision of processes, thereby making possible the use of woman’s work, as well as of unskilled man’s work, in larger proportion to that of skilled operatives. A more recent tendency toward the combination of several machines into one has even been checked, in some cases, because a competent machinist would have to be hired. Unless the advantage of the complicated mechanism is very great, in many industries simpler machinery, which can be easily run by women, is preferred. As a result, both of machinery and of division of labor, the actual occupations of women, within industries, do not differ so widely as do the occupations of men within the same industries. It frequently happens, indeed, that the work of a woman in one industry is almost precisely the same as that of another woman in an entirely different industry. Other historical forces have brought about changes in the occupations of women. Often, especially in the printing trades and in cigar making, women have been introduced as strike breakers. On the other hand trade unions have in some places been strong enough to prevent the introduction of women in industries to which they were well adapted. Usually, however, this has been only for a short period. The scarcity of labor supply in particular places or at particular times has often been responsible for the use of women’s work. Thus during the early years of the Republic the employment of women in manufacturing industries was doubtless greatly accelerated by the scarcity and high price of other labor. This, too, was doubtless largely responsible for the fact that, in the early years of the cotton industry, a larger proportion of women was employed in the cotton mills of Massachusetts and New Hampshire than in those of Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. One of the remedies frequently suggested in the thirties and forties for the evils under which working women suffered was that “the excess of spinsters” should be transported to the places where “there is a deficiency of women.” The Civil War was another force which not only drove into gainful occupations a large number of women, but compelled many changes in their employments. In 1869 it was estimated that there were 25,000 working women in Boston who had been forced by the war to earn their living. The war, too, caused a large number of cotton factories to shut down, and thousands of women thus thrown out of employment were obliged to seek other occupations. Similar to war in its influence, and in some ways more direful, has been the influence of industrial depressions. The industrial depression which began in 1837, for example, temporarily destroyed the newly-arisen wholesale clothing manufacture, and caused untold hardships to the tailoresses and seamstresses of New York and Philadelphia. These women turned, naturally, to any occupation in which it was possible for them to engage. Industrial depressions, too, like war, have taken away from thousands of women

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Women’s Movement (1870s) the support of the men upon whom they were dependent and have forced them to snatch at any occupation which promised them a pittance.

Expansion of Woman’s Sphere As a result of these factors and forces and in many cases of others less general in their operation, woman’s sphere of employment has been greatly expanded during the past hundred years. . . . When, however, the occupations in which women are engaged are considered with reference to the relative number of women employed in each, at different periods, it is evident that the vast majority of working women have remained within the limits of their traditional field. . . . [I]n every census year considerably more than half of all the women employed in manufacturing industries have been in the first two groups, textile and clothing industries. These industries . . . have as household industries been theirs from time immemorial. But women have been driven, by the industrial forces already in part analyzed, into many occupations formerly considered as belonging exclusively to man’s sphere. . . .

Home and Factory Work . . . Home workers have become sweat-shop workers and sweat-shop workers are gradually becoming factory workers. So long ago as now to be almost forgotten a similar transformation took place in the textile industries. Indeed, this is the general tendency of the employment of both men and women in manufacturing industries. Independent domestic production has practically become a thing of the past. But the history of woman’s work shows that their wage labor under the domestic system has often been under worse conditions than their wage labor under the factory system. The hours of home workers have been longer, their wages lower, and the sanitary conditions surrounding them more unwholesome than has generally been the case with factory workers. The movement away from home work can hardly, then, be regretted.

General Conditions of Life and Labor The conditions under which the working women of this country have toiled have long made them the object of commiseration. Mathew Carey devoted a large part of the last years of his life, from 1828 to 1839, to agitation in their behalf. Again and again he pointed out in newspaper articles, pamphlets, and speeches that the wages of working women in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston were utterly insufficient for their support; that their food and lodging were miserably poor and unwholesome; and that the hours they were obliged to work were almost beyond human endurance. . . . In 1845 an investigation of “female labor” in New York, used as the basis of a series of articles in the New York Tribune, developed “a most deplorable degree of servitude, privation, and misery among this helpless and dependent class of people,” including “hundreds and thousands” of shoe binders, type rubbers, artificial-flower makers,

Women’s Movement (1870s) matchbox makers, straw braiders, etc., who “drudge away, heartbroken in want, disease and wretchedness.” Again in 1869 the working women of Boston, in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature . . . asserted that they were insufficiently paid, scantily clothed, poorly fed, and badly lodged, that their physical health, if not already undermined by long hours and bad conditions of work, was rapidly becoming so, and that their moral natures were being undermined by lack of proper society and by their inability to attend church on account of the want of proper clothing and the necessity, being constantly occupied throughout the week, “to bring up the arrears of our household duties by working on the Lord’s Day.”

Wages and Unemployment The low wages paid to women and the inequality of men’s and women’s wages have always been the chief causes of complaint. . . . The average wages paid to women in New York in 1863, taking all the trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week and in many instances only 20 cents a day, while the hours ranged from 11 to 16 a day. The price of board, which before the war had been about $1.50 a week, had been raised by 1864 to from $2.50 to $3. During the war period, indeed, . . . the wages of women increased less, on the whole, than the wages of men, while their cost of living increased out of all proportion to their wages. This fact was recognized, at least, by the labor papers of that period. “While the wages of workingmen have been increased more than 100 per cent,” said the Daily Evening Voice, in commenting upon the report for 1864 of the New York Working Women’s Protection Union, “and complaint is still made that this is not sufficient to cover the increased cost of food and fuel, the average rate of wages for female labor has not been raised more than 20 per cent since the war was inaugurated; and yet the poor widow is obliged to pay as much for a loaf of bread or a pail of coal as the woman who has a husband or a stalwart son to assist her. In many trades the rate of wages has been lowered during the year, until it has become a mere pittance, while in other occupations the prices paid to females are generally insufficient to maintain them comfortably.” . . . History teaches that working women have suffered fully as much and perhaps more than workingmen from unemployment. Especially is this true in the sewing trades, nearly all of which are seasonal in character. Domestic servants, who have always been in great demand, have long had employment agencies to aid them in their search for work, but little aid has been given the women engaged in manufacturing industries, except by wholly or partially charitable societies, which have given them work, often at starvation prices. . . . In the sewing trades, since the early part of the nineteenth century, the proportion of workers who have been without steady employment has always been large. Piecework and a fluctuating demand for labor, combined with a constant oversupply, have been largely responsible. Even in other trades, however, women, partly because of their lack of training and skill, have continually suffered from unemployment. In 1890,

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Women’s Movement (1870s) according to the census figures, 12.7 per cent, and in 1900, 23.3 per cent of all the females engaged in gainful occupations were unemployed during some portion of the census year. . . . That working women should receive the same pay as men for the same work has long been the desire of trade-unionists. Though not expressly stated, it was implied in the resolution of the National Trades’ Union in 1835, which complained that “the extreme low prices given for female labor, afford scarcely sufficient to satisfy the necessary wants of life, and create a destructive competition with the male laborer.” . . . A generation later the National Labor Union, moreover, repeatedly passed resolutions expressing sympathy for the “sewing women and daughters of toil,” urging them to unite in tradeunions, and demanding for them “equal pay for equal work.” . . . Again in 1868 the president of the National Labor Union, in his opening address to the congress, referred to “the extent to which female labor is introduced into many trades” as “a serious question,” and stated that “the effect of introducing female labor is to undermine prices, that character of labor being usually employed, unjustly to the women, at a lower rate than is paid for male labor on the same kind of work.” . . .

Scope and Sources of the Report In this report on the history of women in industry, wage-earning occupations alone are considered. The unremunerated home work of women, which has probably dovetailed in with their wage labor in such a way that at all periods approximately the same proportion of the work of the world has been done by them, is necessarily neglected. Women engaged in professions, in independent business, and in agriculture, too, are considered only in their relation to the wage-earning women in industry. . . . The character and conditions of woman’s work within recent years have been fully described in reports, books, magazines, and newspapers which can be easily obtained, but the history of the formative period of woman’s work has long been buried away in rare old books and papers, many of them until recently unknown even to close students of the labor question. The history of the wage labor of women during and shortly after this formative period, moreover, is not only comparatively unknown, but furnishes the only possible basis for any historical interpretation of women in industry. Source: Helen L. Sumner, Senate Report—History of Women in Industry in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 7–51.

Excerpts from Emma Goldman’s The Traffic in Women and Marriage and Love (1910) Russian-born Emma Goldman (1869–1940) came to the United States when she was a teenager. Throughout her life, she supported causes incompatible with American society, such as anarchism, free love, birth control, communism, feminism, lesbianism, and the working class.

Women’s Movement (1870s) She was passionately committed to liberty as a first principle because she saw individual liberty as indispensable for human growth and development—two values she believed were being undermined by contemporary society. While other feminists generally sought to reform society, she sought to recreate it; where most sought to work within the law, she advocated moving outside of the law. Reproduced here are excerpts from two works she published in 1910. In The Traffic in Women, Goldman focuses on the exploitation of the prostitute, which she links to the degradation of all women. In Marriage and Love, she argues that the institution of marriage is but an economic arrangement and, in some respects, a form of prostitution.

A. The Traffic in Women Our reformers have suddenly made a great discovery—the white slave traffic. The papers are full of these “unheard-of conditions,” and lawmakers are already planning a new set of laws to check the horror. It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from a great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency, gambling, saloons, etc. And what is the result of such crusades? Gambling is increasing, saloons are doing a lively business through back entrances, prostitution is at its height, and the system of pimps and cadets is but aggravated. . . . What is really the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, “Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?” Naturally our reformers say nothing about this cause. They know it well enough, but it doesn’t pay to say anything about it. It is much more profitable to play the Pharisee, to pretend an outraged morality, than to go to the bottom of things. . . . Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution. Just at present our good people are shocked by the disclosures that in New York City alone, one out of every ten women works in a factory, that the average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and that the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors? . . . Dr. Alfred Blaschko, in Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century, is even more emphatic in characterising economic conditions as one of the most vital factors of prostitution. “Although prostitution has existed in all ages, it was left to the nineteenth century to develop it into a gigantic social institution. The development of industry with vast masses of people in the competitive market, the growth and congestion of large cities, the

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Women’s Movement (1870s) insecurity and uncertainty of employment, has given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history.” . . . The most amusing side of the question now before the public is the indignation of our “good, respectable people,” especially the various Christian gentlemen, who are always to be found in the front ranks of every crusade. Is it that they are absolutely ignorant of the history of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? Or is it that they hope to blind the present generation to the part played in the past by the Church in relation to prostitution? Whatever their reason, they should be the last to cry out against the unfortunate victims of today, since it is known to every intelligent student that prostitution is of religious origin, maintained, and fostered for many centuries, not as a shame but as a virtue, hailed as such by the Gods themselves. . . . It would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital. That, too, our reformers know, but dare discuss even less than the institution that saps the very life out of both men and women. I refer to the sex question, the very mention of which causes most people moral spasms. It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and persons who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and thrown into prison. Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an easy prey to prostitution, or to any form of a relationship which degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification. It is due to this ignorance that the entire life and nature of the girl is thwarted and crippled. We have long ago taken it as a self-evident fact that the boy may follow the call of the wild; that is to say, that the boy may, as soon as his sex nature asserts itself, satisfy that nature; but our moralists are scandalized at the very thought that the nature of a girl should assert itself. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock. That this is no mere statement is proved by the fact that marriage for monetary considerations is perfectly legitimate, sanctified by law and public opinion, while any other union is condemned and repudiated. Yet a prostitute, if properly defined, means nothing else than “any person for whom sexual relationships are subordinated to gain.” “Those women are prostitutes who sell their bodies for the exercise of the sexual act and make of this a profession.” . . . Of course, marriage is the goal of every girl, but as thousands of girls cannot marry, our stupid social customs condemn them either to a life of celibacy or prostitution. Human nature asserts itself regardless of all laws, nor is there any plausible reason why nature should adapt itself to a perverted conception of morality. . . . Girls, mere children, work in crowded, over-heated rooms ten to twelve hours daily at a machine, which tends to keep them in a constant over-excited sex state. Many of these girls have no home or comforts of any kind; therefore the street or some place

Women’s Movement (1870s) of cheap amusement is the only means of forgetting their daily routine. This naturally brings them into close proximity with the other sex. It is hard to say which of the two factors brings the girl’s over-sexed condition to a climax, but it is certainly the most natural thing that a climax should result. That is the first step toward prostitution. Nor is the girl to be held responsible for it. On the contrary, it is altogether the fault of society, the fault of our lack of understanding, of our lack of appreciation of life in the making; especially is it the criminal fault of our moralists, who condemn a girl for all eternity, because she has gone from the “path of virtue”; that is, because her first sex experience has taken place without the sanction of the Church. The girl feels herself a complete outcast, with the doors of home and society closed in her face. Her entire training and tradition is such that the girl herself feels depraved and fallen, and therefore has no ground to stand upon, or any hold that will lift her up, instead of dragging her down. Thus society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of. The meanest, most depraved and decrepit man still considers himself too good to take as his wife the woman whose grace he was quite willing to buy, even though he might thereby save her from a life of horror. Nor can she turn to her own sister for help. In her stupidity the latter deems herself too pure and chaste, not realizing that her own position is in many respects even more deplorable than her sister’s of the street. “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute,” says Havelock Ellis, “is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” . . . Moralists are ever ready to sacrifice one-half of the human race for the sake of some miserable institution which they can not outgrow. As a matter of fact, prostitution is no more a safeguard for the purity of the home than rigid laws are a safeguard against prostitution. Fully fifty per cent of married men are patrons of brothels. It is through this virtuous element that the married women—nay, even the children-are infected with venereal diseases. Yet society has not a word of condemnation for the man, while no law is too monstrous to be set in motion against the helpless victim. She is not only preyed upon by those who use her, but she is also absolutely at the mercy of every policeman and miserable detective on the beat, the officials at the station house, the authorities in every prison. In a recent book by a woman who was for twelve years the mistress of a “house,” are to be found the following figures: “The authorities compelled me to pay every month fines between $14.70 to $29.70, the girls would pay from $5.70 to $9.70 to the police.” Considering that the writer did her business in a small city, that the amounts she gives do not include extra bribes and fines, one can readily see the tremendous revenue the police department derives from the blood money of its victims, whom it will not even protect. Woe to those who refuse to pay their toll; they would be rounded up like cattle, “if only to make a favorable impression upon the good citizens of the city, or if the powers needed extra money on the side. For the warped mind who believes that a fallen

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Women’s Movement (1870s) woman is incapable of human emotion it would be impossible to realize the grief, the disgrace, the tears, the wounded pride that was ours every time we were pulled in.” Strange, isn’t it, that a woman who has kept a “house” should be able to feel that way? But stranger still that a good Christian world should bleed and fleece such women, and give them nothing in return except obloquy and persecution. Oh, for the charity of a Christian world! Source: Emma Goldman, The Traffic in Women (New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1910), 2–27.

B. Marriage and Love Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense. . . . [B]ehind every marriage stands the life-long environment of the two sexes; an environment so different from each other that man and woman must remain strangers. Separated by an insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has not the potentiality of developing knowledge of, and respect for, each other, without which every union is doomed to failure. Henrik Ibsen, the hater of all social shams, was probably the first to realize this great truth. Nora leaves her husband, not—as the stupid critic would have it—because she is tired of her responsibilities or feels the need of woman’s rights, but because she has come to know that for eight years she had lived with a stranger and borne him children. Can there by anything more humiliating, more degrading than a life-long proximity between two strangers? No need for the woman to know anything of the man, save his income. As to the knowledge of the woman—what is there to know except that she has a pleasing appearance? We have not yet outgrown the theologic myth that woman has no soul, that she is a mere appendix to man, made out of his rib just for the convenience of the gentleman who was so strong that he was afraid of his own shadow. Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsible for the inferiority. At any rate, woman has no soul—what is there to know about her? Besides, the less soul a woman has the greater her asset as a wife, the more readily will she absorb herself in her husband. It is this slavish acquiescence to man’s superiority that has kept the marriage institution seemingly intact for so long a period. Now that woman is coming into her own, now that she is actually growing aware of herself as a being outside of the master’s grace, the sacred institution of marriage is gradually being undermined, and no amount of sentimental lamentation can stay it.

Women’s Movement (1870s) From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field—sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact. If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a “good” man, his goodness consisting of an empty head and plenty of money. Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love. . . . The moral lesson instilled in the girl is not whether the man has aroused her love, but rather is it, “How much?” The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage. Gradually this saturates every thought of the girl; her dreams are not of moonlight and kisses, of laughter and tears; she dreams of shopping tours and bargain counters. This soul-poverty and sordidness are the elements inherent in the marriage institution. The State and the Church approve of no other ideal, simply because it is the one that necessitates the State and Church control of men and women. Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above dollars and cents. Particularly is this true of that class whom economic necessity has forced to become self-supporting. The tremendous change in woman’s position, wrought by that mighty factor, is indeed phenomenal when we reflect that it is but a short time since she has entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage workers; six million women, who have the equal right with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even. Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million wage workers in every walk of life, from the highest brain work to the mines and the railroad tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete.

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Women’s Movement (1870s) Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man. No matter how decrepit the latter, he has been taught to be independent, self-supporting. Oh, I know that no one is really independent in our economic treadmill; still, the poorest specimen of a man hates to be a parasite; to be known as such, at any rate. The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task. According to the latest statistics submitted before a Committee “on labor and wages, and congestion of population,” ten per cent of the wage workers in New York City alone are married, yet they must continue to work at the most poorly paid labor in the world. Add to this horrible aspect the drudgery of housework, and what remains of the protection and glory of the home? As a matter of fact, even the middle-class girl in marriage can not speak of her home, since it is the man who creates her sphere. It is not important whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in his home, year after year, until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete surrender of all faculties, absolutely incapacitates the average woman for the outside world. She becomes reckless in appearance, clumsy in her movements, dependent in her decisions, cowardly in her judgment, a weight and a bore, which most men grow to hate and despise. . . . The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. . . . Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent. Source: Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love (New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1910), 5–18.

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Excerpts from Anna Garlin Spencer’s Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1912) Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931) was a Rhode Island schoolteacher, a journalist for the Providence Daily Journal, and an ordained minister in an independent church in Providence. In the following excerpts from her Woman’s Share in Social Culture, Spencer eloquently describes how society forces women to suppress their talents and abilities. “Talent,” says Lowell, “is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.” If genius, even in its lesser ranges, be this irresistible pressure toward some unique self-expression, then women cannot be left out of the charmed circle; especially when we remember Helen Hunt with her solitary but wide approach to love and life, and Emily Dickinson, that hermit thrush among poets. Nor can those unique interpreters of art and literature among women whose vital expression has so enhanced the works of genius as to make them seem new creations, be left out of the count. In modern times, the growing company of musicians, some of them composers, and the artists of pen and brush, and the sculptors among women who swell the secondary ranks of genius in numbers and in power, must have increasing recognition. All this, however, does not reach the deepest considerations involved in taking account of the intellectual contribution of women to art, science, philosophy and affairs. Whatever may be the reasons in nature for the lower level of women along these lines of man’s greatest achievement, there are the gravest reasons in circumstance for the comparatively meagre showing. In addition to the handicap of lack of education, a handicap which no exceptional success of the self-made man or woman can offset for the majority of the talented, there is no less important deprivation which all women have suffered in the past and most women now suffer. This deprivation is that of the informal but highly stimulating training which the good fellowship of their chosen guild of study and of service gives to men, but which is denied for the most part even to professional women. For example, women have been in the medical profession for a considerable time, and have obtained high distinction in it. They have won just recognition from many influential doctors of the other sex. Yet they can hardly be said to have entered the inner circle of their clan. They may stop to dinner at medical conventions, it is true, provided they make no fuss about smoking and do not mind being in the minority; but there are few men, even in that enlightened group, who can so sink sex-consciousness in professional comradeship as either to give or get the full social value that might be gained from a mixed company of like vocation. The women lawyers and members of the clergy are in even smaller minority, and hence suffer still more from the embarrassment of the “exception” which prevents easy and familiar association. In the teaching profession, where the relative numbers of the sexes are reversed, there is often more adequate professional intercourse; but the woman college professor, or college president, is still that one among many whose reception into her special class, even if courteous and friendly, is too formal and occasional for real guild fellowship.

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Women’s Movement (1870s) To this negative deprivation must be added the positive opposition of men to the entrance of women into that professional life and work from which the genius arises as the race flower from a vast field. The whole course of evolution in industry, and in the achievements of higher education and exceptional talent, has shown man’s invariable tendency to shut women out when their activities have reached a highly specialized period of growth. The primitive woman-worker, as Jack-at-all-trades, does not develop any one employment to its height of perfection. Gradually initiating old men and boys, not fitted for war and the chase, into these varied forms of effort, women start the other sex toward that concentration of effort upon one process-activity which finally develops separate arts, sciences and professions. When this point is reached, the “woman’s work” usually becomes “man’s work”; and when that time comes, men turn round and shut out women from the labor which women themselves have initiated. This monopolistic tendency of men is shown most clearly in the history of the learned professions. Women were seldom, if ever, priests but they participated in religious services when religion was a family affair. When a priestly caste arose and became the symbol of peculiar authority, only men entered its ranks. . . . Again, women developed law and its application to life in the germs of family rule and tribal custom quite as much as did men; but when statutes took the place of tradition, and courts superseded personal judgeship, and when a special class of lawyers was needed to define and administer laws, which grew more difficult to understand with growing complexity of social relationship, men alone entered that profession. . . . This process of differentiating and perfecting intellectual labor, the process in which at most acute periods of specialization and advance, women were wholly shut out of their own ancient work, finds its most complete and its most dramatic illustration in the history of the medical profession. Some phases of the healing art have always been connected in primitive society with the priestly office and, hence, in the hands of man. Three great branches, however, were always, in all forms of social organization of which we have knowledge, in the hands exclusively of women, namely, midwifery, the treatment of diseases of women so far as those were cared for at all, and the diseases of children. . . . The result of this sex-segregation in the care of the sick in these important branches has been that women doctors, unschooled but often not unskilled, have served all the past of human experience in childbirth, in child-care, and in the special illnesses of women. This has been true in our own, as well as in older civilizations up to the 18th century. In our own country, in colonial times, only women ushered into a bleak New England the potential citizens of the new world. We read of Mrs. Wiat, who died in 1705 at the age of 94 years, having assisted as midwife at the birth of more than 1,100 children. And in Rehoboth, one of the oldest communities in Massachusetts, the Town Meeting itself “called” from England, “Dr. Sam Fuller and his mother,” he to practise medicine and she “as midwife to answer to the town’s necessity, which was great.” Busied with other matters, the Colonies paid little attention to medical science until the war of the American Revolution betrayed the awful results of ignorance in the slaughter of soldiers by preventable disease. When the healing art began to become a true science and took great strides toward better training and facilities of practice for the student, attention was at once

Women’s Movement (1870s) drawn to the need for better service in the fields wholly occupied by women. The opening and improvement of the medical schools, however, was a new opportunity for men alone and the new demand for more scientific care of women in childbirth and for higher medical service to childhood and for the women suffering from special diseases, resulted in the greatest of innovations, namely, the assumption by men of the office of midwife and their entrance into the most intimate relationships with women patients. Dr. James Lloyd, after two years’; study in England, began to practise “obstetrics” (the new name that disguised in some degree the daring change in medical practice) in Boston, in 1762. Dr. Shippen, similarly trained abroad, took up the same practice in Philadelphia and added lectures upon the subject. Thus began in our own country the elevation of this important branch of the healing art to a professional standard and the consequent exclusion of women from their immortal rights in the sickroom. It was a poor recognition of the debt the race owed to the mother-sex, both as suffering the pangs of childbirth and as helping to assuage them and in caring for the infants and children of all time! After men entered upon the task of perfecting the medical profession, and incidentially shutting women out of it, it did not take long, however, for the thoughtful to see the propriety of allowing women those advantages of training which would put them back again into their rightful place on the higher plane of science now demanded. What gave sharp point to this feeling was the common opposition to men engaging in these ancient prerogatives of women. This was at first as intense and as bitter as the later opposition to the entrance of women in the coeducational medical schools. . . . The first women who tried to secure training in medical schools in order to ree¨nter those branches of the healing art from which they had so recently been driven, and on the higher plane of science now properly demanded, endured such hardships as made them veritable martyrs. In 1847 Harriot K. Hunt knocked at the door of Harvard Medical School to be persistently refused admission. In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical School, having secured instruction as a special favor, and began her great career, devoted equally to securing the best possible medical training for women, and to elevating to higher standards than had as yet been attained by men the whole area of medical training. Among the heroic figures of these early days are to be found many married women whose husbands, often themselves physicians, helped them to obtain their training. . . . The attitude of the men of the medical profession generally, however, was one of the utmost hostility, showing every form of monopolistic selfishness and injustice. . . . All this was without reference to the intellectual standing or practical efficiency of the women graduates. The mere fact of women entering the profession meant, in the minds of these protestants, degradation to the men already in it! Earlier than this, in 1859, the Medical Society of the County of Philadelphia passed “resolutions of excommunication” against every physician who should “teach in a medical school for women” and every one who should “consult with a woman physician or with a man teaching a woman medical student.” . . . Nevertheless, the women did ree¨nter their ancient profession of healing after a brief exclusion. So far from permanently lowering the standards of training newly established, their chief pioneer leader, Elizabeth Blackwell, was instrumental in inaugurating modern preventive medicine, by the establishment in the New York Medical College for Women, opened

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Women’s Movement (1870s) in 1865, of the first chair of Hygiene ever set apart in a medical college in the United States. In 1882 this pioneer medical college for women set forth the bravest and truest of philosophies respecting women’s work in the following words: “We call upon all those who believe in the higher education of women to help set the highest possible standards for their medical education; and we call upon those who do not believe in such higher education to help in making such requirements as shall turn aside the incompetent;— not by any exercise of arbitrary power, but by a demonstration of incapacity, which is the only logical, manly reason for refusing to allow women to pursue an honorable calling in an honorable way.” This brief allusion to the heroic struggle of woman to ree¨nter the healing art against the positive opposition of men already entrenched in all the coigns of vantage in professional training and organized professional guilds, furnishes a flashlight picture of the whole course of woman’s entrance into the more modern types of differentiated labor. . . . In addition to these handicaps must be named the well-known but scarcely adequately measured interruptions to both study and self-expression which the women of talent and specialized power have always experienced. Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room. . . . When we read of Charles Darwin’s wife not only relieving him from financial cares but seeing that he had his breakfast in his room, with “nothing to disturb the freshness of his morning,” we do not find the explanation of Darwin’s genius, but we do see how he was helped to express it. Men geniuses, even of second grade, have usually had at least one woman to smooth their way, and often several women to make sure that little things, often even self-support itself, did not interfere with the development and expression of their talent. On the other hand, the obligation of all the earlier women writers to prepare a useful cook-book in order to buy their way into literature, is a fitting symbol of the compulsion laid upon women, however gifted, to do all the things that women in general accomplish before entering upon their special tasks. . . . Added to all this, the woman of talent and of special gifts has had until very lately, and in most countries has still, to go against the massed social pressure of her time in order to devote herself to any particular intellectual task. The expectation of society has long pushed men toward some special work; the expectation of society has until recently been wholly against women’s choosing any vocation beside their functional service in the family. This is a far more intense and all-pervading influence in deterring women from success in intellectual work than is usually understood. . . . No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems. On the contrary, the mildest approach on the part of a wife and mother, or even of a daughter or sister, to that intense interest in self-expression which has always characterized genius has been met with social disapproval and until very recent times with ostracism fit only for the criminal. Hence her inner impulsion has needed to be strong indeed to make any woman devote herself to ideas.

Women’s Movement (1870s) In view of these tremendous obstacles, it is fair to assume that when women in the past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of talent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions. . . . The genius is at once the most self-centered and the most universal of human beings. He sees only himself and the world of thought or of affairs he would master for his special work. All that lies between, family, friends, social groups, is but material for his elect service. Delight in his own personality, absorbed attention to the processes of his own mind, have made him generally the master shirker in respect to the ordinary duties of life. He has been often “ill to live with,” and greedy in demand upon the support and care of others. He is so rare and precious, however, that “with all his faults we love him still.” . . . to suppress in wholesale fashion, and at the outset, all troublesome “variations” in women, while leaving men free to show what they can become and giving them besides a good chance to prove their quality, is to make that discipline too one-sided. The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has been too often a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power. . . . Source: Anna Garlin Spencer, Woman’s Share in Social Culture (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1912), 45–88.

Margaret Sanger on Sex Education and Contraception (1913) Margaret Sanger (1883–1966) was a leader in the fight for birth control. She believed that contraceptives freed women by giving to them greater control of their bodies and thus lessening their economic dependence on men. Arrested under the Comstock anti-obscenity law, Sanger fled to Britain in 1914, but returned to New York two years later to open a birth control clinic in Brooklyn for poor women. The authorities closed the clinic and Sanger was convicted of obscenity. On appeal, her conviction was upheld, but the court ruled that physicians could distribute birth control information to prevent the spread of disease. This exception was the basis upon which Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. Reproduced here are excerpts on the fight for birth control from Sanger’s Women and the New Race. The excerpts contained in this chapter are typical of the letters which come to me by the thousands. They tell their own story, simply—sometimes ungrammatically and illiterately, but nevertheless irresistibly. It is the story of slow murder of the helpless by a society that shields itself behind ancient, inhuman moral creeds-which dares to weigh those dead creeds against the agony of the living who pray for the “mercy of death.”

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Women’s Movement (1870s) Can a mother who would “rather die” than bear more children serve society by bearing still others? Can children carried through nine months of dread and unspeakable mental anguish and born into an atmosphere of fear and anger, to grow up uneducated and in want, be a benefit to the world? Here is what the mother says: I have read in the paper about you and am very interested in Birth Control. I am a mother of four living children and one dead the oldest 10 and baby 22 months old. I am very nervous and sickly after my children. I would like you to advise me what to do to prevent from having any more as I would rather die than have another. I am keeping away from my husband as much as I can, but it causes quarrels and almost separation. All my babies have had marasmus in the first year of their lives and I almost lost my baby last summer. I always worry about my children so much. My husband works in a brass foundry it is not a very good job and living is so high that we have to live as cheap as possible. I’ve only got 2 rooms and kitchen and I do all my work and sewing which is very hard for me. . . . Here is a letter from a paralytic mother, whose days and nights are tortured by the thought of another child, and whose reason is tottering at the prospect of leaving her children without her care: I sent for a copy of your magazine and now feel I must write you to see if you can help me. I was a high school girl who married a day laborer seven years ago. In a few months, I will again be a mother, the fourth child in less than six years. While carrying my babies am always partly paralyzed on one side. Do not know the cause but the doctor said at last birth we must be “more careful,” as I could not stand having so many children. Am always very sick for a long time and have to have chloroform. We can afford help only about 3 weeks, until I am on my feet again, after confinement. I work as hard as I can but my work and my children are always neglected. I wonder if my body does survive this next birth if my reason will. It is terrible to think of bringing these little bodies and souls into the world without means or strength to care for them. And I can see no relief unless you give it to me or tell me where to get it. I am weaker each time and I know that this must be the last one, for it would be better for me to go, than to bring more neglected babies into the world. I can hardly sleep at night for worrying. Is there an answer for women like me? In another chapter, we have gotten a glimpse of the menace of the feebleminded. Here is a woman who is praying for help to avoid adding to the number of mentally helpless: My baby is only 10 months old and the oldest one of four is 7, and more care than a baby, has always been helpless. We do not own a roof over our heads and I am so

Women’s Movement (1870s) discouraged I want to die if nothing can be done. Can’t you help me just this time and then I know I can take care of myself. Ignorance on this all important subject has put me where I am. I don’t know how to be sure of bringing myself around. I beg of you to help me and anything I can do to help further your wonderful work I will do. Only help me this once, no one will know only I will be blessed. I not only have a terrible time when I am confined but caring for the oldest child it preys so on my mind that I fear more defective children. Help me please! Not even the blindest of all dogmatists can ignore the danger to the community of today and the race of to-morrow in permitting an insane woman to go on bearing children. Here is a letter which tells a two-sided story—how mother instinct, even when clouded by periodic insanity, seeks to protect itself and society; and how society prevents her from attaining that end: There is a woman in this town who has six children and is expecting another. Directly after the birth of a child, she goes insane, a raving maniac, and they send her to the insane asylum. While she is gone, her home and children are cared for by neighbors. After about six months, they discharge her and she comes home and is in a family way again in a few months. Still the doctors will do nothing for her. She is a well-educated woman and says if she would not have any more children, she is sure she could be entirely free from these insane spells. If you will send me one of your pamphlets, I will give it to her and several others equally deserving. Hoping you will see fit to grant my request, I remain, etc. The very word “syphilis” brings a shudder to anyone who is familiar with the horrors of the malady. Not only in the suffering brought to the victim himself and in the danger of infecting others, but in the dire legacy of helplessness and disease which is left to the offspring of the syphilitic, is this the most destructive socially, of all “plagues.” Here is a letter, which as a criticism to national waste and to contraceptives, defies comment: I was left without a father when a girl of fourteen years old. I was the oldest child of five. My mother had no means of support except her two hands, so we worked at anything we could, my job being nurse girl at home while mother worked most of the time, as she could earn more money than I could, for she could do harder work. I wasn’t very strong and finally after two years my mother got so tired and worn out trying to make a living for so many, she married again, and as she married a poor man, we children were not much better off. At the age of seventeen I married a man, a brakeman on the—Railroad, who was eleven years older than I. He drank some and was a very frail-looking man, but I was very ignorant of the world and did not think of anything but making a home for myself and husband. After

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Women’s Movement (1870s) eleven months I had a little girl born to me. I did not want more children, but my mother-in-law told me it was a terrible sin to do anything to keep from having children and that the Lord only sent just what I could take care of and if I heard of anything to do I was told it was injurious, so I did not try. In eleven months again, October 25, I had another little puny girl. In twenty-three months, Sept. 25th, I had a seven-lb. boy. In ten months, July 15, I had a sevenmonths baby that lived five hours. In eleven months, June 20, I had another little girl. In seventeen months, Nov. 30, another boy. In nine months a four months’ miscarriage. In twelve months another girl, and in three and a half years another girl. All of these children were born into poverty; the father’s health was always poor, and when the third girl was born he was discharged from the road because of his disability, yet he was still able to put children into the world. When the oldest child was twelve years old the father died of concussion of the brain while the youngest child was born two months after his death. Now, Mrs. Sanger, I did not want those children, because even in my ignorance I had sense enough to know that I had no right to bring those children into such a world where they could not have decent care, for I was not able to do it myself nor hire it done. I prayed and I prayed that they would die when they were born. Praying did no good and to-day I have read and studied enough to know that I am the mother of seven living children and that I committed a crime by bringing them into the world, their father was syphilitic (I did not know about such things when I was a girl). One son is to be sent to Mexico, while one of my girls is a victim of the white slave traffic. Source: Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 74–82.

Colfax Massacre (1873) During the spring of 1873, a siege and massacre occurred between black and white Civil War veterans. William Ward, a former slave, a Union Army veteran, and a Republican state representative, led the blacks of Grant Parish, Louisiana. They were opposed by a white paramilitary force, led by Sheriff Christopher Columbus Nash, a captain in the Confederate Army. Three white supremacists and about 150 blacks were killed, including about 48 executed as prisoners hours after the fight ended. Earlier estimates of the number of blacks murdered ranged from 64 to 400. During the antebellum period, Meredith Smith Calhoun owned 14,000 acres and 700 slaves in what was known as Calhoun’s Landing. Later named Colfax, in honor of Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885), the vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, it became the parish seat to Grant Parish, which was named for the 18th president. Henry Clay Warmoth (1842–1931), a carpetbagger from Illinois, was elected governor of Louisiana in 1868. He created Grant Parish in 1869 and gerrymandered the region so that black electoral majorities were adjacent to white parishes. Grant Parish was juxtaposed between fertile cotton fields to the west and the northern limit of sugarcane area of Louisiana. The Calhoun plantation previously had sugarcane planted, but the sugar culture had since moved southward—by Reconstruction, the area produced cotton, corn, and pecans. The Red River provided not only fertile soil, but steamboat transport to New Orleans. By 1870, over 364,000 African Americans, over half of that state’s residents, lived in Louisiana, and of these, 210 held political office. Grant Parish had 2,400 blacks to 2,200 whites, as the governor deliberately set the borders to favor Republican rule. The rural settlement of Colfax could not be considered a town as such, but a collection of old plantation buildings at the summit of the east bank of the Red River. It was inhabited primarily by white lawyers and merchants, in little houses with extras rooms for travelers, which they called hotels. A black settlement within one mile north and west of Colfax was called “Smithfield Quarters.” Also, Colfax lacked telegraph lines, so communications with the governor in New Orleans required traveling downstream in steamboats. On May 13, 1870, Congress enacted the Enforcement Act, which made racial terrorism a federal offense. To put this law into effect, Grant created the Department of Justice. His first attorney general was Amos Tappan Akerman (1821–1880), a

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native of New Hampshire, who had lived in Cartersville, Georgia, where he despised the Klan. Amendments to the Enforcement Act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, were added by Congress on April 20, 1871. These laws were designed to enforce provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that provided citizenship and voting rights to anyone born in the United States. This act would be tested in the case about the Colfax Massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876). The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872 was particularly contentious. Both candidates claimed victory: the Republican, Vermont-born William Pitt Kellogg, had served as a colonel in the Union Army; in 1868, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate, and he resided in New Orleans; the Conservative John O. McEnery, a cotton planter’s son from Monroe, Louisiana, was a colonel in the Confederate Army. Three state returning boards, charged with authorizing elections, delivered three different verdicts. Both men held simultaneous inaugurations on January 13, 1873, in the Reconstruction-era capital of New Orleans. McEnery approved the selection of Alphonse Cazabat as judge and C. C. Nash as sheriff of Grant Parish. Kellogg certified two Republicans, Robert C. Register as judge, and Daniel Shaw as sheriff. On March 23, four of Kellogg’s associates appeared in Colfax, including Green Brantley, the black tax collector; Eli H. Flowers, a black from Pennsylvania; and Captain William Ward, the black representative from the Louisiana legislature. On March 25, Register and Shaw broke into the courthouse, ousting Sherriff Nash; by March 31, Shaw had deputized several blacks to defend the courthouse. White citizens then proposed a meeting, open to all, on April 1, in Colfax, but this meeting never occurred, due to the blacks blocking white entry into Colfax. On April 5, a group of unidentified white men murdered Jesse McKinney, an unarmed black man, while he constructed a fence in front of his house. On April 9, Colfax attorney William R. Rutland met Kellogg at the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans, informing the governor of unlawful activity that had occurred. Although the adjutant general, James Longstreet, expressed willingness to go to Colfax with some police, none was sent. The major assault by Nash took place on Easter Sunday, April 13, when he led a paramilitary force of about 300 men armed with Winchester repeating rifles or pistols. This far outmatched the 150 black militia’s Enfields and shotguns. Nash’s troops also exhibited mobility, as each man owned a horse. On Saturday, April 12, the militiamen dug a trench around the courthouse as a defense. But by Sunday morning, the trench was only two feet deep and encompassed only three sides of the small rectangular building. At noon, Nash met Levi Allen at Smithfield Quarters, demanding that Allen and the blacks surrender. Mindful of the previous week’s murder of McKinney, Allen refused. Nash’s attack began a half-hour later, as he occupied Smithfield Quarters,

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and moved to the center of Colfax. About 2:00 p.m., Nash’s cannon fire inundated the militia’s trenches, and they retreated to the courthouse. The paramilitaries then forced Benjamin Brimm, a black prisoner, to torch the courthouse roof. As the building burned, Nash sent James West Hadnot and Sidney Harris into the courthouse to secure another surrender, but both were shot, likely by Nash’s men. By 3:00 p.m., fighting had ceased, and at least 37 blacks were taken prisoner. That night, William J. “Bill” Cruikshank took charge of the prisoners, telling them that he was transferring them to a sugar house for the night, before they would be taken to jail. Instead, each prisoner was marched out of the camp and summarily executed. Brimm survived two shots and later testified. Kellogg finally sent two marshals, Theodore W. DeKlyne and William Wright, to Colfax on April 12, but they did not arrive in Colfax until April 15. When Cruikshank and others were tried in February 1874, it ended in a mistrial. The second trial, in May 1874, concluded with four acquittals and found five guilty of conspiracy against a peaceful assembly. The case went through appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1876 that the Enforcement Act of 1870 and Fourteenth Amendment applied only to actions taken by state governments, not private individuals or private militaries. Although the exact death toll from the massacre cannot be ascertained, the courthouse was only 75 feet in length, and could not hold more than 100 people. T. W. DeKlyne, the federal marshal who investigated the scene, counted 59 bodies at the courthouse site. One result of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South was the creation of the Department of Justice. —Ralph Hartsock See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Hogue, James K. Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Johnson, Manie White. “The Colfax Riot of April, 1873.” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 13 (1930): 391–427. Keith, LeeAnna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Block Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008. Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.

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Freedmen The massacre that took place at Colfax, Louisiana, on April 13, 1873, was, in essence, another of the numerous violent confrontations that took place between the white “New South” and the newly freed slaves, or freedmen. In the first years following the end of the Civil War, the Reconstruction-era “carpetbagger” governments had given the freedmen their first real taste of political freedom: the freedom to participate in government. However, it was those very governments that stirred such fierce resentment in the white population of the South, leading to both the rise in violent altercations like Colfax and the creation of numerous white supremacist groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan. As early as 1866, a school for the education of the freedmen was established by the Freedmen’s Bureau, with the assistance of missionaries and one former slave owner (William Calhoun) and his family. However, such participation was certainly unusual for Louisiana. Calhoun was atypical in more ways than one. His marriage to a mulatto woman and his aligning himself with the carpetbagger governments certainly would not have made him popular among his white peers. However, his encouragement and participation in the Freedmen’s Bureau school was his most outrageous act in the eyes of local whites. The state’s Freedmen’s Bureau superintendent described the situation this way. “The feeling [among Louisiana whites] is unanimous that [freedmen] should not own an acre of land nor have any schools. . . . They are more hostile to the establishment of schools than they are to owning land” (Keith 2008, 51). The education of the freedmen, an audacious act in and of itself, was the first real step necessary to both political participation and economic empowerment. The participation of the freedmen in the system of sharecropping that allowed white landowners to reassert their economic and social dominance in the South was absolutely vital to the resurgence of a “New South.” All of this was threatened by the education being offered by the Calhoun family at Colfax. The election of 1872, which saw liberal Republicans and Democrats (Fusionists) win control in Louisiana, brought the political opposition of the freedmen to a head, leading to the conflict that took place between the Republican officeholders along with their freedmen supporters and the newly elected Fusionists at the Colfax courthouse on April 13. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

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Colfax Massacre (1873) Keith, LeeAnna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2008.

Klanism The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by former officers in the Confederate Army. Klan members were almost exclusively white men, and they relied on guerilla tactics and terrorism to continue the battle for white supremacy in the South. African Americans were the primary targets of early Klan violence in the postbellum South because their newfound freedom and citizenship rights greatly threatened the racial caste system upon which the Southern way of life so heavily relied. Klan members targeted African American leaders, politicians, businessmen, and land owners to maintain control over southern blacks. Northern politicians, often referred to as Carpetbaggers, and southern Republicans, known as Scalawags, were often targets of violence as well because their political values contradicted the goals of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. This first version of the Ku Klux Klan lasted fewer than five years before dissolving into other organizations and its members being targeted by southern state militias in 1869 and 1870. The Klan was revived in 1915 by William J. Simmons during a ceremony at Stone Mountain, Georgia. The second Klan was founded by a generation of southerners who sought to reclaim the losses incurred by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Unlike the first Klan, this second version quickly gained mainstream support. Its foundation was part of a larger cultural movement in the United States, and this resulted in greater acceptance of the terrorist organization. Part of the driving force behind this cultural phenomenon was the movie Birth of a Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith. This film depicted Reconstruction as a period when African Americans and Republicans were unable to control their animalistic impulses and proceeded to destroy cherished Southern traditions, run amok in political office, and rape white women. The support garnered by Birth of a Nation is immeasurable, but the movie turned a profit of over $300 million in modern-day dollars. Because of its greater mainstream acceptance, the second Klan gained popularity in the North as well as the South. Klan membership skyrocketed in the 1920s, and cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia were home to tens of thousands of Klan members. By its peak in the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan counted

Colfax Massacre (1873)

between four and five million members, or over 10 percent of the population of the United States. The Klan’s northern popularity and acceptance also increased its targets. Northern Klan members discriminated and attacked all ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups, especially Jews, Eastern Europeans, and black migrants. The second Ku Klux Klan diminished greatly by the 1950s as growing segregation decreased the demand for such an organization. However, remaining Klansmen played prevalent roles in advocating housing discrimination and violence against minority groups throughout the late 20th century. The Klan’s numbers have continued to dwindle over the last several decades, but the legacy of the Klan and several thousand current members ensure that it is one of the most hated and feared terrorist organizations in the history of the United States. —William Sturkey

Further Reading MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995. Trelease, Allen. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Wade, W. C. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Brooks-Baxter War (1874) For about one month in 1874, two men claimed to be the governor of Arkansas, Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks. This followed the disputed election of 1872, in which Baxter was declared the governor. This dispute eventually escalated into an armed conflict, when forces led by Brooks ousted Baxter from the governor’s office. In the wake of the Civil War, carpetbaggers from the Union governed many of the states formerly in the Confederacy, including Arkansas. Congress had enacted the Reconstruction Act (1867), which required states formerly in the Confederacy to adopt new constitutions that allowed African American males to vote. The 1868 Arkansas constitution enhanced powers of the governor, restoring the four-year term for service and granting him authority to appoint executive branch officials and judges. In Arkansas, there were three major political factions during Reconstruction. The Democrats, supporting the Ku Klux Klan, wished to continue the practices of earlier times. The Republican Party was split. The Minstrel Republicans, led by Senator Powell Clayton, who had served as governor until 1871, were so named because one of their leaders, musician John G. Price, had performed in minstrel shows. The Brindletail Republicans were led by Joseph Brooks, whose voice resembled a brindle-tail bull. Brooks supported civil rights for former slaves and economic assistance to blacks and lower-class whites, and allied himself with the Liberal Republicans, those who backed Horace Greeley for president. These Reform Republicans nominated carpetbagger Joseph Brooks on a platform that would reduce taxes, end disfranchisement, and limit specific powers of the governor (appointments). This ticket was also supported by former governor Harris Flanigan (1817–1874), a Democrat. The gubernatorial election, held on November 5, 1872, was particularly contentious. Minstrels had nominated a native Unionist, Elisha Baxter, from Batesville to face the Brindletails’ nominee, Joseph Brooks. Results were not known for several days. By November 30, the Fayetteville Democrat declared Brooks the winner. But the Gazette, published in Little Rock, published official returns on December 13. These showed that Baxter received 41,681 votes to 38,415 for Brooks. But four counties, Greene, Poinset, Johnson, and Scott, had not filed their returns. Following what some called voter fraud, a majority committed by the Minstrels, Baxter was

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declared the winner. In some locations, two polls were conducted, one with the regular ballot box, and a second for those who required affidavits to vote. Brooks and his Brindletail supporters considered opening a second legislature, inaugurating Brooks, and then petitioning the U.S. Congress to resolve the problem. Baxter took office on January 6, 1873, and was sworn in by Chief Justice John “Poker Jack” McClure, who was also editor of the Daily Republican. But revised results of the election, presented as an “Address to the People” by Brooks and his supporters, and published in the Gazette on January 23, 1873, claimed that Brooks had garnered 43,802 votes to Baxter’s 41,394. Baxter also desired to enfranchise former Confederates who were prohibited from voting by the Arkansas constitution of 1868. On March 3, 1873, Arkansas held a special election to determine the result of the Franchise Amendment. With a much lower voter turnout, it passed with 24,304 votes for and 3,694 against. This vote signaled a shift in political climate and was a precursor to the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas. Shortly into 1873, the Baxter administration was encountering its own turmoil. The special election on enfranchisement inspired Democrats to call for a new constitutional convention. Later that year, Baxter successfully quashed the railroads’ efforts to require the state to accept company stock as payment for bonds issued earlier and to impose a tax of three mills to pay interest on these bonds. In 1874, the governor opposed Arkansas Central Railroad’s request for more state bonds. On June 2, 1873, Arkansas attorney general T. D. W. Yonley prepared a writ of quo warranto, requesting that Baxter prove his legal claim as governor. Simultaneously, in June 1873, Brooks filed a lawsuit against Baxter in Pulaski Circuit Court, claiming Baxter had illegally obtained the office of governor. During the remainder of 1873, the courts denied any legitimacy to Brooks’s claims to the governorship. Early in April 1874, Senators Powell Clayton and Stephen F. Dorsey thought Baxter’s moves away from the Republican platform needed to cease. They offered Baxter a federal judgeship and an undisclosed amount of money if he would resign the governorship. Baxter refused any bribes. Later in April 1874, Pulaski Circuit Court judge John Whytock activated the case of Brooks v. Baxter (29 Ark. 1874). Since there was no attorney to represent Baxter, he declared Brooks the de jure governor of Arkansas. Chief Justice McClure then swore in Brooks, who on April 15, 1874, with about 20 armed men, stormed the governor’s office and expelled Baxter. Baxter’s forces retreated to the Anthony House, a hotel about three blocks away from the governor’s office in Little Rock. With the seal of the governor still in his possession, Baxter then declared martial law, appointed former Confederate colonel Robert C. Newton as commanded of the militia, and telegraphed the president for assistance. By April 20, each side had about 1,000 men in military service. Brooks’s forces brought two artillery pieces from Fayetteville, and the

Brooks-Baxter War (1874)

Baxterites found an abandoned Confederate cannon, which they dubbed “Lady Baxter.” Several armed skirmishes occurred in Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and along the Arkansas River. During the next few weeks, over 200 men were killed in the armed confrontations, and most of these were accidental deaths. During the conflict, Baxter’s forces at Pine Bluff sang a battle song to the tune of “Good-Bye, My Lover”: Do you see that boat come round the ben’? Good-bye, my lover, good-bye; She’s loaded down with Baxter men! Good-bye, my lover, good-bye. When they heard this, the African Americans among Brooks forces responded with the following: Oh for the day that soon shall send, That boat again around the bend! The Grant administration, having been embroiled the previous year in the chaos of the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, had recognized the governorship of Baxter. After declaring martial law, Baxter seized a strategic communications center, the Little Rock telegraph office. On May 9, representatives of Brooks and Baxter met with attorney general George Henry Williams (1823–1910), who issued his findings that Baxter should be the governor of Arkansas. President Grant then proclaimed on May 15, 1874, that Brooks should relinquish the office to Baxter. Brooks was replaced as governor by Baxter on May 15, 1874, after attempting to serve only one month. Reconstruction in Arkansas effectively ended at this time. During July 1874, a new constitutional convention convened to replace the 1868 constitution. This new constitution limited powers of the governor in favor of more power for the counties. Statewide offices were reduced to two-year terms, and the legislature required only a majority to override a governor’s veto. In it, whites were re-enfranchised, and blacks were given the right to vote. It was ratified in a special election in October 1874. The dethroning of Joseph Brooks from the Arkansas governorship has been called by many the end of Reconstruction in the South. —Ralph Hartsock See also all entries under Shays’ Rebellion (1787);Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842); Molly Maguires (1870s); Black Patch War (1909); Bonus Army (1932); Battle of Athens (1946); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

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Further Reading DeBlack, Thomas A. With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Harrell, John M. The Brooks and Baxter War: A History of the Reconstruction Period in Arkansas. St. Louis, MO: Slawson Printing, 1893. Thompson, George H. Arkansas and Reconstruction: The Influence of Geography, Economics, and Personality. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976. Woodward, Earl F. “The Brooks and Baxter War in Arkansas, 1872–1874.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1971): 315–336.

Baxter, Elisha (1827–1899) Born on September 1, 1827, Elisha Baxter, merchant and attorney, served as the 10th governor of Arkansas and participated in the Brooks-Baxter War. Baxter, born in North Carolina, moved to Arkansas in 1852 to run a business in Batesville. A Whig, he subsequently served as a state representative and, after passing the bar in 1856, as a prosecuting attorney. Baxter, who was possibly a slave owner although evidence is inconclusive, played little in the political events that prompted Arkansas to secede from the Union. He did oppose secession as both unjust to the federal government and disastrous to the South. When offered the command of a Union regiment in 1862, Baxter declined it. Nevertheless, Confederates chased him to Missouri and brought him back to Arkansas for trial for treason. Baxter escaped, made his way to Union lines in Missouri, and then served as colonel of the Fourth Arkansas Mounted Infantry. At the end of the Civil War, the Republican Baxter held several minor political posts and served as a judge. In 1871, Joseph Brooks, leader of the insurgent wing of the Republican Party, sought the governorship of Arkansas. His strong record on civil rights combined with his platform of restoring the vote to former Confederates, universal amnesty, and honesty in government made him popular among many Democrats. Regular Republicans nominated Baxter. The election in November 1872 was marred by fraud, intimidation, and stuffed ballot boxes. Returns from four counties were declared invalid and thrown out. Official returns gave Baxter the election with 41,681 votes to 38,415. Brooks attempted to overturn the election, but the legislature, dominated by Regular Republicans, refused to allow a hearing. Once in office on January 6, 1873, Baxter immediately took action to restore voting rights to former Confederates. The voters quickly passed the amendment in March 1873, making Arkansas the last state to remove voting disabilities on former Confederates. The voting change allowed Democrats to fill most vacancies in the legislature. When Baxter refused to issue any more railroad construction bonds, he threatened to undermine the Republican plan for an economic Reconstruction. In response, his political opponents revived the case of Brooks v. Baxter. On April 15, 1874, the judge declared Brooks to be legal governor of Arkansas. Brooks and a dozen armed men then forced Baxter to vacate the governor’s office. Forced by the violence to intervene, President Ulysses S. Grant telegraphed his support for Baxter. At the state convention, Democrats shortened the governor’s term to two years, dramatically reduced his powers, and kept his salary low. In 1874, Baxter was succeeded as governor by Augustus H. Garland. Baxter spent the remainder of his life on a small farm near Batesville, practicing law until his death on May 31, 1899. —Caryn E. Neumann

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Further Reading Donovan, Timothy P., Willard P. Gatewood Jr., and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds. The Governors of Arkansas: Essays in Political Biography. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995. Whayne, Jeannie M., et al. Arkansas: A Narrative History. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

Brooks, Joseph (1821–1877) Joseph Brooks held the governorship of Arkansas for about one month. Following a contentious election of 1872 against Elisha Baxter, he forced his way into the governor’s office in 1874, expelling Baxter. President Grant later sided with the opponent as the legitimate governor of Arkansas. Brooks also survived an assassination plot. Brooks was born November 1, 1821, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Indiana Asbury University in Greencastle, Indiana, known today as DePauw University. He entered the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church and was ordained in 1840, at the age of 18. In 1846, he moved to Iowa, and 10 years later (1856), he moved to St. Louis, where he became editor of the Central Christian Advocate, the only antislavery paper published in a slaveholding state west of the Mississippi River. At the outset of the Civil War, he became chaplain of the 1st Missouri Artillery and then the 33rd Missouri Infantry, located in Phillips County at Helena, Arkansas. He then advocated the enlistment of African American troops, and by the fall of 1863, he became chaplain of the 3rd Arkansas Colored Infantry, later named the 56th United States Colored Infantry. After the war, Brooks purchased a plantation in Phillips County, Arkansas, territory that bordered the Mississippi River. In 1868, he became a leader in the state constitutional convention. Brooks demonstrated his ability as a speaker and was determined to expose corruption in Arkansas state government. On October 22, 1868, George A. Clark of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to assassinate Brooks and an Arkansas congressman, James M. Hinds (1833–1868), near Indian Bay, in Monroe County. Hinds was killed, and Brooks injured. Brooks also became a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, replacing J. N. Tobias of Helena, who had died in 1868. In 1872, the Republicans were divided. Minstrel Republicans, named after the musician John G. Price, were led by Senator Powell Clayton. Brindletail Republicans were led by Brooks, whose voice resembled a brindle-tail bull. Brooks supported civil rights for former slaves, and allied himself with the Liberal

Brooks-Baxter War (1874)

Republicans. The gubernatorial election that year was particularly contentious. Minstrels nominated a native Unionist, Elisha Baxter, from Batesville, while the Brindeletails nominated Brooks. Following voter fraud, a majority committed by the Minstrels, Baxter was declared the winner. He took office on January 6, 1873, and was sworn in by Chief Justice John “Poker Jack” McClure, who was also editor of the Daily Republican. On April 15, 1874, McClure swore in Brooks, who with about 20 armed men, stormed the governor’s office and expelled Baxter. The Brooks-Baxter War then escalated to an armed conflict. The Grant administration, not wanting a repeat of the chaos associated with the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, had supported Baxter’s governorship. Using his private seal, Baxter declared martial law and seized a strategic communications center, the Little Rock telegraph office. Following a proclamation by President Grant that recognized Baxter as governor, Brooks relinquished control to Baxter on May 15, 1874, after having attempted to serve for only one month. After being dismissed from the governorship, Brooks was appointed U.S. postmaster in Little Rock. He died on April 30, 1877. —Ralph Hartsock See also Colfax Massacre (1873).

Further Reading DeBlack, Thomas A. With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Woodward, Earl F. “The Brooks and Baxter War in Arkansas, 1872–1874.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1971): 315–336.

Republican Party The Republican Party had been formed in the mid-1850s as the Whig Party started to disintegrate and the issue of the abolition of slavery became an important one for Americans in the northern states. Its aim was to curb the expansion of slavery and eventually abolish it, although there were already many Republicans by the 1860 election who wanted to end slavery outright. During the 1856 presidential election, John C. Fre´mont was the Republican presidential candidate. However, he was not on the ballot in Arkansas, nor was Abraham Lincoln, the Republican presidential candidate in 1860. Arkansas had sided with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and in 1868, Powell Clayton became the first Republican governor of the state. He was succeeded by

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Ozra A. Hadley and then by Elisha Baxter. By this time, the Republican Party was split between the Radical Republicans, who had passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, and the moderates. The former was keen on pushing ahead with major reforms to the nature of government in the southern states that had been in the Confederacy. They wanted universal public education for all, and the ability for all people including African Americans to vote. Some moderate Republicans baulked at this, and there was soon a split in the Arkansas Republicans in much the same way as there were splits in the Republicans ruling in other states. Some of this divide came from the Arkansas Republicans, born in the state, known as scalawags—who termed themselves “Liberal Republicans”; and those who came from the North, who were called the carpetbaggers. The latter were keen on expanding public services, especially to African Americans, while the others opposed many of these moves because of the cost. The Liberal Republicans adopted Joseph Brooks as their leader. He denounced the increase in government expenditure, and his supporters were soon clashing with the governor, Powell Clayton, whom they managed to get impeached. This resulted in Ozra Hadley becoming acting governor, and Elisha Baxter being elected as governor in 1872. Then the two factions of the Republican Party headed to the courts over new legislative moves by Baxter, leading to Brooks trying to seize power. The outcome of this was the Democrats returning to power in Arkansas. Indeed, it was not until January 1967 when a Republican, Winthrop Rockefeller, was sworn in after winning the state gubernatorial election. Since then, there have been two more Republican governors, with one, Mike Huckabee, unsuccessfully contesting the 2008 Republican Party primaries for the U.S. presidential election. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Driggs, Orval. Issues of the Clayton Regime. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1943. Harrell, John. The Brooks and Baxter War. St. Louis, MO: Slawson Printing Company, 1893.

Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877) The Native American tribe, the Nez Perce´, lived in the region around Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho, and during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803– 1806, their lands were about 17 million acres, and they were living peacefully. Indeed, Lewis and Clark noted the help that they received from the Nez Perce´. Ethnographers and archaeologists have identified some 300 sites where they had lived, and their lifestyle saw them migrate from permanent winter settlements into the Great Plains of Montana to hunt buffalo each year. The arrival of settlers saw the tribe members dispersed, and when they were to lose most of their fertile lands in the 1870s, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´ organized a strategic retreat whereby he and members of the Nez Perce´ tribe fled toward Canada, being chased by U.S. soldiers. This was to see the last great battle between any of the Native American nations and the U.S. Army. Essentially, the major pressure on the Nez Perce´ came after the death of Colonel George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Gold had been found in the region, and this had created the confrontation with the Sioux at the Little Bighorn. For the Nez Perce´, it was essentially that white cattle ranchers felt that they could establish open ranges for their cattle in the Wallowa Valley. In spite of serious reservations from some administrators in the region, politicians in Washington, D.C., wanted the Nez Perce´ moved. There were immediate efforts to try to get the Nez Perce´ to accept living in reservations, but most of the tribe’s people did not want to give up their access to the buffalo and their hunting lands, or to the lands where their ancestors had been buried. Up until that point, the Nez Perce´ had never killed any white settlers, in spite of provocations, and were careful in all their dealings with the settlers. Chief Joseph had managed to argue his case against moving to a reservation so convincingly that it was only when orders came from Washington, D.C., that a crisis resulted. A treaty had been drawn up in 1863 whereby the U.S. government commissioners had managed to get one Nez Perce´ chief to sign an agreement to cede the Wallowa Valley in return for a reservation centering on Lapwai village, Idaho. It had only 780,000 acres, but the government did offer schools and a hospital. It had also split the Nez Perce´ into those who supported the treaty and those who opposed it. Chief Joseph the Elder had refused to sign, and his son, Chief Joseph, was able to persuade local officials that it was invalid. In 1871, he had promised

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his dying father that he would look after the tribe’s land and, in 1873, had negotiated the right to stay. Nevertheless, the U.S. government wanted to enforce it, and this involved moving all the Nez Perce´ to a reservation, sanctioning what they certainly saw as a theft of their land. A council was held when General Oliver Otis Howard met with Chief Joseph, Chief White Bird, and Chief Looking Glass. Howard offered them new land, which was occupied by settlers, but the Native American chiefs refused as it would be taking land that did not belong to them. Chief Joseph added that, “A man who would not defend his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.” However, Howard was unmoved and gave the Nez Perce´ an ultimatum of 30 days to leave the Wallowa Valley. While Chief Joseph and others met to decide what to do, news reached them that a Nez Perce´, whose father had been killed by settlers, had taken revenge and killed four white settlers. Chief Joseph had hoped for peace, but he quickly realized that war was about to result. In June 1877, when Captain David Perry was sent against them, they fought on June 17 at White Bird Canyon, and they killed 34. Realizing that the U.S. forces would move on them in large numbers, the Nez Perce´ then tried to leave the region. They tried to seek refuge in the land of the Crow people, but these did not want to risk the ire of the U.S. government. Chief Joseph, Chief Looking Glass, and Chief White Bird then resolved to escape with his people—some 800 warriors, women, and children—to Canada. They were surprised by General Howard on July 11 at Clearwater, and despite being outnumbered, the Nez Perce´ managed to escape, heading eastwards. They managed to skirt around Fort Fizzle, which was being held by volunteers from Montana. U.S. forces under Colonel John Gibbon caught up with them on August 9, and some 89 Nez Perce´ were killed at the Battle of Big Hole. However, most of the rest of the Native Americans managed to escape, heading through Yellowstone National Park. The Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman was on holiday in the park at the time, and was certainly surprised by the commotion. Heading north, the Nez Perce´ then crossed the Missouri River and had almost reached Canada, covering a distance of 1,500 miles before they were cornered on October 5, only 40 miles south of the border with Canada. Near the Bear Paw Mountains, in northern Montana, facing annihilation, the Nez Perce´ under Chief Joseph surrendered to Colonel Nelson A Miles. In his speech for the surrender, he ended it with his comment, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” During the flight of the Nez Perce´, the events connected with it were extensively covered in the press, with the military campaign costing the U.S. government some $1.9 million. During that time, the Nez Perce´ had harmed very few noncombatants, and many political and society figures urged that the surviving Nez Perce´

Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877)

should be well treated. Indeed, Chief Joseph was regarded as the “Red Napoleon” who had fought humanely, and who had had to react to harsh injustices. Half of them were sent to the reservation in Idaho, and the other half to another reservation in northern Washington state. —Justin Corfield See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Wounded Knee I (1890); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Brown, Mark H. The Flight of the Nez Perce´. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Chalmers, Harvey. The Last Stand of the Nez Perce´: Destruction of a People. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce´ and the Opening of the Northwest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Lavender, David Sievert. Let Me Be Free: The Nez Perce´ Tragedy. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Thompson, Scott M. I Will Tell of My War Story: A Pictorial Account of the Nez Perce´ War. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, in association with the Idaho State Historical Society, 2000.

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Indian Reservations The concept of moving Native Americans to “reservations” started to try to prevent wars between Native Americans and settlers. The system started in 1851 when the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, which created reservations in Oklahoma. The plans to move many of the Native Americans stalled during the American Civil War, although several treaties such as those with the Nez Perce´ were signed. After the Civil War, the process of relocation started again as the U.S. government decided to enforce some of the treaties. The whole process ran into a number of problems. The first was that many of the Native Americans did not want to relocate. It involved their leaving their hunting grounds, and also the lands of their ancestors where members of their tribe had been buried for generations. Furthermore, many of the treaties signed between the federal authorities and the Native Americans had involved some payment by the federal government, either in monetary terms or in goods; and in many cases, the money or goods were not delivered. An investigation in 1868 found widespread corruption in the federal Native American agencies, with money being stolen or embezzled. The last problem with many of the reservations was that sometimes after the tribe was relocated, it was found that some of the land was “needed” for other purposes, especially fertile land wanted by settlers for establishing farms. This often saw further relocation, and more consequent problems. There was also often tension with Christian missionaries, who controlled some of the schools and interfered in the traditional way of life of Native Americans. By the late 1870s, much of President Ulysses Grant’s policy to relocate Native Americans in reservations had been largely discredited. Rather than “solving” the “problem,” it instead had seen wars between Native Americans and federal soldiers. As a result, President Rutherford B. Hayes started phasing out the policy in 1877, and five years later, Christian groups that had tried to convert the Native Americans had to end their encroachments into reservations. There were then moves to allow individual Native Americans to own land within the reservations, but this led to some selling their land to white settlers, and the reservations became even less viable than they had been beforehand. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 transformed the whole system by ensuring that land was owned by tribes, not individuals. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Confederation of American Indians. Indian Reservations: A State and Federal Handbook. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986. Frantz, Klaus. Indian Reservations in the United States: Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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Joseph, Chief (1840–1904) The chief of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce´, Chief Joseph’s father, Joseph the Elder, was initially welcoming to white settlers in the region where the tribe lived, the Wallowa Valley in northeast Oregon. However, the settlers gradually took more and more land, and Joseph the Elder began to realize that unless something was done, the Nez Perce´ would lose all their land. In 1863, when some Nez Perce´ supported the signing of a treaty with the U.S. government to vacate the Wallowa Valley, Joseph the Elder refused to agree to this and represented the “anti-Treaty” faction of the tribe. As Chief Joseph related, just before his death in 1871, Joseph the Elder told his son, “my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.” Joseph added that, “I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would

Chief Joseph (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt), as leader of the Nez Perce, orchestrated one of the most brilliant military retreats in history, earning him widespread admiration among Indians and whites. (Library of Congress)

Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877)

protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit-land.” However, in 1877, the U.S. government was keen on enforcing the 1863 treaty, and Chief Joseph was uncertain about what to do. After General Oliver Otis Howard gave him and the Nez Perce´ some 30 days to vacate the Wallowa Valley, Chief Joseph was about to agree in order to prevent war. But as the chiefs of the Nez Perce´ were deciding, they received news that four white settlers had been killed, and they decided that their best policy was to flee, initially to the land of the Crow people, but being refused, Chief Joseph tried to lead his people to Canada. Chief Joseph was a proud man, but he recognized that he would have to use his guile to evade pursuit by the U.S. Army. Although they were involved in skirmishes and battles, Joseph managed to lead the Nez Perce´ to within 40 miles of the Canadian border. At the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, on October 5, 1877, he and the Nez Perce´ were cornered by the U.S. troops under General Nelson A. Miles, and Chief Joseph was forced to surrender. His people were dying in the cold and from sickness and disease. Some later historians argue that Chief Joseph did not lead the actual retreat, which was done by more senior chiefs. However, some of these had died in the flight, and he was certainly in charge by the time of the surrender. By that time, 200 of the Nez Perce´ (originally numbering 800) had died. In 1879, Chief Joseph met with President Rutherford B. Hayes to press his case for his people to have better land than that given to them in Kansas and then in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where many perished from disease. They were eventually allowed to move to the Colville Indian Reservation. Chief Joseph was outspoken about the injustice meted out to his people until his death in 1904, apparently from a broken heart. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading French, Shannon E. The Code of the Warrior. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Howard, Helen Addison, assisted by Dan L. McGrath. War Chief Joseph. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Joseph, Chief. Chief Joseph’s Own Story. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1981. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce´ and the Opening of the Northwest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965.

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Relocation The forced moving of the Native American people was known as “relocation.” This saw them having to move from one place to another—in the case of the Nez Perce´, from Montana to smaller landholdings in the same region, but obviously later, they would have to move to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). In some ways, the actual moving itself would not have many technical difficulties. The Nez Perce´ were a nomadic people, and their possessions, including their teepees, were easy to move. However, they opposed relocation for other reasons. They family lands, and their hunting lands could not be moved. But it was not the hunting land that would have caused the most hurt. The Nez Perce´ had been living in the same region in Montana for centuries, and the ancestors of many of the Nez Perce´ were buried in the land that was then having to be abandoned when the tribe were relocated. One of the graves there was that of Chief Joseph’s father, and Joseph had made a solemn promise to his father to look after and protect this grave forever, and also was keen on maintain the lands where the rest of his ancestors were buried. Therefore, it was these “intangibles” that would present the most problems, and this was never understood much by the U.S. government, who often felt that the Native Americans were being moved to what were, in some cases, larger lands, or similar lands in other areas. The main reasons for the relocations were to control the Native Americans and, in the case of the Nez Perce´, to move them off some of the most fertile land, which could then be used for cattle ranching or—as was argued at the time—for cultivation on a far more intensive manner than that undertaken by the Nez Perce´ or any other Native American tribe. In a few cases, the move was away from land where gold had been discovered. Either way, the land being given in return was always inferior, and without their hunting grounds, the Native American tribes after relocation often saw their societies fall apart. This had happened to so many Native Americans who were forced to live a marginal existence, and the Nez Perce´ would certainly have been aware of this, which serves to explain their great reluctance at agreeing to leave. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Frantz, Klaus. Indian Reservations in the United States: Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Nardo, Don. Relocation of the North American Indian. San Diego: KidHaven Press, 2002. Williams, Jeanne. Trails of Tears: American Indians Driven from Their Lands. New York: Putnam, 1972.

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Surrender Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´, October 5, 1877 The following is the speech of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´ is said to have made following the Battle of Bear’s Paw on October 5, 1877. Although some historians doubt that Chief Joseph ever said these words, others find them consistent with the chief ’s reputation for eloquence. Also, the words are said to have been taken down at the time by Lt. Wood, who was present at the chief’s surrender. Nonetheless, Chief Joseph’s speech, and especially his closing words—“I will fight no more forever”—have become famous in American history. Tell General Howard I know his Heart. What He told me before I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting, Looking Glass is dead. Too-Hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. Source: Mark H. Brown, The Flight of the Nez Perce´ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 407.

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Great Railroad Strikes (1877) The Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 were the largest and most widespread job actions by workers in the United States to that time. In many areas, workers from other industries and crowds of unemployed people joined with the railroad strikers, resulting in disruptions to business that are the closest the nation has ever come to a general strike by all workers. The railroad strikes resulted from the pay cuts and other changes in working conditions made by several of the major American railroads during the economic downturn in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873. In October 1873, the failure of Jay Cooke’s investment banking firm and the related bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad set off the Panic of 1873, the most severe economic recession the nation had yet experienced. Between 1873 and 1875, 18,000 businesses failed, and unemployment may have reached three million, perhaps as high as 25 percent of the workforce. The nation did not fully recover from the Panic until at least 1878. The railroads sought to respond to declining revenues by laying off workers, cutting wages, and running longer trains with fewer crewmen. Early in 1877, the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the largest eastern lines, laid off many employees, cut wages 10 percent for their remaining employees, and announced plans to run longer trains over portions of its system without hiring additional crews. In June, the Pennsylvania announced another 10 percent wage cut, and at about the same time, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad made similar cuts. Railroad workers responded to these cuts by walking off the job and preventing other workers from operating the trains. Historians disagree as to where the strikes first began; it appears that work stoppages by railroaders on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Camden Junction, near Baltimore, Maryland, and at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16, 1877, occurred almost simultaneously. However, as historian Philip Foner notes, the strikes “could have started anywhere along the 2,700 mile length of the B&O,” because all of the company’s workers had experienced severe wage cuts, even greater than the general reductions that had been common throughout the railroad industry. At Camden Junction, firemen walked off the job and were soon joined by brakemen and a few engineers. In Martinsburg, workers took control of the railroad roundhouse and announced that no trains would be allowed to leave the town. By the end of the first week, the strikes had spread to the major rail centers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, and over the next several days, it

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reached cities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and as far west as San Francisco. In many localities, railroad workers not only refused to work, but kept other employees or newly hired strikebreakers from operating the trains. In West Virginia, the governor sent the state militia to force the strikers back to work, but the militia refused to use force against fellow working-class people. The governor requested that federal troops be sent, and President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in army forces. In Maryland, as many as 15,000 people may have clashed with militia troops, and the governor requested federal assistance. Army troops and U.S. Marines were sent to restore order in Baltimore. During the strike, federal troops were sent to several major cities; the government argued that this use of force was necessary to protect the passenger trains that often carried the U.S. mail. Railroad workers were some of the first workers in major industries in the United States to form craft or trade unions, in which workers were organized according to their job specialty. Workers who practiced the same trade made common cause in these craft unions, but often felt little in common with workers in other crafts. Brakemen and switchmen, for example, believed that engineers and firemen cared little about the issues they faced. In any case, these unions were in their infancy in 1877, and the layoffs following the Panic of 1873 had caused a sharp reduction in their membership; it is estimated that craft unions represented less than 1 percent of all workers in 1877. Many of the railroad workers involved in the strikes belonged to no union, and even among the unionized railroaders, the job actions were usually “wildcat” strikes, which were not authorized by the national leaders of the union. Railroad workers were not the only people involved in the mass demonstrations and violent clashes that accompanied the strikes in many cities. Often the crowds were made up of workers from a variety of businesses as well as the unemployed, and large numbers of women and children. While many of these demonstrators had no direct tie to the railroad industry, they nevertheless saw the railroads as enemies. Historian David O. Stowell has noted that in many cities, residents were protesting the danger and inconvenience caused in their communities by railroad tracks being laid in existing streets. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, journalists and politicians sought scapegoats to blame for the violence. Many suggested that socialist and communist influences brought on the strike. The Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), which was the first Marxist workers’ party in the United States, was often charged with instigating the strike. The WPUS had been founded in 1876, and while it played a significant role in the strikes in several cities, it was simply too small and had too little national influence to have had the kind of impact that its critics alleged. The party’s membership was only about 4,500 in 1877, and was centered in the largest industrial cities in the nation. The WPUS tried to

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encourage workers involved in the strikes and sought to provide some organization and leadership wherever possible, but played no role in starting the strikes nationally. The party’s headquarters were in Chicago, and while the party was active on the local scene there, this meant that they were often preoccupied with local matters and unable to offer any national leadership. In Chicago, the WPUS called a mass meeting in the heart of the city’s industrial district on July 23. An estimated 15,000 people attended that meeting, and that evening, railroad workers in the city began to walk off the job. By the following evening, railroad traffic was at a standstill in Chicago, the major railroad hub in the nation. Over the next few days, workers from the stockyards, the meatpacking plants, and many other industries throughout the city joined in the strike. St. Louis, Missouri, along with nearby towns on both the Missouri and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River, was where the WPUS took the most active role in leading the strike. The party had about 1,000 members in the St. Louis area. An “Executive Committee” formed at the party headquarters in St. Louis led the strike effort, and since local government had virtually stopped functioning, some scholars have suggested this committee took on the character of a worker’s “commune” and actually ran the city for a few days. However, this may be somewhat of an exaggeration of the committee’s impact. The strike in St. Louis reached far beyond the railroads, bringing work to a halt at more than 60 factories and along the docks and levees where steamboat freight was handled. Leaders of the WPUS presided over several mass meetings and popular demonstrations. Finally, the leadership came to fear that these meetings might get out of hand, and called for an end to such demonstrations. But the mass meetings provided the WPUS leadership’s only real power, and without them, nothing more was accomplished. Since local police could not stop the demonstrations associated with the strike, 300 federal troops were sent from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and finally restored order in St. Louis. By July 25, the strike was largely over in St. Louis. The Great Strikes of 1877 were the closest the United States has ever come to experiencing a general shutdown by all workers. While the majority of workers nationwide did not strike, there were widespread work stoppages in most parts of the country—only New England and the South were largely untouched. The workers who walked off the job included far more than just the railroad employees. Workers from a variety of industries, including unionized and nonunionized workers, joined the railroaders in the strike. Besides striking workers, large numbers of the unemployed, including women and children in many cases, joined in the mass meetings, demonstrations, and violent encounters that accompanied the strike. The unemployed were no doubt protesting the general economic conditions in the country and their own lack of opportunity. Additionally, many nonrailroad workers, and even many business owners, had long-standing grievances against the

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monopolistic practices of the railroads and the unrestrained economic power wielded by the “robber barons” who headed these corporations. Violence broke out in many large industrial cities during the strikes. Strikers and demonstrators fought against the police, the state militia, and the federal troops called in to restore order. Much railroad property and equipment was destroyed, and much freight was looted by rioters. Eleven people died in strike-related violence in Baltimore, 12 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and over 100 nationwide. Nearly half of those who died nationwide were killed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the scene of the worst violence during the strike. The strikes reached Pittsburgh on July 20. Local authorities were powerless to respond, since the police and local units of the state militia generally sympathized with the strikers. Militia units from Philadelphia were sent to Pittsburgh, because the commanders believed these troops would be less likely to side with the local strikers. When the Philadelphia militia units marched into Pittsburgh, they were met by a large mob of workers and the unemployed. In initial skirmishes with the mob, the troops shot into the crowds, killing 21 people, including one woman and three children. This violence prompted many other workers in the city to join with the railroaders in the strike. Much railroad equipment and property was burned or otherwise destroyed over the next several days. The militiamen had taken refuge in a railroad roundhouse, and when the crowd set fire to the building the following day, the troops came out shooting. In this incident and others over the next few days, another 20 civilians and five militiamen were killed. Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, called for federal forces to break the strike. Scott had been an important supporter of President Hayes in the disputed election of 1876. Hayes authorized sending federal troops and ordered the strikers to disperse within 24 hours. On July 28, Pennsylvania governor John F. Hartranft arrived in Pittsburgh with more state militia and 700 federal soldiers, bringing the total number of troops to nearly 4,000. This large show of force eventually brought order. After several days of unrest, public support for the strike and the accompanying violence began to wane, as people feared the spread of violence and destruction into their own neighborhoods. Volunteer citizen patrols were created to help the authorities keep order, with some of these patrols being armed with weapons from the Allegheny Arsenal. By the time the rioting in Pittsburgh had ended, more than 100 locomotives and more than 2,000 railroad cars of all types had been destroyed. Through the industrial heart of Pittsburgh, a swath about two miles long had been burned, with 79 buildings destroyed. The strikes of 1877 impacted most of the large industrial cities in the United States, with the exception of the South and the New England region. The strikes did impact the Pacific Coast, especially in San Francisco, but there was little strike activity in the Pacific Northwest. It is generally thought that more than 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and were joined in mass meetings and demonstrations

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by thousands of the unemployed. In 1877, there were approximately 75,000 miles of railroad track in the United States, and the lines affected by the strike amounted to about two-thirds of this mileage. Overall, about half of all freight traffic was disrupted, along with some of the passenger service. Strikers often allowed passenger trains to pass unmolested, however, because they wanted to maintain the general public’s support for their efforts. Besides the impact on the railroads, factories and other industrial firms were closed by mob action in at least a half-dozen cities. Nationwide, about 100 people died in strike-related violence, and more than 1,000 were arrested. Generally, those arrested faced little jail time. Many cases were dismissed in the preliminary stages. Workers who were tried by jury often found the jurors sympathetic to their cause, and even judges when handing down sentences seemed to take into account the fact that tensions still ran high in many communities. Just as the strike had begun spontaneously in many localities, it seemed to peak and then wind down after a time in each community. While strike-related activity continued into early August 1877 in some localities, generally July 25 marked the beginning of the winding-down of the strikes. Historians still debate the outcome of the strikes. Railroaders and other workers were able to gain few concessions from their employers. Many railroad laborers were fired for participating in the strikes, but on many lines, participation was so widespread that only a small percentage of those involved were ever disciplined. The WPUS, the first Marxist worker’s party in the country, played a significant role in the strikes in some cities, but in general, socialists were too few in the United States to gain any substantial lasting benefit from the strikes. In communities with a large working-class population of German Americans, there was a brief rise of interest in socialist politics and the creation of English-language workers’ newspapers, but these developments were short-lived. Railroad workers may have gained some sympathy from the general public that helped them in later struggles with management, but on the other hand, the violence associated with the strikes discredited much of the labor movement in the eyes of many Americans. —Mark S. Joy See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Haymarket Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War; Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. New ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989.

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Great Railroad Strikes (1877) Burbank, David. The Reign of the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966. Dacus, J. A. Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States. Chicago: L. T. Palmer and Company, 1877. Reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1969. Foner, Philip S. The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York: Monad Press, 1977. Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Growth. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Jones, Peter, ed. The Robber Barons Revisited. Boston: Heath, 1968. Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934. Salvatore, Nick. “Railroad Workers and the Great Strike of 1877: The View from a Small Midwest City.” Labor History 21, no. 4 (1890). Stowell, David O. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Pittsburgh While rioting and other acts of violence occurred in several U.S. cities during the Great Railroad Strikes of 1877, the worst violence was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The strikes, which had begun on July 16 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, spread to Pittsburgh by July 20. Strike organizers in Pittsburgh struggled to keep the situation from getting out of hand, realizing that violence might turn public opinion against the workers. Robert Ammon, a railroad brakeman and leader of the Trainmen’s Union, led meetings in which he tried to explain the workers’ goals to the general public. Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Robert Pitcairn, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh division, appealed to President Rutherford B. Hayes to send federal troops to break the strike. Scott had been an important supporter of Hayes in the disputed election of 1876, which may have influenced Hayes’s quick and positive response—he authorized sending federal forces and ordered the strikers to disperse within 24 hours. When local authorities tried to send the Pittsburgh police and local units of the Pennsylvania National Guard to deal with the strikers, they found that many of these men sympathized with the workers and would not take action against them. Pennsylvania governor John F. Hartranft ordered National Guard units from the Philadelphia area to go to Pittsburgh, supposing that these troops were less likely to be sympathetic to the Pittsburgh strikers. The Philadelphia militia units were met with large crowds of workers and the unemployed. When fighting broke out, the troops fired into the crowd, killing 21 people, including one woman and three children. The violence between the crowds and the militiamen inflamed many workers in the city, who joined with the railroad strikers. Workers from iron mills and other industrial firms in the area poured into the railroad yards. After the initial skirmish, the militiamen took refuge in a railroad roundhouse. The next day, rioters set fire to the roundhouse, and the militiamen came out shooting. In that incident and over the next few days, another 20 civilians and five guardsmen were killed. On July 21 and 22, the buildings and equipment of several of the railroads in Pittsburgh were burned. On July 28, Governor Hartranft personally arrived in Pittsburgh, with more Philadelphia National Guard troops and 700 U.S. regular army troops. With a total of nearly 4,000 troops, Hartranft restored order, and railroad operations were mostly back to normal within two days. City residents finally grew worried about the extent of rioting, looting, and the spread of fires, especially after fires in the Pan Handle Railroad’s yards spread to nearby homes. Crowds that had formerly cheered looters began condemning them and even stepping in to stop them. Volunteers formed patrols, and were armed with weapons from the

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Allegheny Arsenal. When the rioting ended, a strip of about two miles in the industrial heart of Pittsburgh had been burned. More than 100 locomotives and more than 2,000 railroad cars of all types had been destroyed, along with 79 buildings. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. New ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989.

Railroad Workers The Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 began with railway workers walking off the job in several cities, but railroaders were not the only workers to strike, and in many localities, the unrest was a community uprising including workers from various industries, the unemployed, and large numbers of children and women. The railroaders’ strikes were prompted by many long-simmering issues, but the immediate “sparks” in most cases were wage reductions and the railroads’ attempts to run longer trains with fewer crewmen. The Pennsylvania Railroad reduced most wages by 10 percent in the spring of 1877, and the Baltimore and Ohio followed suit that summer. Railroad workers were some of the first workers to organize craft or trade unions, in which each job specialty or “craft” had its own union. While craft unions fostered solidarity among the members who all had the same job, there often was little feeling of common concern across craft lines. Many of the railroad workers involved in the 1877 strikes were brakemen and switchmen, who felt that the firemen and engineers did not support their efforts for better wages and working conditions. While workers from virtually all railroad trades took part in the strikes at various places, after the strikes ended, both the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers distanced themselves from the violence of the Great Strikes. Eugene V. Debs, who became a Socialist and a radical labor organizer, was at this time the editor of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen’s union newspaper, and his editorials condemned the violence of the strikes. Union leaders generally did not orchestrate the activities of the Great Strikes. In many cases, it was workers who had no union who were striking and keeping others from operating the trains. Many of the job actions by unionized railroad workers were “wildcat” strikes—workers walked off the job without a strike being called by the national union leadership. While it was not only railroad workers that formed the protesting crowds during the Great Strikes, railroads often were the targets of many of those in the crowds.

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Historian David O. Stowell has argued that the uprisings of 1877 often pitted whole communities against the railroads because of the danger and inconvenience that railroad tracks laid in the city streets posed for urban dwellers and small businessmen. Additionally, in many areas, people of all economic classes felt their communities to be at the mercy of railroad monopolies. While railroad workers brought nationwide attention to their concerns and needs, the long-term benefits they gained from the strikes were few. Historians still debate the extent to which the Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 contributed to the development of a worker’s consciousness that aided the further growth of organized labor. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. New ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989. Salvatore, Nick. “Railroad Workers and the Great Strike of 1877: The View from a Small Midwest City.” Labor History 21, no. 4 (1980). Stowell, David O. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Robber Barons The term “robber barons” originated in medieval Europe, where it referred to powerful feudal lords who looted trade caravans passing through their lands, or charged exorbitant tolls for such passage. In the 1850s, the New York Times used this image, although not the exact term, to refer to the business practices of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In the 1930s, the writer Matthew Josephson applied the term to the powerful businessmen who amassed great fortunes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The significance of the railroads in American economic life in that era can be seen by the fact that many of those labeled robber barons were railroad executives—such as Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, E. H. Harriman, Leland Stanford, and Jay Gould. Even those not directly associated with the railroads often had significant ties to the industry—Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills made the iron and steel the railroads used for rails, bridges, and equipment, and oilman John D. Rockefeller controlled so much of the oil traffic on U.S. rails that he was able to demand significant rebates from the railroads for the oil he shipped. Even before the term “robber barons” had been coined, these industrialists were among the favorite targets of the muckrakers, the Progressive Era journalists who specialized in a literature of expose´ concerning the problems in American industry, government and society.

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Industrialists amassed wealth on an unprecedented scale in this era, in part because the growth of truly large businesses was possible for the first time. Advances in transportation and communications made it possible to do business on a national and international level much more efficiently than ever before. A stable government that provided safeguards for private property and fortunes and was slow to embrace the role of a regulator in the economy also contributed to the emergence of the robber barons. While critics like the muckrakers and the Progressive Era historians attacked the robber barons, their contemporaries often saw them in a more favorable light due to the prevalence of Social Darwinist thinking in America. Some saw the rise of such a powerful business elite as a natural phenomena—in the jungle of a modern industrial economy, the robber barons had emerged as the fittest competitors. In recent years, scholars have tended to see that the Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 were more than just “job actions” of railroad workers. In many cities, workers besides railroad employees, and even the unemployed, were heavily involved in the uprisings. These nonrailroaders were not simply protesting the poor wages and undesirable working conditions of railroad employees, but were also addressing the extraordinary power the railroads, and the robber barons who owned and operated them, exercised in America. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Growth. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Jones, Peter, ed. The Robber Barons Revisited. Boston: Heath, 1968. Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934.

Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS) The Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), the nation’s first Marxist workers’ party, was founded in Philadelphia in 1876. It resulted from the merger of four existing regional socialist organizations. At its founding, the WPUS represented about 3,000 members, who were mostly recent immigrants. By 1877, the WPUS had approximately 4,500 members. The party played a significant role in some cities during the

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Great Railroad Strikes of 1877, although contemporary observers were generally mistaken in crediting it with a central part in directing and even instigating the strikes. During the Great Railroad Strikes, the leadership of the WPUS tried to mobilize workers nationwide. But the party was strong only in large industrial cities, and did not have the power to promote a nationwide general strike. In many localities, it played no significant part in the strike. The party was headquartered in Chicago, and the national leadership was preoccupied with the local situation there. In Chicago, the WPUS called mass meetings at two locations on July 21. The next day, the party issued a statement demanding the nationalization of the railroads and the telegraph system, and the eight-hour workday. On July 23, perhaps 15,000 people attended meetings called by the WPUS in the heart of Chicago’s industrial district. The strike began on Chicago’s railroads that night, and by the following evening, no freight trains were moving through the city. Over the next few days, many workers in the stockyards, packing plants, and factories throughout the city joined the strike. St. Louis was the city where the WPUS played the most significant role in the strike. The St. Louis Times estimated the party’s total membership in the city was about 1,000. During the strike, an “Executive Committee” was formed at the WPUS headquarters in St. Louis, which provided leadership for the uprising. For several days, mass meetings and demonstrations swept the city, halting work in a variety of industries. Besides stopping railroad traffic, strikers closed more than 60 factories. The city police seemed powerless to restore order, and eventually, 300 U.S. Army troops were sent from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Even in St. Louis, however, the Great Strikes began to lose momentum by July 25. The Executive Committee called for an end to mass demonstrations, fearing they would get out of hand. Simultaneously, many of the city’s workers began to lose confidence in the party’s leadership. During and after the Great Strikes, editorialists and politicians put much of the blame for the strikes on the WPUS. In recent years, however, scholars have generally concluded that the party simply did not have the strength or national organization to have accomplished much of what its critics claimed it did during the strikes. In December 1877, the WPUS changed its name to the Socialist Labor Party. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. New ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989. Burbank, David. The Reign of the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966. Foner, Philip S. The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York: Monad Press, 1977.

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Haymarket Riot (1886) On May 5, 1886, a riot between striking workers and the police occurred in Haymarket Square, Chicago. Both workers and policemen were wounded and killed during a bomb explosion, the exchange of blows, and gunfire. The tragedy was a climax to labor unrest that had begun to boil over the previous day. The trial that followed was a grave miscarriage of justice. Ironically, the Haymarket Riot, which lasted only a few minutes, had long-lasting effects that were felt for many years to come. Most notably, the riot created a newfound awareness and distrust of socialist, communist, and anarchist ideologies, and resulted in a great setback for union membership and union influence. Work in the factories was hard in the 1880s. Men, women, and children worked long hours, under very dangerous conditions, for low wages. They lived in rundown apartments and saw little hope of improving their standard of living. Consequently, after employers rebuffed worker demands, workers generally went on strike. But they soon realized that these efforts stood a much greater chance of success if strikes were organized under unions. Employers fought back against unions by placing names of suspected union members on blacklists, which barred them from employment. Furthermore, employers required workers to sign ironclad oaths, which stated that the workers pledged not to join a union. Also, employers often disregarded laws that were meant to protect workers’ rights. However, the history of strikes was, perhaps, the most discouraging to workers. This was because, even though the government verbalized a noninterference policy in business, the government had, in fact, historically intervened in strikes on behalf of the business owners. In Chicago in 1877, for example, a strike had failed due to the strong use of the police force. Many strikers had been killed, and bitter feelings against the police still existed in 1886. As a result, many workers began arming themselves for protection, and by 1886, many workers habitually carried handguns. Since employers continually turned a deaf ear to union demands, and unions saw a need to push harder to get the desired results, these growing tensions would come to a head in May. In 1886, unions made the eight-hour workday a priority, and gave Chicago employers until May 1 (May Day) to comply. The issue was discussed at great length in newspapers and in public speeches. The deadline came and went, but

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The police charge rioters in old Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, on May 4, 1886. The riot occurred when a bomb exploded among a group of policemen as they attempted to disperse a giant labor rally in the city's Haymarket Square. Eleven people died in the incident. The illustration, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, May 15, 1886, was titled, “The Anarchists Riot in Chicago.” (Library of Congress)

employers did not comply. Consequently, many workers went on strike, and union leaders organized a meeting on May 3 to assess the situation and discuss the next move. As many as 8,000 strikers gathered near McCormick Harvesting Machine Company to listen to various speakers including August Spies, a German Socialist newspaper editor, who discouraged violence and encouraged the crowd to stick together and stay the course. Fritz Schmidt, a Socialist member of the Central Labor Union, was much more extreme. Schmidt urged the strikers to arm themselves and focused the wrath of the crowd on the workers of the nearby McCormick factory that had not gone on strike that day. These “scabs,” Schmidt said, were taking the bread from the tables of the strikers’ families, and they deserved to be shot down. According to Schmidt, violent revolution was the only cure for the ills of the workers, and he encouraged them to destroy the McCormick factory and shoot policemen if they tried to stop them. After the speech, about 7,000 strikers headed to the McCormick factory to confront the strikebreakers. Coincidentally, the workers were just getting out of work as the angry mob approached. The attackers grabbed stones and began hurling

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them at the men. Workers that had cleared the gates when the assault began ran for their lives as a rain of stones fell all around them. However, workers that had not made it out ran back into the building for protection. The strikers continued their attack by destroying the glass windows of the factory with rocks and other projectiles. About 12 factory guards met the approaching mob at the gates and shot into the air to frighten them off, but the strikers pressed forward and the guards, like the workers, were forced to retreat inside the factory. Unchecked, about 50 of the strikers infiltrated the grounds, looted the gatekeeper’s house, and began banging on the factory doors with crowbars. At this point, a police wagon with about 12 officers arrived on the scene and successfully expelled all of the strikers from the factory grounds and held the mob at bay. The strikers hurled a steady stream of rocks at the policeman for about 10 minutes, and then began firing their handguns. Amazingly, not a single policeman was shot even though more than 500 shots were fired by the angry mob. After a few more minutes of standoff, police reinforcements numbering about 200 strong arrived and returned fire on the crowd. The show of force killed one striker and seriously wounded more than a dozen others. The crowd quickly dispersed and began scrambling in all directions to escape harm. Most of the strikers escaped unscathed, but several were arrested and charged with instigating a riot. The eight-hour day movement had turned bloody, and fear of continued trouble was in the air. A 21-man guard was posted at the First Infantry Armory. The army, police, and reserve police were all put on high alert. Employers and strikers remained at an impasse. Perhaps most serious of all, Spies, who had previously advocated nonviolent tactics, had now made an about-face. Spies was furious about recent events, and he accused the police of excessive force. Now, Spies too encouraged strikers to arm themselves against the police. On May 4, Spies published an editorial in his newspaper, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, which displayed his socialist and anarchist bent and called the workers to arms. Spies accused the business owners of gaining wealth at the expense of the masses with the protection of the government. He asserted that history had proven that all private property was secured and maintained by violent means. So, he challenged the working class to rise up and take what was rightfully theirs. After all, Spies argued, the workers had been making a very reasonable demand for an eighthour workday for over a year, but they had only been met with regulations, the police, and the military. According to Spies, the time had come for revenge. Terror had to be met with terror. To not respond in kind would be foolish, since the “fangs of the beast” would only continue to devour the helpless. Capitalism had reduced workers to mere “slaves,” but they could improve their lot if they remained united. Spies concluded his editorial by appealing to the emotions of his readers. He pointed out

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that poor women and children had recently wept for their fallen fathers, and that the police had even gone as far as to use their clubs on defenseless young girls. Appealing to the workers’ sense of manhood, Spies charged that if they were indeed men, then they must show it. Not surprisingly, many Chicago newspapers and newspapers around the country countered Spies’s arguments and labeled him an instigator of past and future violence, but the mass of disgruntled workers in Chicago fed on Spies’s anger and advice. The unions reacted by calling demonstration meetings against police brutality for that evening. Many meetings were held, and Spies was scheduled to speak at the largest one at Haymarket Square. Consequently, the stage was set for another major confrontation between the strikers and the police. The meeting at Haymarket Square began at about 8:30 p.m. and Spies spoke for about 20 minutes. To the surprise of many in the crowd of about 1,400 people, Spies’s anger had waned, and he spoke against violence once again. He defended himself against newspaper editorials that had accused him of being the cause of violence, and he argued that, if anyone was to blame for the violence, it was the police and the employers. At about 9:00 p.m., Albert Parsons, a Socialist editor of The Alarm, spoke for about an hour in much more radical terms. Parsons said that the capitalist system was to blame for the workers’ ills, and that socialism was the solution. Samuel J. Fielden, the third man to speak, began his speech in the most radical tone of the night. Fielden said that, since the laws did not protect the workers, the workers had to protect themselves. He had been speaking for about 20 minutes when it began to rain and many people went home. Approximately 800 diehards stayed to hear the rest of Fielden’s speech. At about 10:30 p.m., about 180 policemen under the command of Captain John Bonfield and Captain William Ward stormed into the square and ordered the crowd to disperse and go home peacefully. Fieldman immediately climbed down off the wagon platform. Suddenly, a dynamite bomb went off in front of the advancing policemen. Officer Mathias J. Degan, who became the first casualty of the night, was tossed through the air by the force of the explosion, while several of his fellow officers fell to the ground immediately. The bomb inflicted multiple wounds on the policemen. For example, John E. Doyle suffered wounds in the leg, knee, and back; John H. King was wounded in the neck, feet, and arms; L. J. Murphy sustained a foot wound; Arthur Conley was wounded on the right leg; and C. Whitney received a chest wound. A strange silence fell over the square for a few seconds, and then the silence was broken by random police gunfire into the crowd. Many people fled the square as best they could. In the chaos, some of the people were trampled as the crowd scrambled for their lives, while others were shot as they ran. Many of the strikers drew their handguns and shot back at the police, wounding many of them. Just to

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name a few: Lieutenant James Stanton and Jacob Hansen were both shot in both legs. Thomas Shannon was shot in a foot, a leg, and an arm. John K. McMahon received bullet wounds in a thigh and on the calf of his right leg. Timothy Flavin was shot in one leg, while James Plunkett and T. Butterly were both shot in the hand. Edward Barrett was shot in the knee and ankle. J. Simons and A. C. Keller were both shot on the side of their chests, and H. T. Smith was shot in the right ankle. Besides both suffering bomb wounds, L. J. Murphy was also shot in the neck and hand, and Arthur Conley was wounded in the leg and right shoulder. The exchange of bullets lasted about two minutes and was followed by police swinging clubs in an attempt to disperse the remaining crowd quickly. One worker was found dead at the scene, and another was later confirmed dead from his injuries. It was calculated at the time that at least 12 workers were seriously injured during the mayhem, but although the number of civilians killed and wounded was most likely higher than the police casualties, the exact figure remained unknown, since workers carried away wounded friends. Also, witnesses reported seeing many battle-scarred men limping and crawling into drugstores, saloons, and stores to get away from the bullets. Some people suffered collateral damages in spite of the fact that they were not even present at the rally. These innocent bystanders were simply caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of them were just getting out of a show and were on their way home when the bullets began to fly. Just to name a few of these victims, Robert Shults and John Sachaman were both shot in the leg. Charles Shoemaker, Joseph Kucher, and Peter Ley were all shot in the back. B. Le Plant was shot in a leg and a shoulder. John Edlund was shot in the head, and Frank Wrovsch received mortal wounds on his shoulder and both sides of his chest. When the dust settled at the square, the ground was covered with injured bodies in uniform. More than 70 policemen were wounded. Some of the wounds were so serious that seven policeman died shortly after from their injuries. A nearby police station was quickly converted into a hospital, and emergency aid was rendered to the injured policemen. There, a New York Times reporter witnessed blood flowing liberally from so many wounds that the floor was soon covered in red pools of blood that were trampled by those present, which soon made the entire floor red and slippery. Priests were called in and began administering to the suffering and dying men. Surgeons went to work on the men with knives, saws, needles, and thread. Shouts of agony pervaded the room. Family members were not allowed to enter the station. But upon hearing the cries from within the station, they too cried in agony for their loved ones. The reporter had a burning question to ask the policemen. Who had thrown the bomb, which started the carnage? Lieutenant Bowler said that, in spite of the poor visibility under darkness and rainfall, he was certain that the bomb had been

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thrown from the speaker’s wagon. When the reporter pressed Bowler if he was sure, Bowler assured him that he had seen it thrown from the wagon with his own eyes. Seemingly to strengthen Bowler’s testimony, Officer Marx independently gave the same response to the reporter’s question. However, a third policeman swore that he had seen the bomb tossed out of a window from a neighboring building, and yet another affirmed that he had seen it hurled from a sidewalk. Meanwhile the aftershocks of the riot were still being felt in the city. Many angry strikers were still causing havoc in the streets, and authorities feared that the mob would grow larger. For example, about 200 Bohemian sausage makers took to the streets waving red flags, beating drums, and shouting anti-police slogans. By this time, however, police reinforcements had arrived from other stations, and they began dealing with the crowds by firing blank rounds at them. By 11:45 p.m., the crowds had dispersed, and the police moved on to the next order of business. They issued arrest warrants for the Haymarket Square participants. But this was by no means the aftermath. The effects of the riot would gain much greater force during the trial that was to follow and would be felt for years to come. About 200 people were rounded up on suspicion of murder. After questioning, 31 were indicted, and the rest were set free. By the time of the trial, however, the list had been shortened to eight men: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fisher, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. In spite of the fact that the state had been unable to locate Rudolph Schnaubelt, it charged him with being the one who threw the bomb. Later, the sole witness to the charge was found to be unreliable. The defense showed that the witness had told an entirely different story to the newspapers and that he had told several different versions of the story since then. Ultimately, Schnaubelt was never located, and the identity of the bomb thrower remained a mystery. As the trial got under way, Chicago mayor Carter H. Harrison gave orders to the police to break up any gatherings or demonstrations. Fear gripped Chicago. Many believed that the city was on the brink of a bloody revolution. However, anger and a cry for revenge soon replaced fear. The press and the public wanted the guilty parties to pay for what they had done. Also, for the first time in the city’s history, people became aware of socialist, communist, and anarchist ideologies, and they lashed out at foreigners more than ever before. Even the labor unions tried to distance themselves from the Haymarket Affair for fear of being associated with violence. The state sought to make an example of these men. The basic arguments that the state made were that the riot had been a product of a planned conspiracy meeting to exact the revenge that Spies had called for in his editorial. The evidence against all eight men was flimsy. For example, the evidence against Spies was his editorial and his reputation as a radical. Also, the same unreliable witness that had claimed

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to have seen Schnaubelt hurl the bomb also testified that Spies had supplied the match used to light the fuse before the bomb was tossed. Parsons was well known for his socialist ideas, but he had not attended the so-called “conspiracy” meeting, and he had left the square long before the violence began. Several policemen swore under oath that they saw Fielden fire a gun at them. However, Fielden swore that he had never owned a gun or ever carried one. Schwab had an alibi that proved that he had left the square long before the bomb went off, but a witness placed him at the square at the time of the incident. Most damming of all was the fact that Schwab, like Spies, was on the staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Fischer also worked at the same newspaper, was accused of attending the conspiracy meeting, and was carrying a gun at the time of his arrest. However, Fischer claimed that he had left the square before the bomb exploded. Engel was also accused of attending the conspiracy meeting, but, like Fischer, he claimed he had left the square before the bomb went off. Neebe was a member of a labor union and owned stock in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and an illegal police search of his home had yielded a gun, a sword, and a red flag. Lingg was neither at the conspiracy meeting nor at the Haymarket event, but a witness said that he had a habit of making bombs. Clearly, all of the evidence was purely circumstantial at best, but Judge Joseph C. Gary instructed the jurors that a person could be charged with murder even if he was not present during a murder. Gary based his instructions on an Illinois law, which made a person guilty of a crime, which he either helped commit or encouraged others to commit. The jury selection left much to be desired, because it did not fairly represent the accused as peers. While six of the eight defendants were foreign born, only one juror was a foreigner. While the accused worked in industry, none of the jurors did. Half of the jurors were young men in their 20s who lacked the life experiences that most of the men on trial had. Even more astonishing, the judge admitted four jurors that the defense attorney William Perkins Black had been unable to block, who admitted to be prejudiced against radicals in general. Worst of all for the defendants, all of the jurors had admitted to have already formed an opinion before the trial began. Not surprisingly, the “great anarchist” trial yielded a verdict of guilty. The judge granted the men an opportunity to speak before the sentence was read. They all maintained that they were not being convicted of murder, but rather they were being punished for their radical views. Spies, Parsons, Fielden, Schwab, Fischer, Engel, and Lingg were sentenced to death. Neebe was sentenced to 15 years of hard prison labor. Black appealed to the judge for a new trial because, in his opinion, the trial that had been conducted had been a travesty of justice. Gary denied the appeal. In an effort to have the verdict overturned, Black appealed to the Illinois State Supreme Court, but this appeal was also denied. As a last resort, Black

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appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Court claimed that the case did not raise any federal issues. Therefore, it was not its place to overrule a lower court decision that had direct jurisdiction over the case. The entire country read the unfolding events every step of the way and waited for the outcome with anticipation. When the Supreme Court struck down what seemed to be the last hope of a reversal of the verdict, most newspapers applauded and cheered with delight, because the doom of the eight men had been sealed, and the closing of that chapter in American history symbolized an end to the dangers of radical ideas in the country. But it was not the case. The saga was still not over. Once the means of the judicial branch had been exhausted, the Progressive Labor party and other labor unions appealed to the head of the state’s executive branch for help. Before long, Illinois governor Oglesby was over run with petitions asking for his intervention. Oglesby began to feel the growing pressure. Some letters came as far away as Europe. While Chicago and the world waited for the governor’s decision, on November 10, 1887, Lingg committed suicide in his cell. The official report stated that he had placed a piece of dynamite in his mouth, which had blown off half of his face. Suspiciously, however, the report failed to explain how Lingg had gained access to dynamite in his cell. The news of Lingg’s death may have convinced the governor of just how urgent it was for him to intervene, because he overturned the death penalty for Fielden and Schwab and replaced it with life in prison. The governor explained that, in his opinion, these two men were not really anarchists like the other men in the case. The next day, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engle were executed by hanging. Immediately, radicals around the country adopted the five men as symbols of their cause. They posted pictures of their fallen comrades at their meetings and honored them as martyrs. In 1892, Illinois elected a new governor. John Peter Altgeld, like the governor before him, was besieged with petitions for pardons for the three men still in prison. On June 26, 1893, Altgeld granted a pardon to Fielden, Schawb, and Neebe. After having served six years in prison, the men were set free. The governor was sure that he had righted a wrong, but it cost him dearly. The pardon destroyed the governor’s political career. Altgeld was vilified in the press. His competency was questioned. And, even though he had lived in the United States for all but three years of his childhood, he was accused of being a foreigner and a Socialist agitator bent on stirring up social class hatred. Altgeld lost his bid for reelection in 1896 and abandoned politics forever. Employers capitalized on the Haymarket Riot and the controversy of the trial to continue to discriminate against union members and reduce union power. For example, the push for an eight-hour workday, begun on May 1, 1886, was stalled. Perhaps the greatest lasting effect of the riot was that it created a widespread

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revulsion against unions, which caused membership to decline and reduce union influence, because unions became linked to radical ideas and violence in the popular mind. —Rolando Avila See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War; Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading “Anarchists Called to Arms.” New York Times, May 5, 1886. Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. “Bloodshed in Chicago.” New York Times, May 4, 1886. David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American SocialRevolutionary and Labor Movements. New York: Russell & Russell, 1958. Fireside, Bryna J. The Haymarket Square Riot Trial: A Headline Court Case. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2002. Foner, Philip S. The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. New York: Humanities Press, 1969. Glenn, Robert W. The Haymarket Affair: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Green, James R. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. “Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago.” New York Times, May 5, 1886. Roediger, David R. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986. Suskind, Richard. “World Shuddered as Blood Flowed in the Haymarket.” Smithsonian 2 (1971): 52–59.

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Anarchism The anarchism that helped fuel the Haymarket Square Riot in 1886 falls into the broad category of socialist anarchism. This anarchist ideology advocated the use of violent acts to achieve political and social change, but also promoted trade unionism as the best way to organize, overthrow the government, and start a revolutionary transformation. Anarchism during this time was a working-class movement seeking a society based on cooperation and freedom from authority (Avrich 1984, 89). These ideas proliferated prior to the Haymarket Square Riot, but the incident put anarchism in the spotlight, causing public fear of the labor movement and inspiring future radicals. The origins of anarchism in the United States largely stemmed from the ideas of German immigrant socialists and the Socialistic Labor Party, but there were also domestic influences. Johann Most, a German revolutionary, was arguably the individual most responsible for the growth of anarchism in the United States (Avrich 1984, 66). His belief in direct action and violent change spurred other radicals to join the anarchist movement (Avrich 1984, 66–67). Along with two of the Haymarket martyrs, August Spies and Albert Parsons, he helped found the International Working People’s Association in 1883, the organizational arm of anarchist ideology. Yet individuals alone did not give birth to anarchism. Industrialization, mechanization, and mass production in the United States threatened the accustomed lifestyles of American and immigrant workers. Anarchism was a reaction to these changes and a worldview offering a more egalitarian society (Avrich 1984, 87–89). In Chicago, prior to the Haymarket Square Riot, anarchism took the shape of strikes, propaganda, and militant rallies. Newspapers, like the Arbeiter-Zeitung and The Alarm, urged workers to arm themselves and join unions. Spies, Parsons, and other orators agitated crowds with speeches calling for workers to unify and directly confront employers (Green 2006, 97). Strikes throughout the 1880s took on a militant quality and helped create an atmosphere of discontent. Anarchism permeated the labor movement, helping join skilled and unskilled workers in an effort to better working conditions and institute social change (Green 2006, 157). It also caused fear among employers and politicians, urging them to arm themselves for defense (Green 2006, 143). The Haymarket Square Riot, and particularly the explosion that started it, marked the culmination of much of the anxiety and restlessness in society. The bomb-throwing radical became a symbol of anarchism, both good and bad. Anarchist ideology lost much of its foothold in the labor movement as the public viewed foreigners as anarchists and equated violence with all labor demands

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(Avrich 1984, 219). Yet some radicals looked back on anarchism and the Haymarket event with nostalgic admiration. Notable anarchists, like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, viewed the ideas and events surrounding the Haymarket Square Riot fondly (Avrich 1991, 55). Thus, anarchism shaped the direction of the labor movement and future anarchist ideas and actions. —Daniel E. Karalus

Further Reading Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor, 2006.

Bombings Bombings are one of the more sensational symbols of anarchist activity. They satisfied the major objectives of anarchism: the implementation of direct action, the use of violence, and the creation of a dramatic impression intended to awaken the working class and strike fear in the capitalist system (Green 2006, 93). The Haymarket Square Riot in 1886 stands out among other conflicts in the history of the labor movement, partly due to the bomb that rose out of the crowd and helped incite the confrontation. Moreover, the infamy of the Haymarket events helped create a public association between the labor movement, bombings, and anarchism. The use of bombs in the labor movement derived from political failure and anarchist ideology. The inability of the Socialistic Labor Party to make headway for workers through legislation and political office in the 1880s convinced some labor radicals to take another approach. The anarchist philosophy of propaganda by deed was the most appealing option for overthrowing capitalism, and bombings promised dramatic success. They offered enough of a defense against armed oppressors, as well as enough firepower to defeat an army (Avrich 1984, 159; Green 2006, 141). Dynamite became the bomb of choice for anarchists in Chicago. Johann Most, a German activist who helped found the International Working People’s Association, assured a successful revolution if followers adequately stockpiled handheld dynamite bombs in his pamphlet Revolutionary War Science: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun

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Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, etc. etc. (Green 2006, 140–141). Dynamite also offered a sense of courageous manliness and became known as the “great equalizer in class warfare” (Green 2006, 141). When the bomb exploded in Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, it helped forever intertwine the labor movement with anarchism and militancy. The drama of the incident experienced a brief moment of its intended effect by inciting general chaos, but the revolution failed to occur. Police and courts quickly reaffirmed their power through the convictions of the Haymarket trial and attacks on non-anarchist laborers (Green 2006, 203). If anything, the Haymarket bombing failed to live up to expectations, as authorities clamped down harder on the working class. Although one Haymarket defendant, Louis Lingg, openly declared that he made bombs and would use them given the opportunity, none of the defendants admitted to throwing the bomb, and the bomber’s identity is still unknown (Avrich 1984, 159). Perhaps because of the ongoing mystery, the Haymarket bombing remains a popular symbol for anarchism in the visage of the anarchist bomb thrower (David 1958, 528). Despite the Haymarket affair’s immediate negative impact on the labor movement, bombings retained vitality as a means of working-class insurrection. In 1920, Mario Buda responded to the court-ordered deaths of noted anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti by bombing Wall Street (Avrich 1991, 205). Explosions continue to occasionally send shockwaves through society, but bombings remain largely symbolic. —Daniel E. Karalus

Further Reading Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social Revolutionary and Labor Movements. New York: Russell & Russell, 1958. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor, 2006.

Eight-Hour Workday The demand for an eight-hour workday was one of the driving forces behind the strikes and discontent that led to the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886. Founded in the 1860s by Ira Steward, a self-taught machinist from Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement promised workers emancipation from industrial life,

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giving them increased leisure time and a chance to transform themselves into better citizens and laborers. Steward believed shorter workdays would benefit both workers and employers by increasing worker production and, in turn, creating higher wages, employment levels, and economic prosperity. Workers latched onto Steward’s ideas quickly and the eight-hour workday gained widespread support. Several states passed eight-hour workday legislation by 1867, and a year later, Congress extended the eight-hour workday to federal employees. Federal and state officials, however, rarely enforced the new laws, and local politicians and authorities quashed workers’ attempts to strike in protest (Avrich 1984, 43). The legislative failure helped fuel the atmosphere of restlessness that grew to surround the Haymarket Square Riot (Green 2006, 38). The early eight-hour movement also influenced some anarchists involved in the Haymarket affair. Albert Parsons, one of the leaders of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) and defendants in the Haymarket trial, campaigned with Steward for an eight-hour workday in the 1860s. Anarchists distanced themselves from labor demands until the 1880s when Parsons and August Spies, another IWPA leader and Haymarket defendant, saw the eight-hour movement as an opportunity to agitate more workers and spread their ideology of armament and direct action (Avrich 1984, 183). By 1886, Parsons and Spies took leadership of the eight-hour struggle, linking anarchism to the labor movement. The same year, the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions declared May 1 as the start of the eight-hour system, and workers struck across Chicago and the nation demanding shorter working hours (Avrich 1984, 184). The Haymarket Square Riot stymied any momentum in favor of an eight-hour workday. The confrontation created public fear of the labor movement, and blame for the incident centered not just on anarchists, but also on all eight-hour-workday advocates and strikers (Green 2006, 203). Any gains workers achieved largely vanished as employers refused to offer an eight-hour workday and many strikers went back to work (Green 2006, 204). Although the Haymarket affair struck a blow to the labor movement, it also brought the eight-hour workday to the forefront of workers’ demands, initiating a long struggle for shorter working hours. The struggle ended decades later when Congress required an eight-hour day in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Green 2006, 309). In all, the Haymarket Square Riot marked a downward turning point in the battle for an eight-hour workday. —Daniel E. Karalus

Further Reading Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor, 2006.

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May Day May Day, or International Workers’ Day, is a holiday that celebrates the lives and work of the working class on May 1. The first May Day celebration in the United States in 1890 honored the victims of the Haymarket Square Riot for their dedication to labor solidarity and advocacy of the eight-hour workday (Green 2006, 286). Public outrage and sympathy for the Haymarket martyrs reached across the globe, making May Day, and by association the Haymarket affair, an international event and symbol of freedom. It evolved into a commemoration and political tool of both the labor movement and the broader working class (David 1958, 540). Although May Day retains some significance dating back hundreds of years, its modern form took shape when the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions proclaimed May 1, 1886, as the launch of the eight-hour workday across the United States. When employers refused to abide by the declaration, workers went on strike across the nation in protest. Chicago was the center of the movement, where more than 40,000 workers struck and 80,000 marched and paraded through the city. May 1 arguably marked the peak of the eight-hour movement, when unified workers presented a formidable force against capitalism (Avrich 1984, 186). May 1, 1886, also symbolized the solidarity and working-class power that characterizes the ideal vision of May Day. The demonstrations across the nation joined skilled and unskilled workers, multiple trades, and varying ethnicities together for a common cause and remained largely peaceful (Avrich 1984, 186–187). The violence at the McCormick Reaper Works and the Haymarket Square Riot just days later put a stain on the nonviolent protests of May 1, but remained linked to May Day in conventional memory due to the sensational nature of the Haymarket events and transformation of the Haymarket martyrs into working-class icons (Green 2006, 276–286). Early May Day celebrations subsequently commemorated the Haymarket martyrs as symbols of freedom and solidarity in an effort to assert a working-class presence in society (Green 2006, 286). Workers, activists, and others continue to celebrate May Day across the world, but its focus broadened since the Haymarket affair. With the passage of an eighthour workday in the United States in 1938 and the extensive decline of a strong labor movement, May Day celebrates general worker demands and international peace, rather than specific issues (David 1958, 540). The Haymarket Square Riot and trial undoubtedly provided useful imagery and symbolism for the working class on May Day, but more significantly, May Day serves as a reminder of widespread worker solidarity regardless of trade or ethnic differences. —Daniel E. Karalus

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Further Reading Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American SocialRevolutionary and Labor Movements. New York: Russell & Russell, 1958. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor, 2006.

McCormick Harvesting Machine Company One of the ingredients for the Haymarket Square Riot in 1886 derives from events occurring at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, also called the McCormick Reaper Works, one day earlier on May 3, 1886. Strikers and strikebreakers confronted each other, and police opened fire to protect the scabs, killing at least six men and prompting leading anarchists to organize the rally in Haymarket Square that eventually led to the famous riot (Green 2006, 171). Moreover, the McCormick Company’s use of replacement workers and general treatment of employees added to the restlessness that pervaded the labor movement and contributed to violence between workers and police during the 1880s. Owned by Cyrus and Leander McCormick, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company moved to Chicago in 1847 and became a leading manufacturer of farm machinery. By the 1880s, it was one of Chicago’s most profitable and respected factories despite a history of labor negotiations and strikes (Green 2006, 104). Union molders employed at McCormick repeatedly struck for higher wages and succeeded. Amicable relations ended at McCormick when Cyrus’s son, Cyrus Jr., took over the company in 1880 and installed machinery to replace workers, speed up production, and increase profits. Other industries also turned to mechanization, making such a strategy emblematic of the period (Green 2006, 105). The McCormick Company imposed a wage cut in 1885, leading union molders at the plant to strike. Workers won the bitter dispute, but over the next year, Cyrus Jr. replaced molders with more new machinery and completely locked out union workers in favor of nonunion labor by 1886 (Avrich 1984, 188). Union workers responded by turning to anarchist leaders for support. Both found common ground over their concerns about the replacement of men by machines (Avrich 1984, 188). Workers also fought back. Their ensuing clash with scabs ended with police gunfire and bloodshed. It also led August Spies, one of the Haymarket martyrs, to draft

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a leaflet calling for the fateful rally in Haymarket Square and all but threatening revenge (Green 2006, 171). The incident at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company played a mostly secondary role in the Haymarket Square Riot, marking just one episode of a larger manifestation of labor unrest (Green 2006, 149). The skirmish undoubtedly increased the level of anxiety among police and workers. It had its largest effect on the Haymarket trial, making the defendants appear guilty by creating the impression that the circular distributed was part of a conspiracy to commit violence (Avrich 1984, 191). Despite its checkered history, the McCormick Company continued to be one of the premier manufacturers of agricultural equipment, eventually merging into the International Harvester Company in 1902. When the labor movement won the right to an eight-hour workday in 1938, unions were still trying to organize the company and undo the changes from several decades earlier. —Daniel E. Karalus

Further Reading Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor, 2006.

The Circular of Anarchist August Spies (1886) On May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers as they confronted strikebreakers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago. Several strikers were killed, leading anarchist labor leader August Spies to issue the following circular to rouse strikers to anger at the deaths. The following day, at a protest meeting held at Haymarket Square, someone threw a pipe bomb at the police; seven police officers and four other people were killed by the bomb. Although there was no direct evidence that he had anything to do with the bomb, Spies was tried and convicted for murder, and was eventually hanged. Workingmen! To Arms! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police—they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon. They killed the poor wretches, because they, like you, had courage to disobey the supreme will of your bosses. They killed them because they dared ask for the shortening of the hours of toil. They killed them to show you “free American citizens” that you must be satisfied and contented with whatever your bosses condescend to allow you, or you will get killed! You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have for years suffered immeasurable iniquities; you have worked yourselves to death; you have endured the pangs of want and hunger; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords—in short, you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years. Why? To satisfy the

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Haymarket Riot (1886) insatiable greed and fill the coffers of your lazy thieving masters! When you ask him now to lessen your burden, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, to kill you! If you are men, if you are the sons of your grandsires, who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you, to arms! Your Brothers Source: H. David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), 191–192.

Excerpts from the Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887) To support the prosecution theory that the circular of anarchist August Spies and other labor agitators had led to or incited the deadly Haymarket Square bombing of May 4, 1886, the Illinois legislature passed the Merritt Conspiracy Act in 1887. As the following excerpt indicates, the Act made anyone whose spoken or written words incited an act of violence or revolution that led to deaths equally guilty with those who actually committed the act. The Merritt Act was repealed in 1891. Sec. 2. If any person shall, by speaking to any public or private assemblage of people or in any public place, or shall, by writing, printing or publishing or by causing to be written, printed, published or circulated any written or printed matter, advise, encourage, aid, abet, or incite a local revolution, or the overthrowing or destruction of the existing order of society by force or violence, or the resistance to, and destruction of, the lawful power and authority of the legal authorities of this State, . . . or advise, abet, encourage, or incite the disturbance of the public peace, and by such disturbance an attempt at revolution or destruction of public order, or resistance to such authorities shall therefore ensue, and human life is taken, or any person injured or property destroyed, every person so aiding, etc., shall be deemed as having conspired with the person or persons who actually commit the crime, and shall be deemed a principal in the perpetration of the same, and shall be punished accordingly, and it shall not be necessary for the prosecution to show that the speaking was heard or the written or printed matter was read or communicated to the person or persons actually committing the crime, if such speaking, writing, etc., is shown to have been done in a public manner. Source: 1887 Illinois Laws 168, repealed May 28, 1891.

Seattle Riot (1886) By the 1880s, Chinese immigrants, primarily men, had been coming to the West Coast for decades, looking for work and to make their fortune from the “Golden Mountain” that was their name for the United States. Although the first Chinese to arrive in the West came in 1849 as a result of the California Gold Rush, within little more than a decade, significant Chinese communities had been sprung up in many large and small urban centers. Chinese immigrants began arriving in Seattle in 1860, and the size of the community quickly grew to over 300 in Seattle itself and over 3,000 in Washington Territory, with the opportunities presented by the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Approximately two-thirds of the workforce on the Northern Pacific was Chinese, though not all of them found their way to Seattle. In addition to railroad work, at which the Chinese immigrants had already proven their adeptness during the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, mining and salmon canning had also seen the influx of significant numbers of Chinese workers. Much like in other cities, whites in Seattle welcomed the help that Chinese workers represented to the development of their city. However, as jobs became scarce with the onset of the Panic of 1873, opinion quickly turned against the Chinese. What were once welcome allies in urban development became competitors for jobs. The “Golden Mountain” quickly lost its luster as whites across the West began to seek both legal and extralegal ways of ridding themselves of their “Coolie” populations. By the early 1880s, Western politicians had convinced Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first and only law banning a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. In addition to suspending further Chinese immigration, the Chinese populations that were already in the United States were declared ineligible for citizenship. By 1885, the Washington territorial legislature followed the precedent set in California by prohibiting the Chinese from owning property. Popular (white) opinion in the region, whipped into a frenzy by the local Knights of Labor chapter, believed that this was not going far enough. Like many of the Chinese immigrants, the leader of the Knights in Seattle, Daniel Cronin, had moved to Seattle from California to organize a Knights chapter in 1885. Seeing anti-Chinese sentiment as a tool he could use to increase the size and influence of the Knights, Cronin took his chapter of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in a far more

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militant direction than the national Knights organization. By later that same year, Cronin had encouraged Seattle workers to organize a Liberal League to coordinate efforts to oust the Chinese (LeWarne 1995, 15–16). Cronin’s chief ally in the Seattle city government was city attorney George Venable Smith. Like Cronin, Smith was a recent arrival from California, and like Cronin, Smith thought that the Chinese were nothing but a problem and should be deported. Like Cronin, Smith was essentially socialist in his outlook, and saw his position as a means to help create the new city as a social utopian experiment. The more established city leaders, such as Mayor Henry Yesler and Judge Thomas Burke, though less ideologically motivated than Cronin and Smith, agreed that the Chinese had to leave the city, and led the effort to create legal means by which the goal could be accomplished. Yesler and Burke’s approach was not enough to mollify Smith and Cronin, so they whipped up a mob to take the action that their government would not. On February 7, 1886, a mob of ordinary workers, their fire fueled by rhetoric of groups like Cronin’s Knights and Liberal League, stormed through the city’s red light district where most of the Chinese population lived, rounded up every Chinese person they could find, and herded them down to the city docks, where they had arranged for a ship to come and take them all away. The mob was met by a force of police and Home Guard volunteer soldiers at the pier, where they were prevented from taking the Chinese away. A stalemate ensued until the next morning, when approximately 200 of the Chinese boarded the first ship heading for San Francisco, leaving about 150 still in the clutches of the mob. Unfortunately for those who remained, the next ship to San Francisco was not scheduled to arrive for six days. The riot worsened when the Home Guard soldiers attempted to escort the remaining Chinese home. In response, one soldier fired into the crowd, killing one and wounding four. The violence grew so bad that President Grover Cleveland declared martial law in the city. After the state militia and federal troops arrived from Fort Vancouver, the riot quieted down. The fact that nearly all of the remaining Chinese population of Seattle left satisfied the protesters. The violence made headlines in China, and the U.S. Congress eventually paid $276,619.15 to the Chinese government in compensation for the rioting, while the victims of the riots did not receive anything but a one-way ticket out of town. —Steven L. Danver See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre; Black Patch War; Ludlow Massacre; Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

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Further Reading Burke, Edward. Seattle’s Other History: Our Asian American Heritage. Seattle, WA: Profanity Hill Press, 1979. Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Chew, Ron, ed. Reflections of Seattle’s Chinese Americans: The First 100 Years. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Chin, Art. Golden Tassels: A History of the Chinese in Washington, 1857–1977. Seattle, WA: Art Chin, 1992. LeWarne, Charles Pierce. Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885–1915. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. Schwantes, Carlos A. “Protest in a Promised Land: Unemployment, Disinheritance, and the Origin of Labor Militancy in the Pacific Northwest, 1885–1886.” Western Historical Quarterly 13, no. 4 (October 1982): 373–390.

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Chinese Immigrants The Chinese reached America in time to participate in the 1849 California Gold Rush, and from there they moved eastward to gold mining regions throughout the West and in smaller numbers into the American East, totaling some 300,000 prior to their exclusion in 1882. Most Chinese immigrants left the provinces surrounding Canton in southeastern China, fleeing famine and civil strife between the 1840s and 1860s and seeking the relatively high ages that the industrializing United States offered. Chinese immigrants participated in several of the cardinal events of U.S. history: the California Gold Rush; the construction of the transcontinental railroad; and the development of the mineral and agricultural U.S. West. Chinese immigrants faced a great deal of nativism and racism, however, which eventually resulted in the codification of anti-Chinese racism in the 1883 Chinese Exclusion Act (renewed in 1892 and made a permanent feature of immigration policy in 1902). In California, foreign miners’ taxes and alien land laws eventually cut the Chinese out of the gold rush. In other mining regions of the U.S. West, the Chinese had been largely excluded from the higher-paying jobs in mines and Harper's Weekly illustration of Chinese immigrants at the San Francisco Custom House in 1877. (Library of Congress)

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relegated to picking over the exhausted claims of white miners or serving as unskilled laborers. Across the United States, Chinese immigrants faced a racially segmented labor structure that placed them at the bottom. Nativists, many of them members of unions like the otherwise-tolerant Knights of Labor, disparaged Chinese physical features, clothing, food, language, and customs in ways that categorized the Chinese as inferior and as a threat to the white working class. Newspapers frequently carried derogatory references and lurid descriptions of Chinatown opium dens, bordellos, and gambling houses. Predictably, racism and xenophobia led to violence as anti-Chinese riots became increasingly common across the U.S. West. In 1875, the Union Pacific Railroad Company first hired Chinese as strikebreakers in its Rock Springs mines in the Wyoming Territory. The bitterness this caused between the (largely immigrant) white miners and the Chinese festered for a decade before exploding in the fall of 1885, when on September 2, an armed white gang attached Chinese miners, killing 28 and expelling several hundred from the town. Riots in Seattle, Washington; Denver, Colorado; and other regions of the West drove the Chinese to the safety of large cities such as San Francisco. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Penguin, 2004. Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Knights of Labor The Knights of Labor was the first truly national labor organization in the United States. Established as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving Day, 1869, it was a fraternal brotherhood of all producers, irrespective of most occupations,that promoted education and agitation to create a new society based upon cooperation, rather than conflict and confrontation. Under the leadership of its first grandmaster workman, Uriah Stephens (1821–1882), the organization not only followed a policy that to injure one is the concern of all, but also a mason-like ritualistic secrecy. This latter policy was abandoned by its second grand master workman, Terence V. Powderly (1849– 1924), in 1881. The economic downturn in 1877 helped enlarge the organization; by 1879, there were over 23 district branches, known as assemblies, as well as

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1,300 local branches. Eventually, the Knights of Labor became an international organization with branches in Australia, Canada, Britain, and Belgium. During the troubled 1880s, the organization’s concept of an all-inclusive union seemed to offer an effective vehicle for labor solidarity, but Powderly’s continued opposition to strike action gradually weakened its influence. However, the loose assembly system allowed some branches to take part in noteworthy strike action; against Western Union in 1883, the Union Pacific Railroad in 1884, and more spectacularly against Jay Gould’s Southwestern Railroad in 1885. This later successful strike acted as an initial recruiting sergeant for the Knights of Labor, whose membership rapidly increased to 700,000 in 1886. The Knights of Labor actively campaigned for an end to child labor, equal pay for men and women, the need to create worker cooperatives, and a national graduated income tax as well as the nationalization of such industries as the railroads and the telegraph system. They also campaigned to end continued Chinese emigration to the United States, which resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Their part in the protected strike against the McCormick Harvest Company in 1886 resulted in their involvement in the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago on May 3, 1886. The Knights of Labor were not directly responsible for the Haymarket affair, especially the bombing of the next day, and the many deaths this entailed, but it caused Powderly problems. Public revulsion against the violence, which the press extended to the Knights themselves, was gradually replaced by the revulsion felt toward Judge Joseph E. Gray’s punitive prosecution of eight anarchists thought to be involved, men Powderly labeled beasts. His later involvement in ending a series of strikes dramatically led to a decline in membership as more skilled, union-minded members drifted into the American Federation of Labor, and even later into the Industrial Workers of the World. By 1890, the Knights had fewer than 100,000 members, a dramatic decline that could not be stemmed by its own brief alliance with the dynamic Populist Party, or Powderly’s replacement by James Sovereign in 1893, Despite its rapid decline, the Knights of Labor’s universal wish to unite all workers continued to influence the new unionism of the late 1890s and early 20th century. —Rory T. Cornish See also all entries under Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886).

Further Reading Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

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Seattle Riot (1886) Hild, Mathew. Greenbacks, Knights of Labor and Populist: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late Nineteenth Century South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Wounded Knee I (1890) The massacre of between 146 and 300 Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, December 29, 1890, was the sharpest and most deadly engagement in a campaign, adopted by the U.S. government, to suppress an ecstatic religious revival among Native Americans, newly confined to reservations and longing for a return to the life they had previously known. The clash of American culture against the culture of the Great Plains nations, influenced by disputes within American politics and the American military as well as within and between various branches of the Lakota, produced a pattern of distrust, misunderstanding, misjudgment, and hostility, which had a disastrous result. (The words Lakota and Sioux refer to the same people: French explorers picked up the word Sioux, meaning enemies, from tribes at war with the people who called themselves Lakota, meaning allies. Their word for the people who called themselves “white” was wasicun, which makes no reference to color.) What agitated Indian Bureau inspectors and army officers across the Rocky Mountains and western Great Plains was the Ghost Dance, inspired and taught near Walker Lake, Nevada, by a Paiute named Wovoka, often referred to as the Messiah. His teaching was an ecstatic religious revival, borrowing a great deal from evangelical, millenarian, and pentecostal Christianity. Wovoka taught that God had made the earth, and sent Christ to teach the people, but white men had rejected him, leaving scars on his body, so he returned to heaven. Now he had returned to earth as an Indian. The next springtime, the earth would be covered with new soil, which would bury all the white men, or roll them back to the east whence they came. All Indians who danced the Ghost Dance would be taken up in the air while the wave of new earth was passing. Then, they would be set down and joined by the ghosts of their ancestors. The land would be covered with sweet grass, running water, and trees, with great herds of bison and wild horses. The Messiah also taught that sacred garments, perhaps adapted from Mormon tradition, known as Ghost Shirts, would protect the wearer from any bullets. Historians still debate whether there was a component of insurrection in the activities of traditionalists in the Lakota tribes, or whether participants in the Ghost Dance were passively waiting for God and their Messiah to deliver the new earth they desired. The mere fact that all functions of daily life ceased, that

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the rituals of the new faith were outside the control of the Indian Department, frightened agents on the reservations, and alarmed military chains of command. Dancers worked themselves into an exhausted state of self-hypnosis, collapsed, hallucinated, and when revived, told of new visions of the Messiah and the world to come. The vision that all the wasicun would soon be gone was itself considered ominous. Efforts to stop the dancing were disdainfully ignored, met with angry rejection, or resulted in large bands of devotees leaving established communities for remote places where they hoped to be left alone. The military were aware that since settling on the reservations, large numbers of Lakota had purchased the latest-model Winchester rifles, and were probably better armed than at the time of the Little Big Horn battle, which destroyed General George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Not all members of the Lakota bands joined or appreciated the new revival, either. After it was over, Oglala chief Red Cloud, who had not supported the Ghost Dance, said “The white men were frightened and called for soldiers. We had begged for life, and the white men thought we wanted theirs.” Wovoka’s initial teaching was pacifist. He taught that followers of his vision must be industrious, honest, virtuous, and peaceful. He had lived with a rancher named David Wilson and his family in Nevada for many years, acquiring the Anglicized name of Jack Wilson, and was present during readings aloud from the family Bible. He had also worked for two years or so harvesting hops in California, Oregon, and Washington. During this time, he came into contact with a religious revival among Native American nations called the Shakers—different from the Anglo-American faith of the same name. From the Shakers’ mix of Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and pagan traditions, he may have drawn another component of his own later teachings. During the 1880s, Wovoka was a respected shaman among the Paiute. His apocalyptic vision of a new earth came to him at the time of a solar eclipse, January 1, 1889. In October 1890, a Minneconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear returned to the scattered Lakota reservations from Nevada with news of the Ghost Dance. He had traveled west by railroad with Short Bull and nine other Lakota. He had met hundreds of Indians, speaking dozens of different tongues, who all came to hear the Messiah and learn the dance. Upon their return, they taught the dance at the Cheyenne River, Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, located in South Dakota. The venerable Hunkpapa spiritual leader, Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull), invited Kicking Bear to come to the Standing Rock reservation to explain the Ghost Dance. Sitting Bull is reported in many histories as skeptical of the new faith. He may have doubted that dead men and women could return to life. He had heard that agents at some reservations were bringing soldiers in to stop the ceremony. He would not have wanted soldiers coming to frighten his people, nor did he want to risk the possibility of shooting. (Exactly what Sitting Bull thought has to be

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inferred from a very sparse record, since he did not set forth a detailed program to anyone.) However, people at Standing Rock had heard a good deal about the new dance, and were afraid that if they did not join in, the Messiah would pass them by, so that they would disappear at the time of the promised resurrection. Some historical accounts insist that Sitting Bull actively promoted the Ghost Dance, presiding over dances from a specially built lodge 100 feet in front of his cabin. Whatever the motivations, Kicking Bear was invited to remain at Standing Rock, teaching the band living there the Dance of the Ghosts. The death of Sitting Bull was one of the first results of military intervention. By the time Kicking Bear returned from Nevada, both civilian and military chains of command, from Washington down to local agents and officers, had determined that the Ghost Dance must be stopped. If the revival did not incite Indians to rebellion, at the least it would encourage them to resist the ways of “white” civilization. Indian policy at the time was well represented by the stated purpose of Captain R. H. Pratt, director of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The measures to be used were not at first specified, leaving a great deal up to the discretion of the military chain of command, and of agents and officers on the scene. A former agent, Dr. Valentine McGillicuddy, dispatched to Pine Ridge reservation to investigate, advised that the dancers should be left undisturbed. “If the Seventh Day Adventists prepare their ascension robes for the second coming of the Savior,” he observed, “the United States Army is not put into motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If troops remain, trouble is sure to come.” That advice came too late. Standing Rock reservation agent James “White Hair” McLaughlin had railed that “A more pernicious system of religion could not have been offered to a people who stood on the threshold of civilization.” The agent at Pine Ridge, Daniel Royer, loudly instructed Oglala on that reservation to cease the Ghost Dance. Not everyone at Pine Ridge joined in the Ghost Dance, but those who did ignored the political appointee, who owed his job to friendship with South Dakota senator Richard Pettigrew, calling him “Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Indians.” Royer, who had no skills, experience, or qualifications for the position, frantically called for soldiers to prevent what he reported would be a violent uprising, adding that he was “at the mercy of these crazy dancers.” General Nelson “Bear Coat” Miles, commanding the Department of the Missouri from headquarters in Chicago, ordered a total of 5,000 soldiers from various commands into position at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud agencies on November 17, 1889, and along rail and telegraph lines south and west of the reservations. Frightened and offended by the presence of the soldiers, Kicking Bear and Short Bull moved with their followers to a mesa on one corner of the Pine Ridge reservation, known as the Stronghold. This was a triangular extension of a

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formation called Cuny Table, about three miles by two miles in dimension, connected by a path wide enough only to permit one wagon to pass. Three thousand ghost dancers joined them there. Other dancers camped in the nearby Badlands, where they hoped to be left alone until the promised resurrection. On November 20, the Bureau of Indian Affairs directed that all agents at Indian reservations should telegraph the names of “fomenters of disturbances,” meaning those who led or taught the Ghost Dance. An assembled list was transmitted to Miles, where he noticed Sitting Bull’s name among those reported. Miles jumped to the conclusion that Sitting Bull was the primary individual to blame for the Ghost Dance among the Lakota, and ordered his arrest. Agent McLaughlin, Brigadier Thomas H. Ruger, commanding the Department of Dakota, and Lieutenant Colonel William F. Dunn, commanding at Fort Yates, had all recommended Sitting Bull’s arrest in early November. As early as October, McLaughlin had reported that the real power behind the “pernicious system of religion” at Standing Rock was Sitting Bull. Further, McLaughlin reported, inaccurately, that Sitting Bull was about to joint the dancers assembled at the Stronghold. Generally, Miles favored any necessary arrests being made after colder weather and snow had arrived, when there would be less disturbance. Sitting Bull had great popularity among both wasicun Americans and among his own people. All visitors to the reservation wanted to meet him—even those who found his continued prestige a potential threat. He had been invited to the driving of the last spike in the Great Northern Railroad in 1883, and taken on a trip to St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1885, he had traveled with William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show. Returning to his home, he had been a bulwark of opposition to breaking up the substantial lands reserved for the Lakota by treaty in 1868—only 22 of the Hunkpapa at Standing Rock signed the proposed cession of nine million acres at 50 cents an acre. By treaty, the seven Teton Lakota tribes retained approximately the western half of South Dakota as their own. By 1889, three much smaller chunks, separated by land opened for settlement, were all that remained. General George “Three Stars” Crook’s eventual success at getting around Sitting Bull’s refusal, and breaking up the reservation, was a significant background to the despair that inspired devotion to the Ghost Dance. Miles, knowing that a violent arrest of someone of Sitting Bull’s stature would cause upheaval, tried to have Buffalo Bill Cody invite him to Chicago. Cody was one of the few wasicun Sitting Bull trusted, but agent McLaughlin did not trust Cody, and he had the orders rescinded. Colonel Drum at Fort Yates received orders to “secure the person of Sitting Bull.” It took until December 15 to move 43 Indian police, commanded by Lieutenant Bull Head, into position around his cabin. Awakened, Sitting Bull agreed to go, but outside his home found Ghost Dancers and other Hunkpapa living at Standing Rock, determined not to let him be taken,

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who outnumbered police four to one. In an exchange of fire that erupted when one dancer pulled out a rifle and wounded Bull Head, his sergeant, Red Tomahawk, shot Sitting Bull through the head. The Hunkpapa, deprived of their most respected leader, fled to the Ghost Dance camps, or to other reservations. About 100 joined a Minneconjou band led by Big Foot, camped near Cherry Creek. It was Big Foot’s band that was about to bear the brunt of the confused military response to the Ghost Dance revival among the Lakota. General Miles had Big Foot high on his list for arrest. Lieutenant Colonel Edwin V. Sumner, assigned to keep Big Foot and his combined band of Minneconjou and Hunkpapa under observation, reported that without exception, he “seemed not only willing but anxious to obey my order to remain quietly at home” and made an “extraordinary effort to keep his followers quiet.” In the absence of explicit orders to make an arrest, Sumner refrained from doing so. Why Big Foot left his assigned area is not clear. Miles thought he was going to join the Ghost Dancers at the Stronghold. In fact, he went the other way, toward Pine Ridge, where he said he had been asked to resolve some intertribal disputes. Big Foot was known as a good negotiator and peacemaker. Pine Ridge was an Oglala agency, where the oldest chief, Red Cloud, was suspected of being a “fomenter,” since he opposed many “reforms” pressed upon him by the U.S. government, but he never had anything to do with the Ghost Dance. Big Foot said he had been offered 100 horses to resolve some disputes within the Pine Ridge community. It took the army 11 days to find him, because they tried to intercept him moving west when he was moving east. So the soldiers were looking for him in the wrong area. Miles, however, was convinced that Big Foot was one of the key leaders “fomenting disturbances.” Most of the surviving members of the band were women who had lost husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons in battles of the previous 15 years. They danced constantly and ecstatically in hope of bringing the dead warriors back to life. In fact, by this time, most of the routine of daily life had ceased for many Lakota, who were doing the Ghost Dance all day and most of the night. Big Foot did have problems restraining a number of younger men, who if not anxious to fight, were at least resistant to any kind of surrender. Moving his band from Cherry Creek to Red Cloud’s Oglala band at Pine Ridge, Big Foot was riding in a wagon suffering from pneumonia, hemorrhaging and coughing up blood, when the Minneconjou and Hunkpapa were intercepted by four troops of 7th Cavalry commanded by Major Samuel Whitside. The officer told Big Foot he had orders to take him to a cavalry camp near Wounded Knee Creek. The younger men in the band argued strenuously against accepted this direction from Whitside, but Big Foot concluded he could not keep his followers safe if he resisted, and his decision prevailed. He told Whitside they would proceed as directed.

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After some discussion with his scout, a half-Indian named John Shangreau, Whitside agreed to wait until the band was camped at the creek before disarming them. Disarming was further postponed until morning. The Lakota and their military escort arrived at the creek after dark, where the cavalry counted 120 men, with 230 women and children. Whitside took precautions of both a humanitarian and military nature. He issued rations to the band, and as they were short of tepees, provided several army tents for additional shelter. He ordered a stove to be placed in the tent where the ailing Big Foot slept, and sent the regimental surgeon to examine him. Whitside also posted two troops of cavalry as sentinels to prevent escape, and positioned two Hotchkiss guns on a rise overlooking the camp. Hotchkiss guns were capable of shooting 50 explosive shells a minute. Command shifted during the night when Colonel James W. Forsyth, commander of the 7th Cavalry, arrived with the remainder of the regiment. He arrived with orders to take the entire band to the railroad station at Gordon, Nebraska, where they would be shipped to a military prison in Omaha. He added two more Hotchkiss guns to those Whitside had already emplaced. All the guns were in position to subject the camp of Big Foot’s followers to enfilade fire—directed along the entire line of tepees and tents. The officers then opened a keg of whiskey to celebrate their success in capturing the band. Another irresolvable controversy is whether a large portion of the 7th Cavalry’s officers was drunk or hung over the next morning. Contemporary accounts favorable to the military indignantly deny it—the officers had only sociable refreshment. Other accounts say they were quite tipsy. It is equally impossible to establish whether any sizable portion of the subordinate troops had been drinking—favorable accounts say no, just the officers. Some tension arose in the morning. Forsyth issued military hardtack rations for breakfast, then informed the Minneconjou that they were to be disarmed. A surviving Dog Chief named White Lance later recalled that “They called for guns and arms, so all of us gave the guns and they were stacked up in the center.” The cavalry officers were not satisfied with the number or quality of weapons surrendered, demanding more, then sending soldiers to search every tepee. “They brought our axes, knives, and ten stakes and piled them near the guns.” Accounts vary as to whether or how many weapons Big Foot’s band had. According to some of the cavalry, when the band was intercepted the previous afternoon, they were seen to possess a number of the latest-model Winchester rifles, which were definitely not to be found the next morning. Shangreau is cited as a witness that Big Foot himself told his warriors that they would keep the best rifles—perhaps because of their cost and recent purchase, rather than for imminent use in battle. But there was distinct fear that, once disarmed, the prisoners would all be killed. Two guns were recovered after soldiers ordered all the warriors to remove their blankets, and began conducting body searches. While this was going on, a medicine man named

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Yellow Bird began dancing Ghost Dance steps, calling out that the soldiers’ bullets would not penetrate their sacred Ghost Dance shirts. “The bullets will not go toward you” one survivor remembered him singing, “The prairie is large and the bullets will not go toward you.” The assurance proved to be false. The flashpoint of the massacre came when Black Coyote, the owner of one of the last two rifles found, raised the new Winchester over his head, saying it had cost him a lot of money, and it belonged to him. Years later, a witness named Dewey Beard, known at the time as Wasumaza, said that Black Coyote had the gun pointed at no one, and would soon have put it down. Another man named Crazy Hawk described Black Coyote as “a young man of very bad influence, and in fact a nobody.” A shot ran out, possibly fired by Black Coyote, and there was a sound like the tearing of canvas. Accounts from surviving soldiers report that five or six of the younger Minneconjou men stood up, aimed Winchesters at the soldiers, and fired a volley. Then soldiers began firing indiscriminately into the assembled Minneconjou and Hunkpapa. Fighting at close quarters lasted no more than five minutes. Having just been disarmed, the Indians had to flee, although the men briefly grappled with the nearest soldiers using fists, knives, clubs, and perhaps a few pistols. Once out of contact with the soldiers, they were raked by fire from the Hotchkiss guns. Cavalry officers testified afterward that they had repeatedly given orders, when identifying a fleeing group as women and children, not to fire on them. Surviving women and children said firing had been indiscriminate. When the shooting ended, soldiers searched the field for survivors, picking up four men and 47 women and children, who were loaded into wagons and taken to Pine Ridge. Twenty-five soldiers died, 39 were wounded. It is possible, but hotly debated, that most died from cavalry bullets or shrapnel from the Hotchkiss guns. A blizzard raged for two days after the killing. When it ended, a man named Paddy Starr, who had secured a military contract to bury the dead at $2 per body, led a crew of 30 men onto the battlefield. They found a total of 102 adult men and women, 24 old men, 7 old women, 6 five- to eight-year-old boys, and 7 babies under two years old, who were dead. One of the older men was Big Foot. Three pregnant women were found shot to pieces. A four-month-old baby, wrapped in a shawl next to her dead mother, had survived with only frostbite. She had a buckskin cap, embroidered with beadwork in the design of an American flag. Contemporary Lakota sources asserted that many wounded had crawled some distance away to die afterward, and that up to 300 of the original band may have been killed. General Miles, who was on his way to take charge personally at the scene, critiqued Forsyth’s disposition of his cavalry, mounted and dismounted, as fatally defective, making it inevitable that large numbers of troops would be killed and wounded by fire from their own ranks, and that large numbers of women and

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children would be killed. Miles had commanded some of the final campaigns that confined the Lakota to a reservation in the late 1870s, practicing a sophisticated combination of overwhelming force and respectful treatment. Although he had been badly misinformed as to what was happening in the field in 1890, the indiscriminate slaughter at Wounded Knee had upended the tactics he preferred. Kicking Bear and Short Bull were within a day’s march of Pine Ridge, where they had planned to surrender rather than face combat with army troops. Upon receiving word of what had happened at Wounded Knee Creek, they reversed their intention and stampeded a good number of the residents of Pine Ridge along with them. Approximately 4,000 Lakota, 800 to 1,000 of them warriors, were surrounded by a military cordon in White Clay Valley. The Oglala and portions of other bands again decided to surrender; a body of Brule´ among them refused, and established pickets to prevent anyone from leaving. As troops moved closer, while portions of the trapped Lakota were able to slip away and give up, resolution to fight on was worn down, until finally all surrendered January 15, 1891. H. W. Brands observed in The Reckless Decade that “Suppressing the Ghost Dance without triggering violence would have required a steady hand and an ability to inspire confidence among distrustful Indians—talents in short supply among the white officials who dealt with Indians.” The episode of the Ghost Dance and military occupation had impressed upon the Lakota that they were in fact conquered, and dependent upon the goodwill of the U.S. government, without opening any significant beneficial results for either the “progressive” or “traditional” factions on each of the reservations. Might had triumphed, but destitute of any moral authority to build upon, or secure the future loyalty of those subjugated. The deaths at Wounded Knee inspired generations of bitter resentment, and a sense that, however powerful the wasicun had become, their promises were worthless, and cooperation pointless. Eastern civilians who thought of themselves as friends of the Indians fervently advocated that with schools, church missions, and allocation of reservation land into 160-acre farms, all the tribes would become good Americans. The “progressive” factions among the Lakota attempted to cooperate with this vision, both before and after the shooting at Wounded Knee. They had modest advantages in patronage—agents tried to steer allotments of food and other supplies to the “friendlies”—but it was difficult to show that this vision would sustain the people. As wasicun settlers discovered over the subsequent 50 years, the western plains were not suitable terrain for farming crops. Many years, the crops withered and died. Small family farms, so dear to the heart of reformers, were particularly vulnerable. Farming was not, in Lakota culture, respected work at all. When 3,000 cattle were provided as breeding stock, many communities made a promising beginning, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not follow up with sufficient

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breeding stock and assistance to establish a prosperous economic base. In 1973, when the American Indian Movement was invited to occupy the Pine Ridge reservation, the younger traditionalists who asked for AIM’s assistance had embraced a politically radical vision. The most entrenched of the “progressive” partisans had degenerated into a political patronage machine, while life on the reservation remained in a state of cultural, political, psychological, and economic demoralization. Wounded Knee Creek was the obvious symbol, and the obvious location, to reopen a battle long settled by force, but never resolved by opening up a viable road on which the people could move forward, or replace the way of life they had been forced to give up. —Charles Rosenberg See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Brands, H. W. The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Coleman, William E. Voices of Wounded Knee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Hittman, Michael. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Utley, Robert Marshall. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

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Dakota Uprising (1862) The Lakota people who participated in the Ghost Dance and died at Wounded Knee were by no means the only Sioux to rebel against American expansionism in the mid-19th century. By the 1860s, the expansion of the United States’ military and political reach and repeated mineral and agricultural rushes had induced growing numbers of settlers to the West to seek their fortunes. Indian resistance to incursions on their territory was continuous, however, and the series of often costly small wars and isolated military engagements that accompanied the settlement of the West provoked a search for alternative ways to subdue the Indians of the trans-Mississippi West and promote the settlement and development of the West. In the 1850s, the Indian Bureau, recently transferred from the War Department to the Interior Department, determined to reduce the level of expensive military conflict with a new round of treaties and the creation of new agencies and reservations. Among the first objects of this new policy, and under pressure from growing numbers of settlers and the military power of the United States, the Government the Eastern Branch of the Dakota Nation ceded vast territories that included much of southern Minnesota in the 1851 Traverse des Sioux Treaty and again in 1858 with the an additional treaty. In return, the government promised annuity payments and rations. The new Indian Bureau policy was intended to do far more than simply buy Indian compliance, a temporary solution at best; the Bureau hoped that the new policy would eventually solve the Indian question by undermining the cultural distinctiveness and political and social cohesion of American Indians by fostering dependency and forcing assimilation. Inspired by less-than-benevolent intentions at the outset, then, Bureau officials rarely resisted using the withholding of annuities or rations as a cudgel to enforce Indian compliance, and when the Civil War invited further government neglect of its Indian policy, the resentment that had been seething among the Dakotas exploded in an extraordinary outbreak of violence, the Minnesota Uprising of 1864. By 1862, the Indian Bureau had succeeded in rendering the lives of the Dakota Indians of Minnesota intolerably difficult: they had been dispossessed of millions of acres and restricted to reservations by treaty, they faced a severe local crop failure and a dearth of game, and they were further aggravated by the slow arrival of rations and the suspension of annuity payments while the wartime Congress debated the merits of paying them in either gold or currency. Indians’ tempers flared as the policy that the Indian Bureau had intended to use to break the Dakotas instead generated a fierce resentment and galvanized them into a people with a formidable ability to resist. In August 1862, after having recently been confronted by

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a foolishly obdurate agency official who advised that if hungry, they could eat either grass or dung, the Dakotas rose in revolt. On August 17, four young Dakotas attacked and killed five settlers. Though apparently spontaneous, their isolated act triggered further general and coordinated action on the part of the frustrated Dakotas. Little Crow, the 60-year-old chief of the Mdewakanton band, assumed leadership of the uprising, and within a day of the initial outbreak of violence, angry Indians had attacked dozens of settlements across southern Minnesota, killing some 400. Terrorized settlers fled to Fort Ridgley, where they came under siege while Dakotas nearly succeeded in taking the nearby town of New Ulm. Relief was slow in arriving—an overlycautious Minnesota militia of 1,500 took almost two weeks to arrive—but the successful defense of Fort Ridgley and New Ulm marked signaled the end of the uprising, and by mid-September, the militia had decisively defeated the Dakotas who chose to resist. Almost 800, some 700 settlers and 100 soldiers, among them Indian agents whose mouths had been stuffed with grass, had been killed. Some of Little Crow’s followers scattered to the West, while others chose to release their captives and turn themselves in to authorities. Not all Dakotas chose to participate in the uprising, and most of those chose to remain peaceful and stayed on their lands in Minnesota. Called “crocodiles,” “wild beasts,” “red jawed tigers whose fangs are dripping with the blood of innocents” as a result of the uprising, however, Minnesotans cast Indians in general and the Dakotas specifically as an enemy race and determined that all Indians would be punished. Swift and fierce retribution fell upon the peaceful and rebellious Dakotas alike when the government rounded up and imprisoned several hundred. Of the 303 Dakotas initially sentenced to die for the uprising, the state executed 38 on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass hanging in U.S. history. Little Crow and his son initially evaded capture, but were killed by a farmer when they returned to Minnesota in 1863. Vengeance at Mankato could not purge the collective memory of the violence of the event from the residents, though. For decades after, and as far north as the border with Canada, grandmothers vividly described the 1862 uprising to their grandchildren, a cautionary tale to youngsters that even in defeat harbored “bad, cruel, fiendish and devilish” thoughts and were bent on avenging their ancestors. Preoccupied with the Civil War, the U.S. Army initially chose not to follow the Dakotas west, though it did keep pressure in the Indians with renewed attacks in 1863 and 1864. Settlement slowed only temporarily, however and with Union victory in 1865 and the expansion of the railroads, a massive influx of land-hungry settlers insured continued conflict. The Minnesota Uprising, followed by the Sand

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Creek Massacre in 1864, marked the renewal of hostilities across the West that quickly grew in violence and intensity after the Civil War. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Carley, Kenneth. The Dakota War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001. Johansen, Bruce. The Native Peoples of North America: A History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Keenan, Jerry. The Great Sioux Uprising: Rebellion on the Plains, August–September, 1862. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Sioux The people identified by French fur traders and voyageurs as Sioux shared a common language and long-established alliances. There are at least three distinct dialects—Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota—sometimes also used to describe the branch that speaks it; the Lakota, or Teton Sioux, are best known in American history. The Teton in turn consisted of seven tribes: Oglala, Hunkpapa, Sans Arc, Brule´, Minneconjou, Blackfeet (not to be confused with the distinct Blackfeet tribe, traditional enemies of the Sioux), and Two Kettles. Their Dakota relatives in the lake country of what became Minnesota, the Santee Sioux, consisting of four bands, were the first to face collision with military expansion and settlement from the United States into their traditional homeland. The Nakota, also known as the Yanktonais, were closely associated with the Lakota in late-19th century battles against the United States. It is commonly understood in anthropology, and in native traditions, that the Dakota lived on the western side of the upper Mississippi valley, until their traditional enemies, the Ojibwa, armed with French muskets, drove them further west. Emerging onto the Plains in the late 18th century, the Lakota obtained horses, previously acquired by southern Plains tribes from the Spanish, and became masters of the area around the Black Hills and the Powder River country. Historically enemies of the Pawnee, Crow, and Shoshone, the Lakota became close allies of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and, under pressure from western settlement, of the Kiowa.

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Oglala chief Red Cloud is generally credited as being the only Native American leader to fight the U.S. military to a stand-off, securing a treaty in 1868 that guaranteed the Lakota possession of the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), and a good part of what is now western South Dakota, eastern Wyoming, and western Nebraska. At the time, the priority for the United States was peace in the Platte Valley to secure the Union Pacific Railroad line. Red Cloud held out for military evacuation of the Powder River country, the last good hunting ground left, before coming in to sign a treaty. Four years later, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, producing a stream of prospectors and soldiers into the region. This generated a series of renewed military penetration, reinterpretation of the treaty, new treaty commissions, and battles, culminating in the 1876 battle at the Little Big Horn that wiped out General George Custer and his 7th Cavalry. Resistance was undermined by depletion of the buffalo herds and loss of game generally. Repeated military attacks on villages, destroying supplies of pemmican, buffalo robes, tipis, clothing, tools, and horse herds, while survivors ran off on foot, left the Lakota weak and unable to continue fighting. Red Cloud had accepted a reservation in western Nebraska when he concluded hostilities in 1868. By 1877, all the Lakota were at least nominally confined to a reservation, and in danger of reprisals if found anywhere else. Until 1889, the seven Lakota tribes held the western half of South Dakota as their reservation. Far from accepting that annuities in food and other goods were a kind of welfare for dependent peoples, Lakota accepted annuities as promised payment for land relinquished, and loss of hunting grounds; some even thought of the annuities as tribute to the lords of the land. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Gibbon, Guy E. The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Gilliland, Bruce. Seven Council Fires: History of the Teton Sioux, 1679–1890. Kimball, NE: LeMoyne, 1998.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890) Tatanka Yotanka, roughly translated into English as Sitting Bull, was a spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa, one of seven divisions within the Lakota, commonly known to French and English-speaking North Americans as Teton Sioux. Born approximately 1831 along the Grand River, in what is now South Dakota, he was shot to death December 15, 1890, in a prelude to the famous massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Sitting Bull was among the most steadfast in opposing cession of land to the United States, and as such was respected, or at times resented, by members and

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leaders of all the Lakota, not just his own tribe. He was present at the battle on the Little Big Horn River in 1876 where General George Custer and most of his command were wiped out. Contemporary accounts differ as to whether he participated in the battle. Another Hunkpapa named Gall was generally recognized as the tribe’s war chief. In the spring of 1877, Sitting Bull led the main body of Hunkpapa into British-ruled Canada. Hunting in the Yellowstone country in October of the previous year, he had told Colonel Nelson Miles that he did not want war; he wanted to be left alone. Miles replied that there would be no peace until all Indians were settled on reservations. Sitting Bull remained in Canada until 1881, but found game scarce and the Canadian government unwilling to provide any supplies. Crossing the border on July 19 with 186 followers, he was sent to Fort Randall as a military prisoner. In 1883, he was released to the Standing Rock agency on the Sioux reservation, where he denounced a treaty breaking up the reservation into small pieces, opening nine million acres for sale and settlement. The Indian Bureau agent assigned to Standing Rock, John “White Hair” McLaughlin, tried in every way to break Sitting Bull’s influence, to no avail. McLaughlin’s report that Sitting Bull was the real power behind the Ghost Dance revival in 1890 was critical to the spiritual leader’s arrest and death. While he lived, no other representative was acceptable. Invited to speak at the driving of the last spike in the Northern Pacific Railroad, he is said to have improvised in Lakota “You are all thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts,” while an embarrassed army translator delivered in English the flowery greeting previously prepared. In the summer of 1885, he toured with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, but declined to accompany the show to Europe in 1887 because “I am needed here. There is more talk of taking our lands.” Sitting Bull’s attitude toward the Ghost Dance religion is unclear. He appears to have remained aloof, but not unsympathetic. He allowed the dance to be practiced at Standing Rock, but never committed himself to its apocalyptic vision that a new earth, without the people who called themselves “white,” would appear. He combined a firm determination to preserve Lakota land and traditions, with a realistic sense of American military firepower. Considering him a “fomenter of disturbances,” Miles, by 1890 a general, ordered his arrest. When 45 Indian Police were ordered to arrest him, a firefight broke out in which a police captain wounded Sitting Bull, and a lieutenant shot him through the head. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Anderson, Gary Clayton. Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Utley, Robert Marshall. Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008.

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Excerpts from Philip Wells’s Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) In 1890, Philip Wells, a mixed-blood Sioux, was serving as an interpreter for the U.S. Army during its campaign against the Sioux. In this excerpt from his later testimony taken during the investigation into the Wounded Knee massacre, Wells describes what he witnessed of the confrontation between the Army and the Sioux band led by Big Foot. I was interpreting for General Forsyth just before the battle of Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890. The captured Indians had been ordered to give up their arms, but Big Foot replied that his people had no arms. Forsyth said to me, “Tell Big Foot he says the Indians have no arms, yet yesterday they were well armed when they surrendered. He is deceiving me. Tell him he need have no fear in giving up his arms, as I wish to treat him kindly.” Big Foot replied, “They have no guns, except such as you have found.” Forsyth declared, “You are lying to me in return for my kindness.” During this time a medicine man, gaudily dressed and fantastically painted, executed the maneuvers of the ghost dance, raising and throwing dust into the air. He exclaimed “Ha! Ha!” as he did so, meaning he was about to do something terrible, and said, “I have lived long enough,” meaning he would fight until he died. Turning to the young warriors who were squatted together, he said “Do not fear, but let your hearts be strong. Many soldiers are about us and have many bullets, but I am assured their bullets cannot penetrate us. The prairie is large, and their bullets will fly over the prairies and will not come toward us. If they do come toward us, they will float away like dust in the air.” I turned to Major Whitside and said, “That man is making mischief,” and repeated what he had said. Whitside replied, “Go direct to Colonel Forsyth and tell him about it,” which I did. Forsyth and I went to the circle of warriors where he told me to tell the medicine man to sit down and keep quiet, but he paid no attention to the order. Forsyth repeated the order. Big Foot’s brother-in-law answered, “He will sit down when he gets around the circle.” When the medicine man came to the end of the circle, he squatted down. A cavalry sergeant exclaimed, “There goes an Indian with a gun under his blanket!” Forsyth ordered him to take the gun from the Indian, which he did. Whitside then said to me, “Tell the Indians it is necessary that they be searched one at a time.” The young warriors paid no attention to what I told them. I heard someone on my left exclaim, “Look out! Look out!” I saw five or six young warriors cast off their blankets and pull guns out from under them and brandish them in the air. One of the warriors shot into the soldiers, who were ordered to fire into the Indians. I looked in the direction of the medicine man. He or some other medicine man approached to within three or four feet of me with a long cheese knife, ground to a sharp point and raised to stab me. He stabbed me during the melee and nearly cut off my nose. I held him off until I could swing my rifle to hit him, which I did. I shot and killed him in self-defense. Troop “K” was drawn up between the tents of the women and children and the main body of the Indians, who had been summoned to deliver their arms. The Indians began

Wounded Knee I (1890) firing into “Troop K” to gain the canyon of Wounded Knee creek. In doing so they exposed their women and children to their own fire. Captain Wallace was killed at this time while standing in front of his troops. A bullet, striking him in the forehead, plowed away the top of his head. I started to pull off my nose, which was hung by the skin, but Lieutenant Guy Preston shouted, “My God Man! Don’t do that! That can be saved.” He then led me away from the scene of the trouble." Source: “Reports and Correspondence Relating to the Army Investigations at Wounded Knee and to the Sioux Campaign of 1890–91.” Record Group 94. National Archives and Records Administration Microfilm Publications, M983.

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) The Homestead Strike took place from June 30, 1892, until August 14, 1893, and was a pivotal event in American trade unionism. At its height, it saw a pitched battle in the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, between strikers from the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) and private security guards from Pinkertons who had been employed by the Carnegie Steel Company. The steel plant at Homestead owed its location to the presence nearby of coal and iron, and also the railway lines and the accessibility of steamships, which could come alongside on the Monongahela River. As the Homestead Steel Works, it was bought out by the more successful Carnegie Steel Company, which then operated it alongside their other iron and steel concerns in the region. At the time of the strike in 1892, some 4,200 men were employed at the plant. Since 1881, the AA had been organizing at the Pits Bessemer Steel Works at Homestead and in other nearby steel works. This coincided with a clash between the union movement and the owners and management, the latter keen to restrict trade union activities at the plant. From January 1 until March 20, 1882, the union at the Pits Bessemer Steel Works was involved in a bitter strike there to reject the “yellow-dog contracts” by which workers had to agree not to join the AA or any other union as part of their employment contracts. Many other factories were trying to enforce nonunion agreements, and these were becoming increasingly unpopular, with some states already considering outlawing them altogether. After 79 days, the strike had led to an outright victory for the AA, with the management agreeing not to try to introduce any more of these contracts. Although there was often minor trouble at the steel works, another major strike did not occur until 1889. This took place when negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement collapsed. A strike began on July 1, and when the company tried to bring in strikebreakers on July 10, the strikers and their supporters forced the strikebreakers to flee. In this instance, the sheriff tried to restore order, but he was unsuccessful and the AA recorded another victory, albeit at a price. The introduction of new technology reduced the wage rates of workers, but did ensure that all kept their jobs. The aftermath of the two strikes ensured hostile relationships between the management and the union, but the AA considered itself safe although prepared for another battle.

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) Illustration of Homestead Steel strikers attacking Pinkerton men, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, July 14, 1892. During the Homestead Strike in July 1892, union strikers drove the Pinkerton agents from the plant site. State militia, however, allowed nonunion labor, or “scabs,” to enter the factory. (Library of Congress)

Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the Homestead Steel Works, was keen on transforming the operations at Homestead and reducing the power of the union. Publicly, Carnegie had spoken out in favor of the membership of trade unions, but in June 1892 he had appointed Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), an industrialist with a history of confrontation with unions, who drew up a plan to break the power of the unions. It is not known how closely Carnegie was involved in the plans, but it seems certain that Frick would not have done anything that Carnegie would oppose. Frick’s aim was to reduce the costs of running the iron works, and this was to be achieved by lessening the size of the workforce, but more importantly by cutting the wages as had been happening in some other Pennsylvania companies. Carnegie employed a total of 13,000 men in the region, and at this time, his pay rates were certainly no lower than those of his competitors. Figures released show that 13 men at Homestead were employed at $7.50 per day, 45 men earned between $5 and $7, some 1,677 men worked for $1.68 to $2.50 per day, and 1,633 were paid less than $1.40 per day. Many were recently arrived immigrants from central Europe. The previous collective bargaining agreement between Carnegie Steel and the workforce was set to expire at midnight on June 30, 1892, and in February, Frick

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entered into negotiations. If he was in earnest, he was certainly also planning what to do if no agreement was reached. The talks began with the union asking—as they had indicated as early as January 6—for a pay raise of up to 200 percent “over the scale,” and Frick countered by stating that he wanted to reduce the labor force and also cut wages, initially countering with 25 percent “over the scale,” the press quoting figures of a wage cut of as much as 22 percent. However, the wages were based on a factor of $25 per ton, with the workers within the company getting a smaller or larger percentage of the $25 as their pay rate. If the factor was lowered, then the pay rates of all workers would fall. Frick’s offer was $22 per ton, which was based, he said, on the new labor-saving machinery used at the plant. On June 23, the AA then said that they would accept $24. Frick said that $23 was the highest he could offer. By June, clearly Frick was preparing for a confrontation. Indeed, Frick had been building a strong wall around the iron works from January, topped with barbed wire—the place was quickly nicknamed “Fort Frick”—and also stockpiling extra iron to sustain the company through a strike. There were also positions that could protect snipers guarding the plant, and the possibility of the use of water cannons, some using hot water. On April 30, Frick had announced that he would continue negotiations only for 29 days, and then if no agreement was reached, he said that Carnegie Steel would be forced into a position whereby it would no longer recognize the union. Although Frick was clearly acting on instructions from Carnegie, he covered himself by having Carnegie formally approve this statement. By this time, Carnegie had embarked on a holiday at Skibo in Scotland. He seemed keen to ensure that he was well away when the trouble started. When asked by the press, Carnegie said that he had left Frick in charge and implied that he would not be following events but would be leaving Frick to deal with the situation. It was clear that no agreement would be reached by June 29, and on the evening of June 28, the first workers were locked out of the area near the open hearth furnaces. On the following day, as no agreement had been agreed between Carnegie Steel and the union, Frick ordered that the rest of the workers be locked out when they arrived at work the following day. Security guards hired by Carnegie Steel were already manning newly built structures that were now doubling as sniper towers, and measures were quickly put in place to protect the expensive machinery at the works. However, Frick had also, in April 1892, arranged with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for them to provide security guards for the works and any strikebreakers. Pinkerton had become involved in similar tasks before, but they had a company policy whereby when Pinkerton agents were used, they would be deputized by the local sheriff. Robert A. Pinkerton, son of founder Allan Pinkerton, was keen to check that this would be the situation in the impending showdown at

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Homestead. Carnegie Steel said that this would be the case, but Robert Pinkerton wanted Carnegie Steel to agree to this in writing. Initially, Frick had wanted Pinkerton agents to be involved without involving the sheriff. However, as a result of Pinkertons’ insistence, Philander C. Knox, the counsel for Carnegie, finally wrote to Robert Pinkerton and assured him that he had spoken to the sheriff of Allegheny County, and that he had agreed that some 300 watchmen “employed through you” would be used “to guard their [Carnegie’s] property from injury and their workmen from violence.” Based on that assurance, Pinkerton agreed to provide the agents. With the lockout starting, Frick began advertising for new workers in newspapers in the region, and also in Boston and St. Louis. There were also reports of advertisements appearing in the European press. On June 30, the AA leadership in Homestead held a mass meeting, and claimed that the workers had been locked out a day before the contract had expired. Picket lines around the Homestead Steel Works were established, and these were manned by some 4,000 people in shifts, with another 800 men held in reserve. News quickly reached other Carnegie plants at Pittsburgh, Duquesne, and Beaver Falls, where workers walked out in sympathy actions. The AA quickly implemented their plan to keep strikebreakers out of the Homestead plant, and indeed, out of Homestead entirely. This involved using a steam-powered river launch and rowboats to ensure nobody crossed the Monongahela River, which flowed past the plant, as this would be the obvious way of bringing in strikebreakers. Not only were large picket lines established at the steel works, but anybody arriving by ferry or train who could not explain why they had come to Homestead were marched to the city limits and then told in no uncertain terms not to return. Journalists were also given passes to allow them to cover the strike, but if they wrote reports attacking the union, they were also escorted out of town and told not to return. On July 3, the strikers outside the factory saw puffs of steam from the plant with a boiler having been fired by some of the management. However, it was a false alarm. In his sermon to many of the strikers at the St. Mary Magdalen Church, on 10th Avenue in Homestead, Reverend Father Bullion told the men, “Whatever the circumstances may be, you men should preserve order. To keep the peace should be your first endeavor. You must do so if you desire to retain public opinion on your side in this fight. You will lose nothing by remaining quiet. You must obey the laws of your God, your State, and your country. Disorder could result only in harm to you, and I advise you, as a pastor to his people, in whose welfare he is interested, to act prudently.” The first move by Frick came on July 4, when he asked William H. McCleary, the sheriff of Homestead, to enable company supervisors to enter the plant.

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On the following day, Philander Knox, the attorney acting for Carnegie, confirmed this was company policy, and posters were put up in Homestead warning strikers not to interfere with the operations of the plant, but these were quickly torn down. Even though the AA had promised that they would not damage any of the machinery, in the previous decade many factories had been destroyed in labor disputes, so Frick had planned on taking no risks. Confrontation began on July 6, with plans for transporting 300 Pinkerton agents to the plant. One group left Chicago, and the other group was brought in from New York. They met at nearby Toledo, and from there the agents proceeded to the Davis Island Dam, five miles from Pittsburgh. Equipped with Winchester rifles, the Pinkerton agents then embarked on two specially prepared barges (which had previously been used to ferry iron rails), and then taken upriver, where the strikers were waiting for them. Frick seems not to have told the sheriff exactly what was happening, and was hoping to move events along at his own pace. The Pinkerton men were told to expect trouble—hence the rifles—but were only expecting stones and rocks to be thrown at them, certainly not the battle they soon had on their hands. The unionists had been forewarned about the arrival of the Pinkerton agents— the AA leaders had been tipped off that the agents were on their way. The strikers had assembled a small flotilla to try to stop the agents, also blowing the whistle at the iron works, the prearranged warning of an attempt to break the union lines. Soon, some 2,000 unionists were ready for a confrontation, although some believed that the boats approaching had strikebreakers. Some shots were fired by the unionists, and more when the Pinkerton agents tried to land. Both sides accused the other of firing first, with Pinkertons claiming that the first shots were fired from the shore before they opened the boxes of rifles they had on board. However, the New York Times reported that it was the Pinkerton men who opened fire as eight of them came down the gangplank from the barges. As they started to disembark, a striking mill worker, William Foy, appeared in front of them, and they shot him dead. Straight away, the strikers returned fire and shot dead two of the Pinkerton agents and injured the other six, who retreated back to the barge. It was not long before Frederick Heinde, the head of the Pinkerton agents, was injured, as William Foy’s body was taken away. Then the Pinkerton agents, with their rifles distributed, opened fire into a crowd of unionists and their families. Another striker was shot dead and 11 wounded. Then came volleys from the unionists, injuring six more Pinkerton agents. By this point, the unionists were taking cover behind a nearby pile of scrap iron and anything else that provided protection, while the Pinkerton agents remained on their barges (which had been heavily reinforced with steel plates on the inside) and returned fire, although some of the agents later claimed that the boats were

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badly equipped for firing. There came a lull, but tension was very high as families of strikers started building barricades and screaming abuse at the Pinkerton agents. At 6:00 a.m., after another standoff, John McLuckie, the burgess of Homestead, urged the local people to gather to rally and also to stop shooting at the Pinkerton agents. By this time, the unionists had established a 20-pounder brass cannon, which they fired at the barges with the Pinkerton agents, who at 8:00 a.m. tried again to disembark. At this stage, both sides started firing wildly at each other again, and many of the Pinkerton agents, newly recruited to the company, threatened to leave, some keen to try their luck swimming away. In this shoot-out, another Pinkerton agent was shot dead, and a raft soaked with gasoline was set on fire and sent in the direction of the Pinkerton barges. However, it did not reach the barges, and the fire was extinguished as it sank. There were also strikers who threw dynamite at the barges, and some fireworks that had been left over from the recent July 4 festivities. Facing another possible mutiny, the Pinkerton captains only narrowly prevented some of their employees from trying to escape. While this was happening, the international president of AA, William Weihe, had asked the sheriff to arrange a meeting with Frick. Frick, however, was working on two scenarios. One was that the Pinkerton agents would be able to make it into the plant, and the other was that the situation would get so out of control that the Pennsylvania governor, Robert E. Pattison, would be forced to call out the state militia. Pattison, however, did not wish to intervene unless it was absolutely necessary, and he told the sheriff, McCleary, to try to get matters under control himself. It was soon clear that the Pinkerton agents would not be able to land—they had failed in their three attempts to disembark, and the unionists had seized every vantage point to shoot at them. Some of the agents suggested that they surrender. They had plenty of food on board, and the barges had been filled with bunks and cooking equipment in case of a long siege. However the steamer Little Bill, which had towed the barges into position, had been forced to leave to take away some of the injured agents, and it was not able to return to tow away the barges. They hoisted a white handkerchief three times, but it was shot off each time, and the strikers started dumping oil in the river and setting it on fire in the hope of burning the barges. Weihe urged that the agents be allowed to surrender, but some shouted him down, saying “We’ll kill them like dogs!” and “They shall have no mercy.” Hugh O’Donnell, who was the head of the union strike committee, having worked as a heater in the plant, demanded that the agents be charged with murder. Eventually, at 5:00 p.m., two Pinkerton agents, with a white flag, negotiated the surrender. The Pinkerton agents disembarked and walked through a large crowd of unionists and their supporters while the barges were burned. They literally “ran the gauntlet” with people throwing stones and sand at them, one beaten unconscious. The agents

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were then taken to the local opera house, which was to double as a temporary jail while negotiations started for their release. McCleary finally managed to get an agreement by which the agents would be allowed to leave by a special train, which was sent to take them away from Homestead. Overall, three Pinkerton agents had been killed, and another subsequently died of wounds. About 100—a third of all the agents sent there—were badly injured. Indeed, some 28 Pinkerton agents were too severely injured to leave on that special train, and they were taken to the West Penn Hospital, from where they were evacuated to New York by train that night. An inquest was held on July 6 at the West Penn Hospital into T. J. Conners, one of the Pinkerton agents who had been killed. He was described as about 30 years of age, and he died “from shock and exhaustion due to a gunshot wound in the right arm which severed the femoral [sic] artery, received about 8 o’clock am while in a model barge employed as a Pinkerton guard to guard the property of Carnegie-Phipps and Co., Steel works, Mifflin Township, and being shot by a ball from an unlawful assembly which had assembled on said property to attack the landing of said barges and we find said shooting was done by a party or parties unknown with felonious intent and we recommend that said unlawful assembly be certified to the September sessions of the Grand Jury.” The unionists were not without their supporters. Senator John M. Palmer from Illinois made a much-publicized speech at this juncture, in which he blamed Pinkertons and said that “they were all outcasts and that it was a service to humanity to kill them.” Palmer, who had contested the Democratic primaries for the presidential election, was clearly positioning himself with the union movement— and this certainly helped his candidacy in 1896, when he stood as a candidate for the national Democratic Party, but gained only 1 percent of the vote. However, that was all in the future. By this time, Governor Pattison had clearly seen that things were getting out of hand. He had ordered the Pennsylvania National Guard to muster on July 10, but did not want to send them into Homestead for fear that a full-scale battle might take place and many people might be killed. However, he felt forced to act, and he sent the Pennsylvania state militia to the nearby Munhall railroad station on July 12. They had been expected at another train station in Homestead where strikers were waiting, and their arrival surprised the unionists, allowing the militia to force their way into the plant. This enabled strikebreakers—a number of whom were African Americans, adding a racial dimension to the strike—to be brought in to start work and get the steel mill up and running again. The mill furnaces were relit on July 15, and militiamen kept at bay unionists who tried to enter the plant to sabotage equipment. The AA, realizing that they were losing control of the situation, met with the politician Whitelaw Reid, who was standing in the U.S. presidential election as

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the Republican candidate for the vice presidency. Reid tried to get Frick to restart negotiations with the AA—worried that the strike and its political repercussions might upset the election hopes of their candidate Benjamin Harrison (who was later defeated by Grover Cleveland)—but Frick refused as he had won the first part of the confrontation and was already preparing his next moves. These saw 16 of the leading unionists charged with conspiracy, riot, and murder. They were all jailed for a night and had to post a $10,000 bond. Several company executives were then charged with murder by the AA, and these individuals also had to post a $10,000 bond. However, with the militia in control of Homestead, it seemed clear that Frick was winning. Then, on July 23, Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), an anarchist originally from Vilnius, Russia (now Lithuania), and with no connection to the strike, managed to get to meet Frick, shot him twice, and then stabbed him. Frick survived, and Berkman was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison, serving 14 years before being released. Berkman had hoped to focus the attention of the country on the Homestead Strike, and he ended up doing so, but his actions caused widespread sympathy for Frick across the country. The unionists had to admit defeat, and by August 12, Carnegie Steel was able to claim publicly that production had resumed at full capacity. The AA tried to get a boycott of Carnegie products, but the strike was collapsing fast. Many newly arrived immigrants were working at the steel plant, and these were gradually joined by returning workers. The AA, which had entered the confrontation with large strike funds, was nearly bankrupted. On November 20, they voted by 101–91 to return to work. Only four workers were eventually charged, three of whom were found innocent of all charges. However the other, Hugh Dempsey, the leader of the Knights of Labor District Assembly, was found guilty of trying to poison strikebreakers at the plant and served seven years in prison. Curiously, the sympathy strikes at Beaver Falls also lasted until November, and that at Union Mills lasted until August 14, 1893. The events at Homestead saw a full-scale battle between unionists and Pinkerton agents, capturing the attention of the newspapers around the United States. But it also led to the collapse of the AA as a major player in steel works. Membership fell, and gradually other companies were able to follow the leaders of Carnegie Steel in reducing union power and eventually imposing pay cuts similar to those at Homestead. The Bost building in Homestead, which was the AA headquarters during the strike, was listed as a National Historic Landmark, and now serves as a museum preserving items to do with the strike and also the steel industry in the region. —Justin Corfield

Homestead Strike (1892–1893) See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Bridge, James H. The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: A Romance of Millions. New York: The Aldine Book Company, 1903. Burgoyne, Arthur Gordon. Homestead: Complete History of the Struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Pittsburgh, PA: Press of Rawsthorne Engraving and Printing Co., 1893. Harvey, George. Henry Clay Frick: The Man. New York: Beard Books, 1920. Horan, James D., and Howard Swiggett. The Pinkerton Story. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952. Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1890–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Rayback, Joseph G. A History of American Labor. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Stowell, Myron R. Fort Frick, or the Siege of Homestead: History of the Famous Struggle between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the Carnegie Steel Company (Limited) of Pittsburg, Pa. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburg Printing Co, 1893.

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Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) This labor union was formed on August 5, 1876, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from a merger of the United Sons of Vulcan (which had about 3,500 members), and the Heaters and Rollers National Association (which had 600 members). Their first president was Joseph Bishop of Pittsburgh, and their aim was to form a trade union which would represent all iron and steel makers in the United States and Canada, although they drew most of their support from their members in Pennsylvania. The AA quickly expanded its influence in large factories in the area around Pittsburgh before the Homestead Strike and had managed to gain higher wages rates for its workers (as well as an end to “yellow-dog contracts”), which caused its membership to quadruple from the 4,100 at its inception. The AA sanctioned and organized a number of strikes, and initially they had much success, which further increased their membership. They relied on the threat of strikes not only in factories and plants in dispute, but also with sympathy action at other factories and plants. In 1880, John Jarrett of Sharon, Pennsylvania, was elected as their new president, and under his leadership and that of his successor Lee, the union came effectively to control some worksites. To help ensure that strikes were effective, the AA started meticulously planning their actions, relying on large numbers of strikers and families, unconditional support from its members, and a strike fund to sustain the workers during a long industrial dispute. They also cultivated political links, including with members of the Republican Party. However, for the most part, their success came because of the inaction and unpreparedness of the steel company management. It was because of better planning by John Frick that they lost the Homestead Strike. The Homestead Strike damaged the AA. A number of steel companies refused to sign contracts with the union during the strike, and the AA also faced much opposition especially at plants run by Carnegie Steel, such as the Duquesne steelworks and the Edgar Thomson works. Indeed, Frick was able to prevent its organizing at Homestead after the strike. The AA later merged with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee to form the United Steelworkers. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Brody, David. Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969.

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) Brooks, Robert R. R. As Steel Goes: Unionism in a Basic Industry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940. Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1890–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Robinson, Jesse S. The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1920. Rose, James D. Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Carnegie Steel This company produced steel and was established by Andrew Carnegie (1835– 1919) to run his steel mills in Pennsylvania, with most located near the industrial center, Pittsburgh. Carnegie himself had been born in Scotland and came to the United States as a teenager. He rapidly came to see the great business opportunities in the United States and, after taking on menial jobs, taught himself through reading and then started work for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. During and after the American Civil War, there was a great demand for iron, and Carnegie became heavily involved, first in producing cars for the railroad and then also diversifying to include petroleum. However, iron and steel remained at the core of his business. By the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel had emerged as the largest single manufacturer of both pig iron and steel rails in the world. In 1889, for the first time, U.S. production of steel—much of it by Carnegie Steel—exceeded that of the United Kingdom; and Andrew Carnegie, who had grown up in hardship, had emerged as one of the wealthiest people in the world. Carnegie continued to expand, and the Homestead Steel Works was a part of this expansion. As an owner of the company, Carnegie appointed managers whom he trusted implicitly. One of these was Henry Clay Frick. Thus, although Carnegie owned the company, it was Frick who became involved in the Homestead Strike while Carnegie himself vacationed in Scotland, keeping himself extremely distant from what was happening at Homestead. Whether Carnegie had agreed with Frick’s course of action and then absented himself is not known, but it seems likely that Frick would not engineer such a confrontation unless he had the backing of the company’s owner. Certainly Carnegie himself was not ideologically against trade unions. From his humble origins, he had empathized with the “working man,” and the wages he paid his workers were certainly competitive with other similar industries.

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In 1901, with Carnegie deciding to retire, Carnegie Steel was transformed into the U.S. Steel Corporation in what was, at that time, the biggest personal commercial transaction. The new company was the first ever to be capitalized at over $1 billion, and Carnegie took his $225 million share in the form of bonds, spending the remaining 18 years of his life as a beneficent philanthropist. He donated heavily to libraries around the world and also established the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Bridge, James Howard. The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: A Romance of Millions. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Carnegie, Andrew. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Edited by John C. Van Dyke. London: Constable, 1920. Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich. Hollywood, CA: Wilshire Book Co., 1973.

Lockouts The Homestead Strike was, strictly speaking, a lockout that became a strike. While the latter is an act by the workforce whereby they walk “off the job” or the next shift does not return to work, the former involves management locking out the workers to achieve their demands. With the Homestead Strike, there had been negotiations between the management and the unions for many months, and at midnight on June 30–July 1, 1892, the collective bargaining agreement was set to expire. However, Henry Clay Frick, the manager, locked out the workforce on the previous day. This involved closing the plant and refusing to let the workers turn up for work on the morning of June 30. This is what made it technically a lockout rather than a strike, although the workers refusing to come to work under new conditions from July 1 onward turned it into a strike. The reason for the lockout—the term had emerged in about 1860—was basically because Frick wanted to avoid a situation in which the workforce was able to disable, sabotage, or vandalize the machinery. This had happened in other work sites, and Frick had to prepare for the possibility of it happening at Homestead and costing the company much money in trying to make good any damage. Moreover, if any of this happened, it is likely that this would be on the afternoon of June 30. Thus, the lockout was essentially a preemptive move by Frick that took the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers by surprise. It is clear that Frick

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had prepared himself for this many months in advance, using the lockout as a way of positioning the company at the start of the inevitable conflict. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Harvey, George. Henry Clay Frick: The Man. New York: Beard Books, 1920. Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1890–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Rayback, Joseph G. A History of American Labor. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1966.

Pinkerton National Detective Agency This company was established by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 and was formed for the provision of private security guards. Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) had been born in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a local police sergeant. However when he was 10, his father was badly injured during a riot and was unable to walk again. He died four years later, and the young Pinkerton had to find work, eventually taking part in Chartist demonstrations and then fleeing Great Britain for the United States. He found work with the police in Chicago but then decided to set up his own security company, which had the task of protecting trains. In 1861, Pinkerton agents managed to foil an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln when he was heading to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration, and were soon employed providing protection for the president. They worked during the American Civil War collecting intelligence. During the 1880s, the company was said to have had more agents than there were soldiers then in the U.S. Army. During the 1880s, Pinkertons were used by some of the big industrial companies to break strikes. The first time this had happened had been as early as September 1866 when they were involved to break a strike at Braidwood, Illinois. By the time of the Homestead Strike, they had already been involved in about seventy other actions. The role of Pinkertons was to provide protection for private property and for the lives of people trying to get to work. They were instructed never to actually work as strikebreakers—i.e., those taking the place in the workforce of those on strike, but only to protect those doing so, as well as the factory or works from vandalism or sabotage. They were also to be deputized by a sheriff. There was a good sense of discipline among their agents, and from 1866 until 1892, apparently only two men had been shot dead by Pinkerton agents—one, it was claimed, accidentally,

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and the other in self-defense. However because of their pivotal role in breaking strikes, they became hated by the union movement, with the general master workman of the Knights of Labor, Terrence Powderley, telling a congressional hearing that “Pinkertons fire upon people too poor to indulge in litigation.” During the Homestead Strike, the Pinkerton agents retained good discipline and were led by General George R. Snowden throughout much of it. Although there were periods when some clearly wanted to flee the scene, this did not happen. However, three of them were killed at the scene, and another died from his wounds, with about 100 injured and 28 so badly injured that they were first hospitalized before being evacuated. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Horan, James D., and Howard Swiggett. The Pinkerton Story. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952. Morn, Frank. “The Eye That Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Yellow-Dog Contracts These contracts are agreements between an employer and an employee by which the employee agrees, as part of their conditions of employment, not to join a labor union. They were widely used from the late 1880s through the early 1930s as industrialists sought to keep unions out of their companies. They were outlawed in 1932 under the Norris-LaGuardia Act. The idea of banning or restricting membership of trade unions had been around for as long as the trade unions themselves, with the Tolpuddle Martyrs and other famous legal cases emanating from laws enacted. However, in the 1870s, with the increase in literacy and with more and more workers signing legally enforceable employment contracts, some employers added into the contract that the employee could not be a union member, or could not join an union during the time of their employment. These gradually became more and more common in the United States as well as in Great Britain and other countries that had large unions for unskilled laborers. They were initially known as “infamous documents” and later as “iron-clad documents.” However they soon started to be called “yellow dog contracts” because a dog was always loyal (and subservient) to its master, and from 1840, the term came to represent, in the United States, a “mongrel dog

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or cur, of a yellow or yellowish color.” By 1902, it had come to be used in the sense in which it is now used, and it was commonly used by the 1920s. In 1887, the state of New York enacted a law to ban the use of employment contracts that forbade the membership of a union, and other states gradually followed. However, these contracts were allowed in Pennsylvania in 1892 during the Homestead Strike. They were not specifically the cause of the strike there in 1892, although they were the direct cause of a strike in Homestead 10 years earlier. Although he did not like the power of the unions and had tried to curb them in 1882, by 1892, Andrew Carnegie had come to accept unionism; the strike at Homestead in 1892 had been about pay rates rather than membership of the union. Part of this was undoubtedly because the late 1880s and early 1890s had seen an increase in the power of organized labor, with the real risk of sympathy strikes in other plants, which did actually take place in 1892. Although during the strike, Carnegie Steel did take nonunion labor, they readily accepted the unionists when they returned to work at the end of the strike, albeit entirely on their terms. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Rayback, Joseph G. A History of American Labor. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Seidman, Joel I. The Yellow Dog Contract. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932.

Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards (1892) On June 30, 1892, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers went out on strike against the Carnegie Steel Company plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. The strike followed a company lockout precipitated by a failure of the union and the company to come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. The union sought hired wages, while the company responded with a wage decrease in an attempt to break the union. The account reproduced here describes a battle between strikers and company security guards on July 6, 1892. Nothing more dramatic in the History of Labor and Capital is recorded than the Incident of the 6th of July. The forces of the Nineteenth Century are Capital and Labor, united they transform the desert into a garden, in collision they convert the garden into a waste. On the 6th of July, 1892, at Homestead, Penn., the Forces met. The sound of the shock echoed through the labor markets of the world.

Homestead Strike (1892–1893) In this age we regard the French Revolution with surprise, we wonder at the growth of the power of the mob, we are amazed at the brutality of the people, and we are astonished at the spectacle afforded by the savagery of women. The Incident of the 6th of July affords a parallel in diminutive form, and is pregnant with meaning. Let us see! A certain man, who has risen from the ranks of labor by thrift, cleverness, and lucky transactions, has amassed riches. His name is Andrew Carnegie; his fortune is written in the millions. Much of this fortune is invested in steel rolling mills at Homestead. These works cover one hundred and fifty acres of ground; here work four thousand five hundred men. The smoke of the flumes ascend day and night to the god of commerce, and the high price of bread consumes the day wage of the toilers. Four years ago Carnegie gave $500,000 to the campaign fund which promised him “protection” or monopoly. Fourteen competing rolling mills have passed away and one hundred acres have been added to the Carnegie plant. A few weeks since Carnegie’s partners decided that men seeking the protection of a union or brotherhood should not be employed at the works. He who sought “protection” denied protection. As the custom is, the time came when the Employer and Employe should fix the price of wages. The Man asked one dollar more than the Master was willing to pay. “Protection” had poured gold into his strong box, and raised the price of beef, bread, and clothing. The Wage-giver and the Wage-taker could not agree about the one dollar. And the works shut down! The Advisory Committee of the locked-out workmen said: Let there be order! And there was order. The Master of the mill said: Let there be protection! A fence, twelve feet high, of stout boards mounted on three feet of slag, four miles in length, closed in the works. This fence was bored with holes to allow the passage of a rifle barrel from the inside. It was surmounted with barbed wires, connected with powerful dynamos, so that they could be made alive with electricity. Search lights were mounted at certain points, and nozzles connected with hydrants supplied with boiling water at others. At an excellent point of vantage, a detective camera was set up in order to secure photographs of invaders, for the purpose of prosecution in the courts of law controlled by the Master of the Mill. So much for the stockade. The Hessians were to be imported. The Master of the Mill said: Hire Pinkerton’s men. A foreign armed force was to settle the question of one dollar in wages. “We have done our best to preserve order and have succeeded in preserving it. We cannot now, of course, be responsible for anything that may occur in consequence of your action.” So said the Advisory Committee to the Sheriff. It is the morning of July 6. The sun has not risen, the morning star shines in the inverted blue bowl over the silent factory and on the river.

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) Men watch the coming of the armed deputies—the paid assassins of the Master of the Mill. It is half-past two in the morning. A scout stationed at Lock No. 1, on the Monongahela River, reports the arrival of two barges in charge of a river steamer. They contain armed men. Now up—filling the great star-bespeckled bowl—goes the long, sad wail of the steam whistle at the electric light plant. It is the voice of Labor shrieking to the wage-worker to rise and make haste, for armed Capital is to take possession of the workshop. Flash lights start from many points. The night is over; horsemen dash through the streets of Homestead yelling: “To the river; to the river—the Pinkertons are coming!” They go to the river. Half-dressed men and women, boys, girls, and children rush to the river. Each has a weapon—some of guns, revolvers, knives, heavy irons, and sound sticks. Labor is in arms. The river steamer Little Bill crowds on steam and speeds to the landing; the mob on the bank races to intercept the armed men. It is a mad race in the morning light. Down come fences and other impediments. When the barges are within one hundred feet of the landing, the advance guard of the mob is on the ground to contest the holding of it. The mob warned off the armed men: “Don’t land or we’ll brain you.” Out from the barge came the plank. Every Pinkerton man levelled his Winchester rifle. A few of the bravest of them endeavored to land. The sight of this infuriated the mob. They rushed forward and attempted to seize the rifles. One Hugh O’Donnell, a man of character and heroic soul, a mill hand, with three others, hatless and coatless, with their backs to the Pinkertons, in fearful peril of their lives, besought the mob to fall back: “In God’s name,” he cried, “my good fellows, keep back; don’t press down and force them to do murder!” A sharp report of a Winchester rifle from the bow of the boat answered him. In an instant there was a sheet of flame —a rain of leaden hail. The crowd fell back a few feet, then advanced, pouring deadly shots into the invading force. The boat pulled out into the stream. There were dead men on both sides. And so ended the first battle of the morning. When the armed hirelings of Andrew Carnegie poured their deadly volley in the ranks of the men who dared to demand one dollar more on their wages, there were few guns among the people. At the crack of the Pinkertons first rifle men rushed to their homes for firearms and prepared for battle in earnest. At half-past six a second attempt at landing was repulsed. Out on the stream lay the barges. The hot sun beat down upon them and the heat was suffocating. Pinkerton’s men needed air. Rats require that. They started to cut air holes, but the bullets of the mob on shore were too much for them. They decided that hot air was better than bullets.

Homestead Strike (1892–1893) An attempt was made to fire the barges by pouring burning oil on the river, but fortunately this terrible ordeal was spared the Pinkertons. Hugh O’Donnell, cool headed and brave, constantly endeavored to hold the men in check. No one more than he wanted the rights of the men to triumph, but he did not wish those rights to be steeped in human blood. He was talking to them when over the barge a fluttering white flag told the story that the Pinkertons sought for terms. The spokesman of the Pinkertons announced that they would surrender if assured of protection from the mob. They landed. Their arms were taken from them. With heads uncovered, to distinguish them from the mill hands, they passed along between two rows of guards armed with Winchesters. There were two hundred and fifty Pinkertons in line. And so those who came to hold the Carnegie mills were led trembling away to the lock-up. Silently, sadly, and filled with fear, the disarmed Pinkertons, some bleeding, with bedraggled clothing, haggard and pale-faced, walked between their captors. Some held small bags with clothing. Alongside crowded the surging mass of hard-fisted men hurling epithets at them. For some time they walked thus, hoping for the shelter of the jail. Now woman comes to the front! One snatched a bag, tore from it a white shirt and waved it. This action was almost a signal to the brigade of women. They seized every bag and scattered the contents. With yells and shouts the crowd cheered the women. There was a fine humor here; to scatter the clothing of those who had come to scatter them. Another woman threw sand into the eyes of a Pinkerton and cut him with a stone. Then, in spite of the guards, the women cast stones and missiles at the unprotected Pinkertons. The guards hurried them over the unlevel ground to the jail. There they were a sorry lot. Cut, bruised, with eyes knocked out, with noses smashed, the invading, conquered army escaped death in the jail. So ended an expedition of two hundred and eighty men, armed with Winchesters, and supplied with provisions for three months. And behind the high board fence, with the barbed wires charged with electricity, rest the mill hands waiting the developments of the future. Source: Illustrated American, July 16, 1892.

Account of the Course of the Strike (1892) Reproduced here is a description of the Homestead Strike as it unfolded in July 1892 at the Carnegie Steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Unlike the more disorganized, leaderless labor uprisings of the previous decades, the Homestead Strike was well organized and led by the Amalgamated Associated of Iron and Steel Workers, which sought to improve wages and end such practices as the use of yellow-dog contracts. The Carnegie Steel Company sought to break the union by locking out workers and forcing a decrease in wages. The strike eventually failed, and Carnegie Steel remained nonunionized for the next 40 years.

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) “THE situation at Homestead has not improved,” wrote Sheriff McCleary to Governor Pattison, of Pennsylvania; and then he went on to say that while all was quiet, the strikers were in control and had openly expressed to him their determination not to allow the Carnegie works to be operated by any but themselves. The poor sheriff had had a hard time of it. The governor blamed him for allowing the Pinkertons to go to Homestead to do his work. When he did try to raise a posse he could only get a dozen citizens or so who had the pluck—or it may have been sympathy with the strikers had something to do with it—to answer the call. Be this as it may, Sheriff McCleary threw himself upon the good nature of the governor, telling him that only a large military force would enable him to control matters, and the governor gave orders to Gen. George R. Snowden to place his entire division under arms and to take 8,500 men to maintain the Peace at Homestead. This was no sooner said than done. By the morning of the 12th the troops were in the town. So suddenly did they make their appearance, that before the strikers could realize that they were actually there, the town was completely invested by the National Guard. For a week the strikers had defied the law; mob rule had reigned supreme. There had been peace since the battle with the Pinkertons, but it had been an armed and lawless peace. Now all was changed. Gen. Snowden showed that he had gone to Homestead with the full intention of maintaining peace, and that he and his soldiers were not to be trifled with. Gen. Snowden appears to have carried out his plan of campaign with great military skill. In the first orders, issued immediately after the governor had ordered out the troops, Brinton, on the Monongahela River, and about a mile-and-a-half from Homestead, was announced as the rendezvous. It was his intention that the Second and Third Brigades of the National Guard should gather there on July 11, go into camp for the night, and march into Homestead at daybreak the following morning. But the correspondents got wind of his plan, and the details appeared in all the papers. There was a great chance now of the rioters and their sympathizers collecting in great force at Brinton, and a possibility of their making an attack upon the soldiers before they reached Homestead. To prevent this, Gen. Snowden altered his plans and notified his colonels that he had selected Blairsville, a station on the Pennsylvania Railroad, about fifty-two miles east of Pittsburgh for the rendezvous. The general intended this second order should leak out, which it did, and duly appeared in the papers, but what his true intentions were he kept to himself, not even taking his colonels into his confidence. When the soldiers reached Brinton there were not less than ten thousand persons on the platform to meet them. But at Brinton the conductor found orders to proceed to Wall, and at Wall to go on somewhere, and so until the special reached Radebaugh, where there is a signal station. The next morning the troops were in Homestead. The rioters had got up a very pretty scheme, which they hoped would gain them the sympathy of the public, and probably it would have had they succeeded in carrying out their project. They sent a delegation from the Amalgamated Association to Gen. Snowden at his headquarters. They decided to inform him that they had come to offer him their assistance, but the general put on his most freezing manner when he told them he

Homestead Strike (1892–1893) had no need of their services, he meant to preserve order himself. “I am here,” he said, “by order of the governor to cooperate with the sheriff in the maintenance of order and the protection of the Carnegie Steel Company in the possession of its property.” This was a terrible snubbing for the delegation, for it had been intended to treat the entry of the troops as a fete, and to let them march in to the strains of a brass band. As Hugh O’Donnell, the labor leader, who was one of the delegation, said: “I never met with such a chilling reception in my life. Gen. Snowden didn’t seem to have the slightest regard for what he said or thought.” Meanwhile Congress had appointed a committee to go to Pittsburgh and investigate the troubles and outbreak at Homestead. During the investigation Mr. H. C. Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Company, produced the letter he had written to Robert Pinkerton on June 25, with regard to the hiring of 300 of his men to guard the Homestead mills. “The only trouble we anticipate,” he wrote, “is that an attempt will be made to prevent such of our men, with whom we will by that time have made satisfactory arrangements, from going to work, and possibly some demonstration of violence upon the part of those whose places have been filled, or most likely by an element which usually is attracted to such scenes for the purpose of stirring up trouble. We are not desirous that the men you send shall be armed unless the occasion properly calls for such a measure later on, for the protection of our employee or property. We will wish those guards to be placed upon our property, and there to remain, unless called into other service by the civil authority to meet an emergency that is likely to arise.” Hugh O’Donnell, the young leader of the strikers, made a brief statement, giving an account of how the fight was brought about. According to him, about two o’clock in the morning an alarm reached the headquarters of the strikers that the Pinkertons were descending upon Homestead. He went down to the bank of the River Monongahela. A big crowd of Hungarians, Slavs, women, and boys were on the banks, and were firing pistols in the air. He advised the men not to fire and followed them as they moved up to the point toward which the boat was heading. While he was addressing the crowd, urging them not to use violence, a volley was fired from the barges and a bullet struck his thumb. The firing lasted about five minutes. As to the way in which the surrender of the Pinkertons was effected, O’Donnell told the following story: I tied a handkerchief on the end of a rifle barrel and waved it over the pile of beams behind which we lay. The men had promised me that in case the Pinkertons surrendered they should not be shown any violence. When I waved my handkerchief one of the guards came out on the barges and waved his hands. As soon as he appeared one of our men jumped from behind his barricade and exposed himself to the fire of the Pinkertons. I walked down the bank, and said to the man who had come out on the barge, that I thought the thing had gone far enough, and he said he thought it had gone altogether too far. He then accepted my proposition that his men should make an unconditional surrender, and should give up their rifles. While the rifles were being unloaded, the crowd began to assemble on the barges, and I must confess that during the march from the barges to the rink the

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Homestead Strike (1892–1893) Pinkerton men were shamefully abused by the crowd, but we took care of them that night and saw that they got out of town safely. Frick, the president of the company, is a determined man, and when he stated that he would not give in to the strikers, everyone who knew anything of him believed he would keep his word. But the strikers, too, were equally determined, and there was an inclination among them to rule Homestead by mob law. Anyone who was suspected of having any connection with Carnegie’s people was taken to the Rights of headquarters of the strikers, there to be examined as to his mission, and personal rights were very little regarded. Gen. Snowden threatened to arrest any one who dared to interfere with the rights of citizens; but the strikers, who became more and more sullen each day the troops were in their midst, had awed the people, and nobody cared to act as complainant in such a case. Source: Illustrated American, July 23, 1892.

Two Examples of Yellow-Dog Contracts (1904 and 1917) In an effort to inhibit the growth of unions, employers began using so-called yellow dog contracts, which forced job seekers to swear not to join a labor union as a condition of employment. The term arose from a popular saying—“yellow-dog contracts” were so vile that no decent human being would require even an old yellow dog to sign one. Although the term was not common until after 1902, the practice was common in the 19th century. The 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act abolished the practice, although many workers complained that unwritten yellow-dog contracts persisted. The first example below is a 1904 document required of Colorado miners seeking employment in the Cripple Creek region. It was usually accompanied by a housing lease agreement that further reinforced the company’s antiunion position. The second contract reproduced here was used by the Hitchman Coal and Coke Company. The Supreme Court, in Hitchman Coal and Coke v. Mitchell, found the use of such contracts to be constitutional. Mine No._______ Office No._______ APPLICATION FOR WORK _______Mine. _______ 190_. Name, _______ _______. Age, ____. Married? _____. Nationality, _____. Residence, _____. Occupation, _____.

Homestead Strike (1892–1893) Where last employed? _____. For how long? _____. In what capacity? _____. Did you quit voluntarily, or were you discharged? _____. If discharged, for what reason? _____. How much experience have you had as _____? _____. Where employed before coming to Cripple Creek district? _____. Are you a member of the Western Federation of Miners? _____. Have you ever been a member of the Western Federation of Miners? _____. If so, when did you sever your connection with same? _____. Do you belong to any labor organization; and if so, what? _____. References: _____ _____. __________, Applicant. Remarks: _____ Source: U.S. Congress, A Report on Labor Disturbances in Colorado from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive (1905), 278–80. I am employed by and work for the Hitchman Coal & Coke Company with the express understanding that I am not a member of the United Mine Workers of America, and will not become so while an employee of the Hitchman Coal & Coke Company; that the Hitchman Coal & Coke Company is run non-union and agrees with me that it will run non-union while I am in its employ. If at any time I am employed by the Hitchman Coal & Coke Company I want to become connected with the United Mine Workers of America, or any affiliated organization, I agree to withdraw from the employment of said company, and agree that while I am in the employ of that company I will not make any efforts amongst its employees to bring about the unionizing of that mine against the company’s wish. I have either read the above or heard the same read. Source: Hitchman Coal and Coke Company v. Mitchell, 245 U.S. 229 (1917).

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Pullman Strike (1894) In 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company joined the new American Railway Union (ARU). Organizing began as early as January, motivated by pay cuts instituted in 1893, and by longer-standing grievances. ARU’s reputation was enhanced by a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway in April of the same year. Organizing locals by craft, then federating them for united action, ARU offered skilled and unskilled workers in all Pullman departments a way to unite, much as it sought to unite all crafts throughout the railway industry. There were many locals within the Pullman works, covering upholstery, glass, electric, paint, and freight departments, and Local 269, the “girls local,” representing seamstresses who made and repaired carpets, drapes, linens, and seat coverings for passenger cars. Pullman Company had experienced strikes before, generally in a single production department. Wood carvers struck in 1887, when traditional craft rules were abridged by giving portions of their work to cabinet makers, and in 1888, when a foreman was assigned by a superintendent, rather than chosen by the work crew. The actions of individual foremen touched off short strikes, as did introduction of mass production methods in the lumberyard and in freight car building. In May, Pullman workers presented their first set of grievances to company management. Foremen laid off several members of the grievance committee on May 10; the next day, 3,000 workers walked out of the car works, and the company locked out the rest. It has never been established whether the layoffs were in retaliation for the presentation of grievances; the company denied it, but employees at that point placed no reliance on the good faith of management. In accordance with tradition from previous conflicts, 300 strikers set up a perimeter around the Pullman works to prevent violence and vandalism, vigilantly guarding company property until this duty was taken over July 6 by federal troops.

Local Initiative and National Organization ARU national leadership had opposed precipitous action. With three million unemployed nationwide from the Panic of 1893, it appeared strategically prudent to strengthen the organization before taking on a major battle. Pullman workers had joined the union for immediate redress, and acted accordingly. Thomas

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Pullman Strike (1894) Deputies endeavor to operate a train engine during the great Pullman Strike of 1894. (Library of Congress)

Heathcote, the Pullman Strike committee chairman, clarified, “We do not expect the company to concede our demands. We do not know what the outcome will be, and in fact we do not care much. We do know that we are working for less wages than will maintain ourselves and families in the necessaries of life, and on that one proposition we absolutely refuse to work any longer.” ARU president Eugene V. Debs, after personally investigating workers’ grievances and observing that costs of living remained at a pre-depression level while reduced wages were well below subsistence, told a meeting of strikers on May 16, “I believe a rich plunderer like Pullman is a greater felon than a poor thief, and it has become no small part of the duty of this organization to strip the mask of hypocrisy from the pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor of labor . . . The paternalism of Pullman is the same as the interest of a slave holder in his human chattels.” The strike had been underway for a month when the union’s first national convention assembled in Chicago on June 12, 1894. After hearing testimony from Jennie Curtis, president of Local 269, other representatives from the town of Pullman, and Reverend William Carwardine, a local pastor sympathetic to the strike, a committee of 12 delegates was chosen to suggest to the Pullman Company that employee grievances be submitted to arbitration. The company’s second vice

Pullman Strike (1894)

president, Thomas Wickes, replied, “We have nothing to arbitrate,” and subsequently referred to a committee of six representatives as “former employees” who “stood in the same position as the man on the sidewalk.” On June 22, a committee of convention delegates proposed the measure, which made this strike famous: a boycott of Pullman palace cars. ARU members on any and all railroads would refuse to attach Pullman cars to any passenger train, until Pullman agreed to adjust or arbitrate his employees’ grievances. This tactic had the potential to cut off the company’s largest and most reliable source of revenue. It also would risk the very existence of the ARU on direct confrontation with all railroad management in the United States, assembled into a powerful General Managers Association. The boycott and spreading railroad strikes also resulted in unanticipated direct federal intervention in support of railroad management. George Howard, ARU vice president, advised that closing Pullman’s shops at St. Louis and Ludlow would cripple the corporation without the drastic measure of a boycott. Debs deferred to a vote of the convention; delegates wired for instructions from their locals and were unanimously authorized to support a boycott. After adopting the proposal, the convention sent three delegates to notify the Pullman Company. When Wickes responded that the company would neither deal with union representatives nor submit any controversy to arbitration, the boycott was set to begin June 26.

The Conflict Begins A predictable sequence of events rapidly escalated the conflict. Switchmen were on the front line: they would refuse to switch Pullman cars onto trains, and most likely would be fired. The railroads’ General Managers Association (GMA) had decided on June 26 to adopt that response, even if the employees were willing to perform any other work assigned. (On June 29, it further decided to permanently blacklist such workers from future employment with any railroad.) If replacement workers, commonly referred to as “scabs,” took the vacant jobs, all union members on that rail line ceased work. Within two days, 18,000 were on strike on seven railroads operating out of Chicago. Much to Debs’s surprise, many more locals, including affiliates of the more established railroad brotherhoods, spontaneously informed strike headquarters at Uhlich Hall in Chicago that they had decided to strike until the Pullman workers’ grievances were settled. Pullman’s decision to hire only “white” workers in his manufacturing and repair shops, and only “black” workers as porters on sleeping cars, served the company well. The ARU, over Debs’s strenuous objections, had voted to allow only “white” workers to join the union. Not only did this encourage “black” workers to accept jobs as replacements, it alienated the Pullman porters, who were in a position to

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cripple the company’s revenues had they joined the strike. The majority of scabs, however, were unemployed “white” eastern railroad workers, reflecting that the ARU’s strength was more on the Midwest and western rail lines.

General Managers Association On June 28, only two days into the boycott, the General Managers Association hired John M. Egan, formerly general manager on the Chicago and Great Western Railroad, as full-time coordinator of antistrike activities. Denouncing the boycott as “unjustifiable and unwarranted,” the GMA was deeply hostile to the ARU, fearing, as the New York Times observed, “the permanent success of the one organization through which it is sought to unite all employees of railroads.” During the course of the strike, the GMA spent at least $36,000 to oppose the Pullman boycott. Thirteen large rail lines were assessed 5 percent of costs, with smaller lines each contributing smaller portions. A press bureau was established; 20 to 30 detectives were employed to provide information on ARU strategy, strengths, and vulnerabilities, with a view to annihilating the union. A coordinated program notified railroad managers in eastern cities to open agencies to hire strikebreakers, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, and Buffalo. About 2,500 workers were supplied through this measure to various rail lines. Perhaps more deadly was the panel of lawyers assembled under the direction of George R. Peck, chairman of the GMA’s legal committee, to prepare strategy for judicial proceedings. The primary line of attack was to position the ARU as interfering with U.S. mail and with interstate commerce, to precipitate federal intervention, advising each railroad company to institute proceedings through the office of the U.S. attorney in various federal district courts. The U.S. attorney for Chicago obtained a writ on July 3 prohibiting interference with mail trains, interstate trains, and interstate commerce not in transportation. The U.S. Strike Commission later recorded, but could not confirm, charges that mail cars, normally included in freight trains, were deliberately attached to passenger trains right behind Pullman cars, so that boycott and strike action could be construed as interfering with the mails. General managers shut down passenger service and ceased accepting freight for shipment precisely to build public opposition to the strike. The ARU repeatedly offered that striking workers would assemble and operate mail trains so long as Pullman cars were not attached, but no railroad official responded to this offer.

Public Support For the first month of the strike, Pullman workers received strong support in the Chicago area, not only from union members and other workers, but also from middle-class families and even business classes. Bertha Palmer, a leading socialite

Pullman Strike (1894)

and vice president of the Civic Federation of Chicago, which had sought to arbitrate the strike, observed that Pullman had been “grasping or oppressive in their measures.” Palmer resented Pullman’s refusal to arbitrate. Chicago mayor John P. Hopkins donated $1,500 to the Pullman relief fund. The Chicago Daily News reported that many men hired as strikebreakers “have voluntarily given up their positions to join the ranks of the strikers.” Other newspapers, while sympathetic to the workers’ grievances, criticized the strike as ill considered. The Chicago Record observed, “They struck at a time when the company was well able to stand an interruption of its operations and precisely at the time when to strike is to share bitterly with others in the industrial depression.” Nationally, public opinion was molded by a virulently hostile press. In Chicago, the ARU was violently opposed by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Journal, Chicago Herald, and Chicago Evening Post. Photographs were not yet common daily illustrations, but imaginative sketches of railroad cars and buildings in flames, grim soldiers holding back rioting crowds at bayonet point, were picked up nationwide. Headlines such as “Mob in Control” and “Anarchy Is Rampant” were the primary information available outside of Illinois. The New York Times called anyone who left work in sympathy with the ARU criminals, while Harper’s Weekly described the boycott and strike “blackmail on the largest scale.” Ministers in many eastern states thundered from their pulpits against the “miscreants” of the ARU.

Federal Government Intervention On July 2, John Egan candidly admitted that the railroads had been “fought to a standstill” with, up to that time, a minimum of disorder. With railroad workers displaying discipline, unity, and determination, Egan called for federal troops from Fort Sheridan, Although no violence was in evidence, Egan called for the government to “take this business in hand, restore law, suppress the riots, and restore to the public the service which it is now deprive of by conspirators and lawless men.” Egan had good cause for optimism. The U.S. attorney general was Richard Olney, who served as a director of three railroads after 35 years in private law practice representing corporations. With Olney providing reports to President Grover Cleveland, daily cabinet meetings established particularly close coordination between Olney, Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont, and Major General John M. Schofield. The U.S. attorney in Chicago, Thomas E. Milchrist, conferred regularly with the GMA, inviting them to provide names of anyone interfering with the mails or interstate freight shipment. Although dispatches reported to Washington on June 30, “No mails have accumulated at Chicago so far,” Milchrist recommended that the U.S. marshal in Chicago be authorized to appoint 50 deputies, which Olney immediately approved.

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On June 30, Olney appointed Edwin Walker, general counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, as special attorney for the federal government at Chicago. Reports of delay in mail shipment came in from Riverdale, Illinois; Hammond, Indiana; Cairo, Illinois; Hope, Idaho; and San Francisco, California. Some rioting was reported in Blue Island, a village outside of Chicago. On July 2, Milchrist and Walker obtained a sweeping injunction from federal judges William A. Woods and Peter S. Grosscup, listing 22 railroads as needing protection, charging the strikers with conspiracy against interstate trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Officials and members of the ARU were forbidden to interfere in any way with “mail trains, express trains or other trains, whether freight of passenger, engaged in interstate commerce”; the application even specified that Pullman Palace cars were indispensable to the successful operation of trains. Anyone involved in the stated conspiracy was ordered to abstain from “ordering, directing, aiding, assisting or abetting in any manner whatever” any individual committing any act prohibited by the court’s order. By July 4, the general managers declared, “So far as the railroads are concerned with this fight, they are out of it. It has now become a fight between the United States Government and the American Railway Union.” However, between the end of June and July 5, about two-thirds of 5,000 deputy marshals in the Chicago area alone were provided, armed, and trained by the railroad companies. A captain was designated by any railroad desiring this service, and his name, together with those he selected, was transmitted to the General Managers Association, which forwarded the list to the federal marshal, who commissioned the men without examination. A Chicago police superintendent later testified that these deputies were “more in the way than of any service,” while a reporter for the Chicago Herald described them as “a very low, contemptible set of men.” On July 3, with little sign of violence outside of Blue Island, but manifest evidence that the recently deputized marshals were ineffective, Cleveland ordered an entire army command from Fort Sheridan into Chicago. In doing so, he bypassed Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, who had made no request for troops, as well as the option of requesting assistance from the Illinois militia. Additional reserves were moved in from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and Fort Brady, Michigan; from Madison Barracks, New York; Fort Riley, Kansas; and Fort Niobrara, Nebraska. Troops were also ordered to Los Angeles, California; Raton, New Mexico; and Trinidad, Colorado. After federal troops had occupied key points throughout Chicago, lawless outbreaks and rioting increased sharply. As tensions rose, crowds gathered on railroad property and, by the evening of July 4, were overturning rail cars, then on the following day setting some on fire and blocking trains. By this time, the crowds included an assortment of drifters, tramps, and young boys eager to have fun

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throwing rocks at trains. On July 6, mobs destroyed about $340,000 worth of railroad property. Illinois Central rail cars were especially targeted, after one of its railroad agents shot and killed two rioters.

Indictments End the Strike Ultimately, a federal grand jury, more than the presence of federal troops, disrupted the boycott and strike. Using a series of telegrams from Debs to various ARU locals, none advocating violence and some cautioning against it, as evidence of a conspiracy to stop trains unlawfully, Milchrist and Walker obtained indictments on July 10 against all officers of the union. While they were being apprehended and detained, until bail was posted, the offices of the ARU were raided, going far beyond the terms of a very limited search warrant. (Both Judge Grosscup and Attorney General Olney repudiated the raid, ordering all private papers returned.) Indictments were returned against hundreds of ARU members in many other states, which, while later dismissed, spread fear and a sense that the strike was lost. Refusing to turn a switch or fire up an engine was often treated as grounds for arrest. On July 17, contempt of court proceedings also were initiated against Debs, Howard, Keliher, and Rogers. Debs asserted that “Our men were in a position that never would have been shaken under any circumstances if we had been permitted to remain among them.” But because the union officers were under arrest, “headquarters were demoralized and abandoned, and we could not answer any messages. The men went back to work, and the ranks were broken up by the federal courts.” Pullman posted a notice on July 18 that the shops would reopen, and all except strike leaders might have the privilege of applying for work, provided they surrendered their ARU membership card and signed a pledge not to join a union. On August 2, a convention of the ARU recognized that further struggle was hopeless, and designated that since workers on each rail line had decided to strike, a vote on each line should be taken to return to work. —Charles Rosenberg See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Hirsch, Susan Eleanor. After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

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Pullman Strike (1894) Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

American Railway Union (ARU) From 1893 to 1895, the American Railway Union offered a single industrial union as an alternative to the many craft unions into which railroad employees were divided, after failure of an attempt to federate the separate brotherhoods of firemen, switchmen, brakemen, trainmen, conductors, and engineers into a Supreme Council of the United Order of Railway Employees. Discussions in 1891 and 1892 culminated in February 1893 with the first board meeting of the American Railway Union in Chicago. Eugene V. Debs and F. W. Arnold had strong ties to the firemen, George Howard to the conductors, W. S. Missemer and Sylvester Keliher to the carmen. The ARU represented a break with the distinct brotherhoods, which represented at most one-fourth of railway employees, but hoped to incorporate or work cooperatively with the existing organizations. Local lodges inquired about dual membership, but the brotherhoods were generally hostile; Arnold and Missemer left the ARU. Debs, the longtime national secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, resigned, wrote the ARU’s initial Declaration of Principles, and emerged as president. ARU was strongest in the west; the brotherhoods were more firmly established in the older eastern railroads. Within a year, ARU reported 125 locals, with entire locals of some brotherhoods switching their affiliation. The union’s short history was defined by three major confrontations. The first concerned administration by a federal court of the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad, which in February 1894 slashed wages and enjoined employees from discussing the matter, much less going on strike. After a month of bitter discussion in the union’s Railway Times, speeches by Debs, and legal debate in court, another judge found for the union. Early victory in a strike against James P. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad gave the ARU confidence. Responding to three wage cuts in eight months, the union decided that unless wages were restored, a strike would begin at noon on April 13, 1894. With ARU holding “revival meetings” all along the Great Northern lines, men of all crafts walked out, despite efforts by leadership of the engineers and firemen to cut their own deals with Hill. The St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, mostly businessmen dependent on rail transport, offered an arbitration panel, which Debs accepted, forcing Hill to do the same. The panel approved 97 and one-half percent of the union’s wage demands. Notably, Hill’s request for federal troops was not fulfilled, although U.S. marshals were “disposed to be governed by the railroad companies, attorneys and U.S. Atty.” Success on the Great Northern line inspired 2,000 new members to join each day for several weeks, swelling membership to 150,000, more than all the brotherhoods combined. In the ARU’s next major battle, it faced a sweeping

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federal injunction, and intervention of federal troops on July 3, 1894. The first ARU national convention, meeting in Chicago on June 12, 1894, heard testimony from striking employees of the Pullman Car Works, located in the company town of Pullman, Illinois. Delegates voted a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars, which quickly became a sympathy strike, when railroad management refused to detach Pullman cars from trains. Intervention of federal troops, prosecution for violating the injunction, and an extensive blacklist of ARU members and anyone who had participated in the strike, broke the ARU, which held its last convention in 1897. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Boyle, O. D. History of Railroad Strikes. Washington, DC: Brotherhood Publishing Co., 1935. Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. New York: Russell & Russell, 1969, c. 1949. Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926) Undoubtedly the most home-grown and widely respected socialist leader in American history, Eugene V. Debs grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he was born November 5, 1855. He left school in 1870, obtaining his first railroad job, rising to fireman on the Vandalia Railroad, until he was laid off during a depression in 1874. A founding member of Vigo Lodge #16, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, he later served as editor of the national BLF Magazine, and grand secretary-treasurer. Debs was elected city clerk of Terre Haute in 1879 as a Democrat, and reelected in 1881. In 1884, he was elected to the state assembly, and he married Katherine Metzel on June 9, 1885. He resigned his BLF office in 1891, disappointed by the collapse of the United Order of Railway Employees, intended to federate a variety of craft brotherhoods on the railroads. A founder of the American Railway Union in 1893, Debs became nationally known through his leadership of the ARU’s first, highly successful strike, against the Great Northern Railroad, and the subsequent Pullman Strike and Pullman sleeping car boycott, which collapsed after the administration of President Grover Cleveland intervened in support of the railway managers, destroying the union. Debs was sentenced to serve six months in jail by federal judge William A. Woods, for violating an injunction against the boycott.

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As leader of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States three times and was eventually imprisoned for his opposition to American involvement in World War I. (Library of Congress)

By March 1894, Debs renounced his Democratic Party affiliation, and declared himself for the People’s Party (Populists). However, he declined to accept the party’s 1896 nomination for president, which then went to the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan. In January 1897, he publicly declared himself a socialist, and was overwhelmingly chosen to run for president on the Social Democratic ticket in 1900. The newly formed Socialist Party of America (SPA), organized in January 1901, ran Debs again in 1904, 1908, 1912—running a whistle stop campaign from a train called the “Red Special”—and 1920 from his cell in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, with campaign buttons urging a vote “For President—Prisoner # 9653.” In his last race, admired and denounced because he was imprisoned for opposing U.S. entry into World War I, Debs won nearly a million votes. Both a unifier and a maverick for the fractious socialist party, Debs opposed violence and sabotage, advocated legal means to bring about socialist victory, but aggravated his more conservative comrades, such as Morris Hillquit and Milwaukee socialist congressman Victor Berger, by cofounding the Industrial

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Workers of the World in 1905, condemning “the malign spirit of race hatred” both inside and outside the party, and standing by advocates of direct action such as William D. “Big Bill” Haywood. Motivated by traditional American principles of liberty, which he saw corrupted and degraded by industrial capitalism, Debs appealed to many with his spirited defense of the individual dignity of every working man and woman. Released from prison on December 23, 1921, his 10-year sentence commuted by President Harding, Debs returned home to Terre Haute. Debs remained in the SPA after the party’s left wings split to form two or three communist parties in 1919, but refused to unequivocally endorse either the remaining SPA leadership, or the communists, alternately criticized or appealed to by both. He died on October 20, 1926, five days after suffering a massive heart attack. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. New York: Russell & Russell, 1969, c. 1949. Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Pullman Palace Car Company This company was incorporated by charter from the Illinois legislature February 22, 1867, to manufacture, sell, and operate railroad sleeping cars, and to own real estate that might be necessary for that business. Sleeping cars had been attached to trains in the United States since 1836, but company founder George Pullman had developed prototypes, between 1858 and 1864, of more comfortable, luxurious cars, costing four times as much as earlier models, believing passengers would be willing to pay increased charges for the greater comfort. Technical innovations, such as the hinged upper berth, matched introduction of the hotel, parlor, and dining cars. By the time he sought incorporation, Pullman had 48 cars, costing up to $24,000 each. Buying control of many competitors, by 1894 the Pullman company ran its cars on 125,000 miles of railroad, three-fourths of the track in the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland and Italy. Beginning with a capitalization of $1 million in 1867, the company had capital stock valued at $15.9 million in 1885, with $28 million in assets. By 1895, capitalization reached $36 million and assets $62 million.

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Pullman Company not only manufactured, but owned and operated the cars attached to passengers trains of various railroads. It hired and paid the conductors, porters, cooks, and waiters, receiving all net revenue; in return for performing maintenance and repair on the cars, it received a two-cent mileage fee from railroads for each passenger ticket. In 1893, Pullman built 314 new cars, owning and operating 2,573. In the prosperous year of 1891, 64 percent of employees in Pullman shops built cars for outside purchasers. Eighteen percent maintained Pullman’s fleet, and another 18 percent built palace cars for company use. For a time after the Panic of 1893, purchase orders fell, and only a small fraction of employees worked to fill them. In 1893, $9.2 million of the company’s $11.4 million revenue came from operating palace cars. Representative of the social attitudes of many Republicans following the Civil War, Pullman insisted on hiring only Negroes as porters and waiters, “because they know how to serve.” His paternalism carried over into supervision of Pullman’s exclusively “white” manufacturing employees, in both labor policies and the constructing and administration of the town of Pullman. In 1880, the company decided to concentrate most manufacturing into a single new facility outside of Chicago. (By 1890, it had repair facilities in at least seven other locations). Purchasing 4,000 acres on the western shore of Lake Calumet, Pullman built a massive factory covering 15 acres, with four brick buildings three stories high, and a complete new town. Brick tenements predominated, 10 per block, each housing 12 to 48 families in two- to four-room flats. One water faucet was provided for every five families, and two families shared a toilet. Salaried company officials lived in spacious nine-room cottages. George Pullman has left little record of his motivation for insisting on relatively well-built, sanitary housing, a library, theater, and beautiful parks, rather than hastily assembled wooden tenements. Many of his board of directors opposed the expenditure. Pullman himself appears to have thought that better housing, and wholesome recreational opportunities, would limit labor disputes, and give the corporation greater stability. He also expected at least a 6 percent return on his investment. The experiment was a business venture, not philanthropy. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Hirsch, Susan Eleanor. After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiement and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

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Wage Cuts In the fiscal year beginning August 1, 1893, the Pullman Company’s orders for new sleeping cars fell dramatically, reflecting the nationwide panic in business generally. Between May 1893 and May 1894, the Car Works laid off over 1,000 employees, one-fourth of the workers in that division. After reducing its bids by 25 percent for construction of passenger, baggage, refrigerator, street, and box cars, somewhat below production costs, Pullman secured 44 contracts bringing in nearly $1.5 million in new business. The company’s president, George Pullman, found it advantageous to keep the shops open: his plant would not deteriorate, competitors would not take over market share, he would have an operation staffed with experienced workers when business improved, and Pullman Company also owned the tenements in the town of Pullman, which would bring no rents if too many employees were laid off and left the area. However, Pullman also determined to reduce wages in the company’s carbuilding division, which was operating at a net loss. It seemed expedient to reduce wages for all employees, rather than pay different rates for similar work in different divisions. The Pullman Company was operating quite profitably overall. The number of passengers in the company’s palace cars was down only 7 percent, and revenue was $8.76 million in the 1894 fiscal year, down less than half a million dollars from 1893. The company paid its usual 8 percent dividend to shareholders, and retained $2 million in undistributed profits. Between September 18, 1893, and May 1, 1894, Pullman Company absorbed $52,000 in losses building rail cars, while wage reductions saved the company at least $60,000. At the time, materials were three-quarters of the cost of production, and labor only about one-quarter. The United States Strike Commission later observed that a more equitable measure would have been for the company to absorb three-fourths of the loss, with one-fourth distributed in pay cuts. Daily earnings of freight-car builders were slashed from $2.61 to $1.54 between April 1893 and April 1894. Journeymen mechanics during the same period suffered losses from $2.63 to $2.03 per day. Piece rate for seamstresses, finishers, and other employees were slashed by up to one-third. The salaries of superintendents and foremen were not reduced. Many employees were left with paychecks that barely covered, or did not even cover, their rent, leaving little or nothing for food, clothing, and other necessities. Rents were collected by another division of the Pullman Company, using as their agent the Pullman Loan and Savings Bank. Often, paychecks would simply be sent over to the bank, where rent would be deducted before cashing whatever might remain. George Pullman insisted that a fair return on rental property had nothing

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to do with what the going wage might be in his factory. Local real estate agents observed that units comparable to those renting for $17 in Pullman were available in nearby communities for $10. The Strike Commission estimated that rents in Pullman were 20 to 25 percent above market rate in surrounding communities. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Hirsch, Susan Eleanor. After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiement and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942. Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Two Excerpts from U.S. Strike Commission Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894 The 1894 boycott of the Pullman Palace Car Company was one of the most famed clashes of capital and labor in American labor history. Characterized by violence, the wholesale abuse of injunctions, and the dramatic leadership of union organizer Eugene V. Debs, the boycott and strike shocked many Americans. Pullman, Illinois, the company town built by George Pullman, was considered by many to be a model town. The town of Pullman had an artificial lake, a grand hotel, wide boulevards, and neat houses that attracted tourists. Although hailed by some as a social reformer, George Pullman ensured that his company town, like his railroad sleeper and baggage car factories, was a profit-making enterprise. Rents, utilities, store prices, and rail service were more expensive in Pullman than in nearby Chicago. Many workers also resented the social and cultural control that the moralistic Pullman exercised over their lives. The economic Panic of 1893 only exacerbated these existing economic and social pressures within the company town. When the company cut wages but increased rents and other charges, desperate workers turned to strikes to improve their situation. The first excerpt below is from a special government commission on Pullman rents that proved critical of how the town of Pullman operated. The second excerpt describes the strike against the Pullman Company in 1894. If we exclude the aesthetic and sanitary features at Pullman, the rents there are from twenty to twenty-five per cent higher than rents in Chicago or surrounding towns for similar accommodations. The aesthetic features are admired by visitors, but have little money value to employees, especially when they lack bread. The company aims to secure six per cent upon the cost of its tenements, which cost includes a proportionate share for paving, sewerage, water, parks, etc. It claims now to receive less than four per cent. . . . The company makes all repairs and heretofore has not compelled tenants to pay for them. Under the printed leases, however, which tenants must sign, they agree to pay for all

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Pullman Strike (1894) repairs which are either necessary (ordinary wear and damages by the elements not excepted) or which the company chooses to make. The company’s claim that the workmen need not hire its tenements and can live elsewhere if they choose is not entirely tenable. The fear of losing work keeps them in Pullman as long as there are tenements unoccupied, because the company is supposed, as a matter of business, to give preference to its tenants when work is slack. The employees, believing that a tenant at Pullman has this advantage, naturally feel some compulsion to rent at Pullman, and thus to stand well with management. Exceptional and necessary workmen do not share this feeling to the same extent and are more free to hire or own homes elsewhere. While reducing wages the company made no reduction in rents. Its position is that the two matters are distinct, and that none of the reasons urged as justifying wage reduction by it as an employer can be considered by the company as a landlord. The company claims that it is simply legitimate business to use its position and resources to hire in the labor market as cheaply as possible and at the same time to keep rents up regardless of what wages are paid to its tenants or what similar tenements rent for elsewhere; to avail itself to the full extent of business depression and completion in reducing wages, and to disregard these same conditions as to rents. No valid reason is assigned for this position except simply that the company has the power and the legal right to do it. Source: U.S. Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strikes of June–July, 1894 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895), xxxv–xxxvi. Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union: We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women, and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heaven-sent message you alone can give us on this earth. In stating to this body our grievances it is hard to tell where to begin. You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee the day after George M. Pullman, himself, and Thomas H. Wickes, his second vice-president, had guaranteed them absolute immunity. The more remote causes are still imminent. Five reductions in wages, in work, and in conditions of employment swept through the shops at Pullman between May and December, 1893. The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly thirty per cent, and our rents had not fallen. We owed Pullman $70,000 when we struck May 11. We owe him twice as much today. He does not evict us for two reasons: One, the force of popular sentiment and public opinion; the other because he hopes to starve us out, to break the back of the American Railway Union, and to deduct from our miserable wages when we are forced to return to him the last dollar we owe him for the occupancy of his houses. Rents all over the city in every quarter of its vast extent have fallen, in some cases to one-half. Residences, compared with which ours are hovels, can be had a few miles away

Pullman Strike (1894) at the price we have been contributing to make a millionaire a billionaire. What we pay $15 for in Pullman is leased for $8 in Roseland; and remember that just as no man or woman of our 4,000 toilers has ever felt the friendly pressure of George M. Pullman’s hand, so no man or woman of us all has ever owned or can ever hope to own one inch of George M. Pullman’s land. Why, even the very streets are his. His ground has never been platted of record, and today he may debar any man who has acquiring rights as his tenant from walking in his highways. And those streets; do you know what he has named them? He says after the four great inventors in methods of transportation. And do you know what their names are? Why, Fulton, Stephenson, Watt, and Pullman. Water which Pullman buys from the city at 8 cents a thousand gallons he retails to us at 500 per cent advance and claims he is losing $400 a month on it. Gas which sells at 75 cents per thousand feet in Hyde Park, just north of us, he sells for $2.25. When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his “children.” Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name. The revenue he derives from these, the wages he pays out with one hand—the Pullman Palace Car Company, he takes back with the other—the Pullman Land Association. He is able by this to bid under any contract car shop in this country. His competitors in business, to meet this, must reduce the wages of their men. This gives him the excuse to reduce ours to conform to the market. His business rivals must in turn scale down; so must he. And thus the merry war—the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out. Source: U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, U.S. Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895).

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Lattimer Massacre (1897) On Friday September 10, 1897, about 400 immigrant workers in northeast Pennsylvania walked from the Harwood coal-patch town and colliery south of Hazleton to the Lattimer mines and colliery north of Hazleton. Unarmed and led by Slovak leaders Mike Cheslak, John Eagler, Steve Jurich, and others, the laborers marched to join their coworkers in Lattimer to shut down the regional mining operations of Ariovistus D. Pardee and Company. On learning of the strike, Luzerne County sheriff James Martin declared a state of civil disorder and deputized 150 men. Many of the deputies were regularly employed by the coal industry or as Coal and Iron Police and were armed with Winchester repeating rifles recently purchased by A. D. Pardee and Company. It was alleged that they were loaded with metal-jacket bullets. Both groups met at McKenna’s Corner in West Hazleton along the public road. In an effort to intimidate the strikers, Sheriff Martin and his deputies verbally harassed and physically injured the marching strikers, yet were unable to deter the majority of them. The marchers continued, and the sheriff and his deputies boarded a trolley to Lattimer, where they formed a picket line of 150 men across the public highway. When the strikers arrived, the sheriff ordered them to disband, and attempted to detain the marchers. The frontline marchers halted while those behind continued to march, unaware of the sheriff’s demands. Amidst this confusion, the sheriff’s deputies opened fire without provocation. Nineteen marchers died, and 37 known strikers were seriously wounded, some to die later of their injuries. While the remaining marchers fled the area, some of the deputies continued to assault as well as berate the wounded and dying strikers, though some onlookers attempted to aid the wounded. Among the dead were Poles, Slovaks, and one Lithuanian, including Cheslak and Jurich. The dead were buried at St. Stanislaus, St. Joseph’s, and Vine cemeteries in Hazleton, or at St. Patrick’s cemetery in McAdoo, Pennsylvania.

The Background Lattimer is part of the Anthracite Coal Region, which is roughly a 500-square-mile area from Lackawanna County to Upper Dauphin County in eastern Pennsylvania. Vital to the industrial expansion of the U.S. economy during the 19th and

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20th centuries, anthracite, or “hard coal,” burned hotter and longer than the bituminous or “soft coal” and was found only in this region of the United States. Many sought to profit from its high demand—both the owners of the mines, collieries, and mining towns, and the many ethnic laborers seeking escape from the impoverishment of Central and Eastern European agricultural economies. Economic class and ethnic differences segregated the lives of people within coal-mining communities. The poorest members were the most recent laborers from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Confronted with bigotry and an arrogant paternalism from the native mining elite and their company system, recent immigrants were continually reminded of the serfdom and disenfranchisement of their European homelands. As newcomers, many were given the most difficult, dangerous, and demeaning jobs associated with mining. Language and educational barriers as well as American-born prejudice kept them from the technical and professional positions that native workers held. Additionally, they were required to spend their wages at company stores, rent company homes, and visit company doctors, all of which were automatically deducted from their wages. The coal economy’s volatility forced many laborers and their families to accumulate expenses during difficult times, and often families found themselves indebted to the coal companies for generations. There was little recourse for local complaint as the legislative system heavily favored the companies and their rights over the workers’ civil liberties. The year 1897 was difficult for the coal economy. Low anthracite prices led to low pay or even no pay for extra work and employment became sporadic among the coal-mining region. On June 15, Pennsylvania governor Daniel H. Hastings passed the Campbell Act (Act. No. 139), which charged coal companies three cents per day for every adult immigrant they employed on the payroll. Local cost-cutting methods in the Hazleton coal community exacerbated the general economic instability and contributed to a strike-ready atmosphere. Lattimer was part of a larger series of strikes throughout the coal-mining towns throughout the summer and fall. When the law went into effect on August 21, coal companies decided to cover this cost by garnering the wages of their workers. The regional economic stress combined with local business decisions definitively led to the strike and march to Lattimer.

The Aftermath Within the days following the massacre, public meetings were held in towns throughout the region. The leaders, often Catholic clergy, urged the residents to remain peaceful and to work within the American judicial system to bring the perpetrators to justice. Twenty-five hundred national guardsmen were sent to the region the day after the massacre to ensure that peace and stability remained in

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effect. Local residents felt that their presence was unnecessary and insulting given the circumstances. Many of the meetings unanimously adopted resolutions that condemned the event and demanded the prosecution of the Luzerne County sheriff and his deputies as well as his resignation and the removal of the National Guardsmen. On September 15, the National Prosecuting Committee of the Lattimer Victims (NPCCLV) was established with the primary goal to see the sheriff and his deputies brought to trial as well as to ensure that the victims of the massacre received financial support. The regional and national newspapers helped further the outrage over the event describing the butchery and murderous intent of the lawmen. Victim relief and money for prosecution trickled in from all areas of the country, primarily from Slavic communities throughout the United States. Because so many victims emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the imperial government conducted an investigation of the massacre and promptly registered a diplomatic protest with the U.S. secretary of state. The protest requested an official U.S. investigation of the event as well as the right to seek indemnity on behalf of its subjects massacred at Lattimer. On September 20, the sheriff and his deputies were arrested by the justices of the peace of Luzerne County, with a murder trial set for February 1, 1898. Attending the trial was the legal counsel of both the U.S. secretary of state and the Austro-Hungarian ambassador. All of the gunmen were acquitted of the attack on March 9, 1898, which was ruled as a riotous condition, and that their actions were free of malicious intent. The U.S. government accepted the verdict and refused to pay indemnity to the Austro-Hungarian government or its subjects.

Event Significance As a strike, the Lattimer Massacre was one of many throughout the United States during the 1890s in which mine laborers and their employers contested the meaning of rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to foreign laborers. From a legal standpoint, the massacre represented a denial of the freedom to assemble in a public space as decreed by the Bill of Rights, and like many of the strikes during this period, it was met with swift reprisal by local authority. The strike was unique in that it represented the largest and deadliest assault on American laborers throughout the 19th century. While the United Mine Workers Association (UMWA) claimed the event as part of their labor history, they actively distanced themselves from the strikes that led to the massacre in the immediate aftermath. As such, the Lattimer Massacre was not a definitive part of the unionization process of the anthracite coal regions, despite the UMWA’s later inclusion of the event in labor history and physical memorials to the event. Even so, UMWA membership increased dramatically after

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the massacre within the region, yet the UMWA contributed little to the relief of Lattimer Massacre victims. —Jason Reuscher See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Aurand, Harold W. “The Lattimer Massacre: Who Owns History?—An Introduction.” Pennsylvania History 68 (Winter 2002): 5–10. Beik, Mildred Allen. “The Significance of the Lattimer Massacre: Who Owns Its History?” Pennsylvania History 63 (Winter): 58–70. Blatz, Perry K. “Reflections on Lattimer: A Complex and Significant Event.” Pennsylvania History 63 (Winter): 42–57. Dubofsky, Melvin. “The Lattimer Massacre and the Meaning of Citizenship.” Pennsylvania History 63 (Winter): 52–57. Novak, Michael. The Guns of Lattimer: The True Story of a Massacre and a Trial, August 1897–March 1898. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Stolarik, Mark M. “A Slovak Perspective on the Lattimer Massacre.” Pennsylvania History 63 (Winter): 31–41. Turner, George A. “The Lattimer Massacre: A Perspective from the Ethnic Community.” Pennsylvania History 63 (Winter): 11–30. Wolensky, Kenneth C. Freedom to Assemble and the Lattimer Massacre of 1897. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, http://www.hsp.org (accessed December 10, 2008).

Eastern European Immigrants At present, Eastern Europeans are generally the peoples living west of the Ural Mountains and east of Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, also known as the Central European region. The defining boundary of what is Eastern Europe has changed significantly in the past century as countries and empires have formed and dissolved. Eastern Europeans are usually thought of as Slavic-speaking peoples, regardless of geographical boundaries. Until 1991, the term included all countries that were part of the Eastern or Soviet Bloc within Europe. Since the Soviet dissolution, Eastern Europe has been defined by specific, regional terms (the Baltic states or the Balkans, for example). As immigrants, Eastern Europeans were part of the U.S. population since the colonial period, when 100 Poles under Pulaski fought the British during the American Revolution. Yet the bulk of Eastern European immigrants arrived in North America during the 19th and 20th centuries. As nationalism and ethnic tension increased during the 19th century, Pan-Slavic sentiment increased in the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, and Ottoman empires and contributed to Balkan independence from Turkish rule and the outbreak of World War I. The subjugated peoples of these empires included Poles, Slovaks, Russian Jews, and Ukrainians, many of whom faced political disenfranchisement, persecution, and starvation as well as the turmoil of war. Hungarians, Czechs (Bohemians), Slovaks, and Ukrainians moved to the United States to find work in both rural and urban economies. While a large percentage of Eastern European immigrants during the 20th century were living in urban areas, they also comprised a large part of middle-sized towns as well as mining towns in rural regions. Unlike German, Irish, and Welsh immigrants before them, Eastern Europeans were circular immigrants initially, which meant they hoped to return to their homeland after earning enough money through the economic opportunities available in the Americas. When serfdom was abolished in Europe during the 19th century, many became landless/itinerant workers. Some moved to the Pennsylvanian coalfields and steel factories as well as other industries in the MidAtlantic and Midwest regions to seek work as laborers. Others, enticed by the opportunity to own land in the American and Canadian West, became settlers and homesteaders in these regions. Eastern Europeans encountered prejudice and bigotry upon their arrival to the United States. One common, ethnic slur used to stereotype them was “bo-hunk,” which disparaged the first immigrants’ Bohemian and Hungarian origins, yet the term was applied to all Eastern and

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Central Europeans. The aftermath of World War I effectively limited many from returning to their homelands, though Poland’s rebirth as a nation enticed many Polish e´migre´s to return to their country. Most immigrants stayed in the Americas, forming communities in Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the western Canadian provinces. Stricter immigration laws during the 1920s effectively ended the influx of Eastern Europeans to the United States. Despite this, their cultures, religious customs, and languages still persist and provide an ethnic diversity unique to these regions. —Jason Reuscher

Further Reading Fainhauz, David. Lithuanians in the USA: Aspects of Ethnic Identity. Chicago: Lithuanian Library Press, 1991. Galush, William J. For More than Bread: Community and Identity in American Polonia, 1880–1940. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2006. Granatir, Alexander. Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other New Immigrants in the Interwar Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Kuropas, Myron B. The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations, 1884–1954. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Miners Historically, miners included persons involved in digging tunnels to mine or sap enemy fortifications. The term expanded to include all those who work in tunnels to extract valuable metals, fuels, gemstones, ceramic clays, and other natural resources. Miners were central to early civilizations’ cultural, military, and technological exploits. In the ancient world, bronze, copper, gold, and silver were used to make weapons as well as household tools and works of art. The miners were usually slaves. In ancient Athens, miners outside of the city lived in brutal and squalid conditions as they toiled to extract silver-lead deposits at Laurium. While different civilizations developed mining techniques, much of the work was done manually. During the Roman Empire, water wheels were used within limited mining operations, yet by the medieval period, mines and mining technology had all but stagnated and disappeared throughout Europe. Out of the medieval period came a new class of traders, merchants, and bankers who developed and supported European mining operations. After 1450, new mining and metallurgical practices, particularly in Saxony and Bohemia, were discovered and disseminated throughout Europe.

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While most European prospectors and miners were nominally free, the discovery and settlement of the Western Hemisphere ensured that slavery remained the reality for many miners in the Americas. When native Peruvian labor perished in the silver mines of Potosı´, they were replaced with African slaves. In North America, a capitalistic system developed as mine owners competed fiercely for labor. This enabled skilled miners to demand higher wages through collective action and unionization, though many of the unskilled labor continued to suffer harsh working conditions and pay. The energy needs of the 19th and 20th centuries helped engineers realize the use of industrial technology and science in mining operations. Coal and iron ore fueled the Western Industrial Revolution, and coal miners, or colliers, provided for the energy resources of this period. Coal mining in the United States and Great Britain expanded at tremendous cost to the health and safety of the miners and their families as well as the environment. Miners also settled California, Alaska, western Australia, and the Canadian Klondike during the gold rushes of these regions. Mining towns developed their own laws and social mores, and were often strictly divided along class, ethnographic, and religious lines. In Eckley, Pennsylvania, miners were encouraged to live and work within their ethnic groups. While part of this sentiment was natural, the owners saw the benefit of a divided labor force that would help ensure miner productivity and reduce the potential for labor strikes and civil strife. Despite such practices, mining strikes and unrest were frequent, and miners were directly involved in the development of major labor unions of the 20th century. William D. Haywood (1869–1928) led the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization dedicated to worker solidarity and revolutionary class warfare. John L. Lewis (1880–1969), leader of the United Mine Workers of America, helped create the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Through collective bargaining and advances in science and technology, miners in developed countries have improved their working conditions significantly in the past century, yet conditions have improved little for miners in developing nations. —Jason Reuscher

Further Reading Dublin, Thomas, and Walter Licht. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Gregory, Cedric Errol. A Concise History of Mining. Lisse, the Netherlands: A. A. Balkema, 2001. Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosi, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Temple, John. Mining: An International History. New York: Praeger, 1972.

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Strikers’ Resolutions and Editorials Appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger Following the Deaths of Striking Coal Miners at the Lattimer Mine, Hazleton, Pennsylvania (1897) The following three selections relate to the so-called Lattimer Massacre, which refers to the killing of 19 striking Pennsylvania coal miners at the Lattimer Mine by the Luzerne County sheriff’s posse in September 1897. The first selection is a series of resolutions memorializing the dead, which were adopted at a mass meeting of strikers held at Harwood, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1897, the day after the incident. The other two selections are from editorials in the Philadelphia Public Ledger calling for the restoration of order in the aftermath of the deaths at the Lattimer Mine. For years we have been oppressed by C. Pardee & Co. by the payment of starvation wages. They have deprived us of our liberty by compelling us to deal in their company store. They have forced us to purchase powder at five times the actual value, and have otherwise tyrannized us in ways too numerous to mention, so that we are no longer free men, but slaves. We assembled together peacefully and to seek redress for our grievances. Not one man among us was armed. Our mission was not to take human life not to destroy property, but to go and meet our fellow employe´s of the same company at Lattimer, who were in sympathy with us. We were opposed on the public highways, and without provocation were shot down like dogs. Resolved, That we deplore such resistance to the right to assemble and march; that we look upon such shootings as unprovoked and uncalled for, and that if such slaughter is not murder in law it surely must be before high Heaven; that we denounce such action by the Sheriff and his deputies as cruel and willful and cowardly murder. We place ourselves before the bar of public opinion and appeal to the good citizens of the State and country, and ask them if there was justification or warrant in such assassination. Resolved, That we extend our sympathy to the friends and relatives of those who have fallen, and pray to God that those now dead will live in our memories as martyrs to the cause of down-trodden labor. Source: Philadelphia Public Ledger, September 11, 1897. . . . It is not infrequently the case that in periods of great public turmoil, like that through which Hazleton has been passing, legal distinctions and definitions as to the duties of public officials and the rights of individuals and of the public become somewhat confused. It is clearly the duty of all persons engaged in a riotous assemblage to disperse upon the demand of the Sheriff. If they continue to participate in such an assemblage upon such demand, they assume the extreme risks which such conduct involves. . . .

Lattimer Massacre (1897) That the public highways can be used for almost any purpose is one of the popular misconceptions of the day. The public have the right to travel over the highways freely and without obstruction or molestation at all times. A tumultuous assembly which blocks the way and prevents its free use by travellers in pursuit of their lawful callings is an unlawful assembly and should be dispersed by the strong arm. It is true that free assembly is one of the primary rights of citizens; but it is a right, like all other fundamental rights, which must be regulated by law. The use of the highways by large, riotous bodies of men passing from point to point to prevent workmen by force from continuing their lawful employments cannot be permitted in a country which assumes to protect its citizens in earning their livelihood. Source: “The Situation at Hazleton,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, September 13, 1897. The responsibilities and duties of civil officers with reference to the disposition of riotous assemblies are clearly defined by statute and decisions. Whether the Sheriff and his posse acted within the law in dispersing the marching miners at Lattimer is a query which cannot be answered decisively by newspaper comment or by the resolutions of public meetings. That issue is within the province of courts and juries to decide. As was forcibly pointed out by Judge Paxson in the Homestead cases, a mob may so conduct itself as to commit treason against the State. This jurist held that when a large number of men arm and organize in a common purpose to defy the law, to resist its officers and deprive their fellow-citizens of their rights, it is a levying of war against the State, and the offence is treason. A riotous gathering directed against individuals or private property may thus develop into a treasonable outbreak which no State can permit to continue. As the conduct of the Sheriff and his posse at Lattimer is subject to legal scrutiny, so also the character of the marching body which came into collision with the Sheriff’s posse must be determined by the law courts. The Homestead cases under review by the Supreme Court evoked important judicial deliverances upon many vital points touching the right of assembly and the abuse of it; and the Lattimer tragedy is likely to lead to further declarations of law upon this extremely important subject. These matters may be safely left to the legal tribunals, and in the meantime every law-abiding citizen in the disturbed mining districts will do what he can to allay public excitement. Source: “Restoring Order at Hazleton,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, September 14, 1897.

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New Orleans Race Riot (1900) Occurring between July 24 and July 28, 1900, the New Orleans Race Riot was described by one historian as “a carnival of fury.” The riot was initially sparked by the wounding of a New Orleans police patrolman, August T. Mora, on July 23, and the murder of two other New Orleans policemen, Patrolman Peter Lamb and Captain John T. Day, the next day by Robert Charles, a young African American who had relocated to New Orleans from Pine Bluff, Mississippi, in 1894. The initial motivations behind Charles’s own violent response to the initial questioning by police officers on Dryades Street must remain speculative, for he was himself killed following a shoot-out on July 27. But his actions, and the subsequent riot, occurred during a tense period in the racial history of New Orleans, a city perhaps rather more superficially known for the birth of jazz and its more joyous carnival atmosphere. New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century was, however, an illgoverned, disorderly, dirty, and poorly policed metropolis. One of the largest cities in the South, it was also developing a hard drug problem, with cocaine openly sold in many drugstores. The city was also slow in recovering from the economic depression of the 1890s, and continuing unemployment only helped to increase racial tensions. Attempts to extend Jim Crow laws and secure segregation in the city also increased hostility amongst African Americans and the large, and somewhat wealthier, Creole population. The city’s newspapers, especially the States— which was published and edited by Henry J. Hearsey, an ex-major in the Confederate army—increasingly supported segregation as an answer to what was termed the “Negro problem.” In fact, the initial attempt to institute earlier restrictive Black Codes in July 1866 had sparked a previous riot in the city, and the murder of the city’s chief of police, David Hennessy, in March 1891 had also sparked a violent outbreak of vigilante violence in which 11 Sicilians, thought to be behind the murder, were publicly lynched. If Charles had not begun his gun battle with the city’s police force, another similar incident may well have acted as a catalyst for violence in July 1900. After his initial gun battle with Patrolman Lamb on July 23, a wounded Charles returned to his lodgings on Fourth Street to retrieve his .38 caliber Winchester rifle. As Captain Day and six other officers approached the house in which he was hiding, Charles again opened fire, killing Day and mortally wounding

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Patrolman Lamb. Again escaping, the wounded Charles later took refuge in the house of a friend at 1208 Saratoga Street. Following this second shooting, an angry white crowd began to congregate outside Charles’s residence on Fourth Street, and scuffles began between the angry white mob and the black residences. By late evening on July 24, the crowd around Fourth Street was estimated to be over 5,000 people, with another 500 people attempting to view the bodies of the slain officers at the city morgue. During the evening, random violence between whites and blacks occurred frequently. At Lee Circle on Charles Avenue, an armed white mob also assembled, and they dispersed only when a leading citizen informed them that Charles had been arrested in Kenner, a suburb. Charles, however, was still at large, and the next day, July 25, witnessed the funeral cortege of both Day and Lamb. City newspapers continued to inflame public opinion and seemed to suggest the need for white vigilante action, and another large mob, estimated at 3,000, congregated at Lee Circle that day. Stopping streetcars and randomly assaulting innocent African Americans, the mob made its way to the parish prison intent on lynching Charles’s roommate Lenard Pierce, who had been arrested on July 23 when the police had initially questioned both men. Deterred by a strong show of police force under Sergeant Gabriel Porteous, the mob moved on, but violence continued into the night. Near the French Market, an aged African American, Baptiste Philo, was fatally shot, and by the morning of July 26, two other African American men had been murdered, six seriously injured, and another 50 innocent victims had been beaten. The mayor, Paul Capdeville, was so alarmed by the violence that he issued a call for responsible citizens to enlist in a special police force, and the governor, William H. Heard, mobilized the state militia. A reliable African American police informer named Fred Clarke alerted the police that Charles had taken refuge in the residence of the Jackson family on Saratoga Street. On the afternoon of July 27, Sergeant Porteous and three patrolmen went to investigate. As they approached Charles’s hiding place, Charles opened fire, killing Porteous and mortally wounding Corporal John F. Lally. As Charles then took up position of the top floor of 1208 Saratoga Street, news quickly spread throughout the city about the attack and Charles’s whereabouts, and a large armed mob, estimated at 5,000, joined the police and militia in surrounding the 1200 block of Saratoga Street. In the developing gun battle, Charles, who appeared every minute to fire out of a window, hit another 21 of his white attackers. In response, over 5,000 bullets hit the building, which was eventually set on fire by the police at 5:00 p.m. As he attempted to escape, Charles was finally shot dead by a special policeman, Charles A. Noiret, and after his dead body was riddled with bullets by other policemen, it was dumped in the street, where it was attacked by the mob. Charles’s death on July 27 did not end the violence in

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New Orleans, and throughout the night and into the morning of July 28, arson and violence continued in African American neighborhoods. At midnight, the Laton School, the best African American school in Louisiana, was set on fire and destroyed. By daylight, however, the furious spirit of the mob was ebbing, and order was restored to the city by a large police presence. The aftershocks of Charles’s actions and the riot continued to trouble New Orleans for months after July 1900. Unwilling to admit that Charles alone was responsible for the events of July, rumors spread that Dillard University, another African American school, was to be burned down; and in August, Lenard Pierce and nine other African Americans, including five members of the Jackson family, were indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. A case could not be made against any of the accused, and they were later freed. Similarly, the nine white men indicted for murder during the riot were also released after an aborted trial. Scapegoats were found, however, and five patrolmen of the New Orleans Police Department who had failed to capture or kill Charles on either July 23 or July 24 were found guilty of cowardice in a disciplinary hearing and dismissed from the force in August 1900. This did not end the matter, for on September 2, 1900, Lewis Forstall, who had known and admired Charles, shot dead the informer, Fred Clark, as he sat on the doorstep of his house on South Rampart Street; Forstall was later found guilty of manslaughter and served seven years of hard labor. On the first anniversary of Charles’s death, persons unknown finally burned down the stillempty house in which he had defied his attackers, 1208 Saratoga Street. —Rory T. Cornish See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Hair, William Ivy. Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Jackson, Joy J. New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Somers, Dale A. “Black and White in New Orleans: A Study in Urban Race Relations, 1865–1890.” Journal of Southern History 60 (February 1974): 19–42. Synnestvedt, Sig. The White Response to Black Emancipation. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1972.

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Charles, Robert (c.1866–1900) Robert Charles was an obscure African American whose initial gun battle with the New Orleans police on July 23, 1900, led to a serious race riot in the city. By the time of his own death on July 27, Charles had shot 27 white people, killing four policemen. Contemporary opinion considered Charles to be a bloodthirsty champion of African supremacy and a cocaine-riddled woman beater. More recent historians have suggested that he was one of the proudest martyrs in American history. Born to poor, but literate, sharecroppers in Pine Bluff, Copiah County, Mississippi, Charles’s parents had been slaves. Though his father, Jasper Charles, was never very politically active, he did exercise his right to vote and was called upon as late as 1882 for jury duty. Copiah County, however, was the scene of a violent reign of terror against African American voters in 1883 as a prelude to their later disenfranchisement. The U.S. Senate investigated conditions in the county in 1884, but the U.S. Supreme Court later upheld the “Mississippi Plan” of disenfranchisement in Williams v. Mississippi (1898). Charles only received two years of primary education, but contemporary opinion described him as an intelligent, serious young man who kept to himself, but who, according to his later roommate in New Orleans, Lenard Pierce, was concerned about the wrongs inflicted upon his race and the needs for self-defense. In 1887, Charles went to Vicksburg and found work as a section hand for the Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad (LNO&T). Undoubtedly aware of the increasingly widespread campaign of lynching that accompanied the attack on African American civil rights, Charles purchased a pistol, a Colt .44, sometime before 1892, the possession of which later provoked a shoot-out between Charles and a white flagman of the LNO&T at Rolling Fork in May 1892. Returning to Pine Bluff under the alias of Curtis Robertson, the only other trouble Charles found himself in before 1900 was an arrest for bootlegging in October 1894, a charge for which he was cleared in 1896. Nonetheless, this brush with the authorities prompted his rather sudden relocation to New Orleans at the end of 1894. One of the largest cities in the South, and one with a large urban population, New Orleans had a somewhat unjustified reputation for integration. Racial confrontation in the city increased in the 1890s due to an economic depression. While a resident in New Orleans, Charles, who managed to find employment in a number of semi-skilled and unskilled jobs, not only witnessed the failure of a PopulistRepublican fusion ticket in 1896 to defeat the conservative Democrats in the state, but also the subsequent campaign in Louisiana to also disenfranchise its African American male voters, which was quickly successful. Charles was also shocked

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by the brutal torture and lynching of Sam Hose (or Holt) in Newman, Georgia, in April 1899, for in May, he contacted Bishop Henry M. Turner to become a subscription agent for his magazine Voice of Missions, which advocated the cause of a return to Africa, something Charles had long shown an interest in. While his motivations for his actions on Dryades Streets on July 23, 1900, must remain a mystery, it seems Charles was agitated about the increasing attack on African American civil rights in the South. When questioned by three policemen while he waited for friends at 11:00 p.m., a struggle developed, resulting in Patrolman August T. Mora using his billy club against Charles. Charles pulled out his pistol, and in the exchange, both Charles and Mora were wounded. Having made his escape, Charles returned to his residence on Fourth Street, where another attempt to arrest him resulted in the death of Captain John T. Day and Patrolman Peter J. Lamb. Again escaping arrest, Charles’s actions sparked a four-day riot in New Orleans. Finally cornered in the rented residence of the Jackson family on Saratoga Street, Charles engaged in a gun battle with the police, special constables, and vigilantes on July 27. After the house was set on fire, smoke drove Charles from his hiding place, and while attempting to escape, he was shot and killed by Charles A. Noiret. Charles’s body was horribly mutilated after his death, his autopsy recording 34 bullet holes and multiple other wounds to the body. His death did not initially end the violence in New Orleans, but on July 29, 1900, his body was finally buried in Holt’s Cemetery. —Rory T. Cornish

Further Reading Hair, William Ivy. Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Somers, Dale A. “Black and White in New Orleans: A Study in Urban Race Relations, 1865–1900.” Journal of Southern History 60 (February 1974): 19–42. Synnestvedt, Sig. The White Response to Black Emancipation. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1972.

Jim Crow Laws Jim Crow is the common name used to describe the racial segregation and disfranchisement inflicted upon African Americans in the postbellum South. The term “Jim Crow” was the name of a popular, black-face minstrel show character that originated in the 1830s. This character represented the ignorant, goofy, and

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inferior stereotype applied to African Americans during that period in American history. Jim Crow restrictions and laws became popular in the south during the post-Reconstruction era and continued well into the 20th century. The Compromise of 1876 ended the Reconstruction era in the South. To secure the 1876 presidential election, Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes promised to former Confederate states the withdrawal of Union troops as well as not to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. This negotiation, known as the Compromise of 1876, led to the reestablishment of political power for southern Democrats. As southern Democrats regained their political power, they began to reign in control over the political and economic opportunities and the social freedoms that African Americans had so recently won through Jim Crow. Racial segregation was first implemented through railway travel. By 1890, four states—Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana—had enacted railroad segregation laws. These laws required railroad companies to provide “separate but equal” travel accommodations for African American travelers. However, black passengers did not receive the same accommodations as white passengers. In many cases, black passengers were required to sit in the smoking car or in a car with uncomfortable seating near the engine car, which emitted sooty smoke and where prisoners or disruptive, often drunk passengers were seated—nothing like the clean and comfortable cars reserved for white passengers. Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case challenging the 1890 Louisiana railway segregation act, solidified the legality of railway seating segregation based on race, and it provided a legal precedent for further forms of segregation. By the turn of the century, Jim Crow segregation had spread throughout the southern landscape—restaurants, hotels, hospitals, parks, theaters, churches, cemeteries—any and all public spaces. Schools and universities were segregated, severely limiting educational opportunities for African American children. Jim Crow had also infiltrated the electoral process. Politicians imposed voting qualifications on African American men, including the grandfather clause and a literacy test—neither of which were applied to white male voters. The regulation and enforcement of Jim Crow became widespread and increasingly violent. Intimidation tactics by both politicians and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instilled fear in the African American community. Black male voters who did qualify under the grandfather clause and passed the literacy test were threatened with violence, which often resulted in low African American voter turnout. Lynching became the most prominent form of violence against African Americans who were found guilty of violating Jim Crow. Under the Wilson administration, government offices and the military also became subject to Jim Crow. Although they faced incredible violence, the African American community did not sit idly by and simply accept their second-class-citizen status. Leaders such as

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Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others organized their communities and took action. They formed groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and numerous other organizations aimed at achieving racial equality. Jim Crow remained a staple of southern culture and society until the mid-20th century when justice finally breached the callous nature of white supremacy and racism through judicial decisions such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that reversed the “separate but equal” statute and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. —Dawn M. Sherman

Further Reading Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ortiz, Paul. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy intentionally violated the “Separate Car Act,” an 1890 Louisiana statute that, by law, segregated railway cars on the basis of race. This act of defiance was a planned response to years of post-Reconstruction discrimination aimed at African Americans. Members of the New Orleans Citizens’ Committee organized this act of civil disobedience with the intention of taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, exposing the racial inequality existing in the South, and legally enforcing a halt to such practices. At the close of the Reconstruction era, in 1876, Republicans began to lose their political hold throughout the South. Southern Democrats once again gained political power and reinstituted political and social discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws—racially segregating society by applying the “separate but equal” standard to all people of color. Segregation applied to public schools, churches, restaurants, transportation, parks, and even cemeteries. By no means did equal

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accommodations mean identical accommodations—certainly schools did not receive the same funding. Railcars reserved for black travelers were filled with uncomfortable seats and often used for prisoner transport or disruptive, drunk, and disorderly passengers. “Separate but equal” was simply a ploy to placate Republicans who might challenge the legality. In reality, Jim Crow laws did not provide equal accommodations or services but deprived African American of their newly found freedoms. Fed up with the masked discrimination, the Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans recruited Homer Plessy, a shoemaker living in the integrated middleclass neighborhood of Faubourg Treme in New Orleans. Homer was a black Creole—a descendant of French or Spanish and African liaisons. He had a light complexion and was able to pass as white, which enabled him to easily purchase a train ticket and board the “white only” section of the East Louisiana Railroad Company railcar. He then announced to the conductor that he was a black man and was in violation of the 1890 statute prohibiting blacks to sit in white railcars. Plessy refused the conductor’s request to move to the “black only” railcar and was arrested for his crime. Plessy’s attorney, presiding in front of district court judge John Ferguson, argued that the “Separate Car Act” violated both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Judge Ferguson ruled against Plessy’s claim. Plessy appealed his case to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, which also ruled against him. Plessy and his attorney, Albion Tourgee, took their final appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy, finding him guilty of violating the “Separate Car Act.” Plessy chose to pay the $25 fine rather than go to jail for up to 20 days. Plessy v. Ferguson opened the flood gates for southern states to legally segregate society according to race and marginalize the African American people by depriving them of their constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. Legalized segregation remained part of the southern landscape well into the 20th century, until the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which the Court found to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. —Dawn M. Sherman

Further Reading Fireside, Harvey. Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision that Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. Lobel, Jules. Success without Victory: Lost Legal Battles and the Long Road to Justice in America. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

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Atlanta Race Riot (1906) The Atlanta race riots occurred from September 22 to September 24, 1906. Murder, property damage, and indiscriminate violence did not make this event unusual. However, the timing of the event, not long after the demise of Reconstruction, had a residue of anger and hostility, providing the energy that ignited the city’s population. Atlanta was a growing city; it was becoming the rail hub of the “New South” and attracted men and women, white and black, to potential jobs and upward mobility. The population increased from 89,000 in 1900 to 150,000 in 1910. The black population grew from 9,000 in 1880 to 35,000 in 1900. Intense competition for employment above the subsistence level existed. The atmosphere caused the municipal government to use its police powers; it sought to control the working classes through restrictions, one of which segregated the races. Fears of intermingling and intermarriage dominated the new urban center, where opportunities for social freedom existed. Mixed with Jim Crow laws, the intellectual remains of racial politics, the withdrawal of civil rights, and the perceived loss of opportunity aided the press in its yellow journalism and jingoism for the war of the races. Hoke Smith, former publisher of the Atlanta Journal, and Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, both sought the Georgia governorship. Both played upon the fears of a rising black class with money and power. Both used their power to influence the general population to acquire support for the coming election. Smith, who had the support of populist Thomas E. Watson, inflamed racial tensions by advocating blacks should be disenfranchised to keep them in their “place.” He argued that blacks threatened the social, economic, and political order. Howell, his opponent in the race, believed the Democratic White primary and poll tax contained the political methods of control over the blacks of Atlanta. The means used included alleged and unsubstantiated “information” about black assaults against white women. The media, violating its mission, provoked the whites against blacks in any way possible to garner the gubernatorial vote. The candidates used America’s new international image to support their use of racism. President McKinley and his secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt, the politicians most instrumental in causing the Spanish-American War and occupation of many areas throughout the world, used terms such as “little brown/black

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brother” to justify American expansion. With the Brownsville, Texas, convictions, black anger rose as the news of this inequity spread. A regiment of black solders who had fought in the Spanish-American War was garrisoned in Brownsville. Their compounds allowed them entry into the city and race rioting occurred. Roosevelt, then president, tried the black segregated unit unfairly, and his actions gained notoriety for racial conduct, which may have affected the atmosphere in and for the Atlanta Race Riot. Many in the unit were discharged without honor on November 9, 1906. This was unfortunate, since the peoples of Atlanta had, at least superficially, resolved their statuses in the city. Parks, transportation, recreational centers, and neighborhoods throughout Atlanta had many integrated areas. Unfortunately, “Jim Crow” came to Atlanta at the beginning of the 20th century. Racial restrictions, violence, and hysteria became common all over the South; growing and prosperous municipalities endured the civil brutality leading to the riot of 1906. Segregation returned with the demise of Reconstruction, and the justifications offered by the theory of “scientific racism” segregation returned. The black community, like the white, created its own worlds. Since the dominant social and political forces were white, they instituted policies that affected housing, cemeteries, intermarriage, and transportation, the last having been granted legal sanction by Plessy v. Ferguson. This case, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on May 18, 1896, established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The politicians offered methods of controlling the black population’s “violent” conduct. The more charitable whites suggested alcohol as the cause. Hence, prohibition became part of the state’s program, which the nation eventually followed. The saloons were centers for black violence against white women. Taverns became the meeting place for planning crimes of all sorts. After the Civil War, temperance segments allied with politicians wished to make it illegal for emancipated blacks to drink alcohol. Such a belief was in keeping with the temperance movement gaining strength throughout the region, and voting support was forthcoming. Atlanta, as part of the New South, had a developing black population. The city witnessed the first black insurance company and many other businesses serving their community. Financially, black elites emerged, threatening the white view of the relationship of the two races. These blacks were called “uppity,” and their growing voice in Atlanta was a course for concern to the establishment. Black elites usually allied themselves with wealthy whites when a political challenge occurred between rich and poor. The wealthier segments of society—white and black—banded together against the wishes of their poorer brethren. The political desires of the gubernatorial candidates, failure of the fourth estate, the newspapers after repeated and unsubstantiated race batting, and human nature

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all contributed to the riot of 1906 in a growing and prosperous city. On Saturday, September 22, the local newspapers continued their repeated statements about racial violence and discourse. This day, however, was different. The newspapers published several extra editions with language intended to incite violence. The newspapers were distributed throughout the city, in the center of which men and women gathered. Atlanta mayor James G. Woodward urged calm, but indignant mobs refused to listen. The mobs attacked blacks in all parts of the city. Vandalism accompanied the rioting. Blacks on public conveyances were pulled off and beaten. As the situation worsened and the local police could not control the situation, the state militia was called into action to prevent the escalation of violence and civil disorder. The militia was only able to quell the chaos because of a deluge. The Atlanta newspapers reported that the militia came to secure the city because the blacks allegedly were no longer a problem. The media’s reason for this allegation was that white mobs had driven the blacks off the streets. However, vigilante gangs roamed the city streets as the armed militia patrolled them. This peaceful mirage was a hiatus in the storm. Some blacks secreted weapons for self-defense as white mobs invaded their neighborhoods. Blacks did fight back, protecting family and property. September 24 became a pivotal day. Blacks held a mass meeting near the downtown area. The police responded, fearing more violence, and attacked the meeting’s participants. Violence ensued, and an officer was killed; three militia companies reinforced the police in Atlanta and seized weaponry while arresting 250 blacks. This action only inflamed the situation. Eventually, all concerned and/or interested parties pleaded for a cessation of violence. Whether the competing gubernatorial candidates accepted responsibility for their contributions to the riot or the key city to the New South was irreparably harmed, no one can answer with certainty. The obvious hostility and violence gave way to efforts of reconciliation, dialogue, and hope. It appeared that one way to resolve the potential for continued conflict was de facto segregation in all avenues of life. Booker T. Washington’s policies of accommodation in education and civil life suffered from statewide white reaction against the black population. He called upon whites to provide jobs, train blacks, and forget civil liberties and social equality. His nonviolent philosophy garnered funds for black colleges. His Up from Slavery spoke of self-help and self-reliance, but he wanted blacks to gain the tools with which to compete. Washington’s opponent, W. E. B. Dubois, proposed a different, and more popular solution to the racial impasse destroying Atlanta. He opted for more aggressive tactics pursuing racial justice and equality. His Souls of Black Folk advocated direct and political action and a college education. His “Talented Ten,” college graduates, were intended to lead.

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While a modus vivendi was accomplished, the city became more segregated. A literacy test was imposed on black residents and racial polarization became the rule with each race establishing its own social structure. The Ku Klux Klan, ever present in moments of racial tension, made its appearance in Atlanta and served as a method of controlling the white and black population in the competition for jobs in the South’s fastest-growing city. —Arthur K. Steinberg See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Bauerlein, Mark. Negrophobia: Race Riot in Atlanta in 1906. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001. Burnes, Rebecca, et al. Race in the Gate City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Dorsey, Allison. To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875–1906. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Godshalk, David Fort. Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Economic Competition A large, though underinvestigated, part of the motivation for racial violence such as the Atlanta Race Riot is the economic competition that African Americans posed to white southerners. Before the Civil War, slavery prevented economic competition between the races, as whites were the sole beneficiaries of the labor of their black slaves. Even free blacks were so marginalized, and so small in number, as not to pose an economic threat. Feelings about slavery among northerners before the Civil War were ambivalent, largely because of the perceived threat that free blacks might pose to the free labor and free land ideals of northern white America. Although the motive given by white Atlantans for the violence that erupted on September 22, 1906, was that African Americans were harassing white women, “uppity” behavior on the part of African American Atlantans could consist of any attempt by blacks to escape their station in life, both socially and economically. The larger context for the Atlanta riot is the gubernatorial campaign that was taking place that year. Democratic candidate Hoke Smith was a champion of improving the South’s economic standing, but he was equally a champion of the suppression of the state’s African American population. To him, and to many Atlantans, the issues were inextricably connected. The issues were also connected to Booker T. Washington, whose argument that white southerners were beginning to see that their lives would improve with the progress of African Americans was utterly shattered by the violence wrought by white Atlantans (Godshalk 2005, 3). Around the turn of the 20th century, Atlanta seemed to be one of the least likely places to see racial violence. Black-owned businesses were springing up throughout the South, as African Americans were able to experience the general economic good times on a limited basis. It was home to six African American colleges. However, white politicians, playing to the economic concerns of their white constituencies, avoided true progressivism’s emphasis on economic opportunity, instead encouraging racial rivalries that found their expressions in groups like the Ku Klux Klan and events like the Atlanta Race Riot (Godshalk 2005, 9). Race relations, always tense, became even more contentious as the rhetoric of the gubernatorial race began to heat up. Atlanta’s phenomenal growth had increased job competition between the races, as well as class distinctions. Upper-class whites feared the social mixing of the races that increased prosperity for African Americans might bring. The backlash to the economic competition posed by Atlanta’s rising African American community, thus, has to be seen as the cause both of legal maneuvers, such as the increasing the stringency of Jim Crow laws, and of popular mob violence, such as the three-day Atlanta riot in 1906. —Steven L. Danver

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Further Reading Bauerlein, Mark. Negrophobia: Race Riot in Atlanta in 1906. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001. Godshalk, David Fort. Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Mixon, Gregory. The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

White Supremacy Racial stratification and white racism have fueled extralegal violence and riots throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The 1906 Atlanta Riot provides one of the more devastating and spectacular illustrations of the import of white supremacy. Over three days, the city that epitomized the promise and problems of the postReconstruction South was the scene of spontaneous and orchestrated violence, rooted in long-standing racial tensions, emergent class conflicts, and the consequences of urbanization. In particular, growing economic competition between blacks and whites, demands for civil rights, and a public panic over black crime set the stage for the right. Like so many other anti-black attacks in the post–Civil War South, the Atlanta Riot of 1906 erupted around issues of masculinity, honor, and hierarchy, most commonly expressed as white men protecting white women from allegedly improper advances by black men. Newspapers reported four such assaults on Saturday, September 22. A crowd of perhaps as many as 10,000 whites assembled in Five Points. Initially, individual African American men were targeted by groups of white Atlantans, who quickly turned their aggression against black-owned business. As the violence escalated, it became more intense and increasingly random. In response, armed groups of African Americans took to the street to protect their community from further harm and defend their property from destruction. Georgia governor Joseph M. Terrell deployed the state militia to quell the violence and regain control of the central business district, but it was only heavy rains that dispersed the rioters at 2:00 a.m. on September 23. The presence of the militia pushed the rioting to the suburbs on the south side of the city. Although meant to restore law and order, over the next two days, the militia actually reinforced the vigilantes’ efforts. Not only were there reports of violence and looting unchecked by the militia, but in the end, it mobilized against African Americans organizing

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for self-protection, arresting as many as 250 of them in the community of Brownsville. In the end, the Atlanta Riot of 1906 resulted in the deaths of at least 25 and perhaps as many as 70 African American men and two Euro-American men. An additional 70 African Americans were injured. Although largely forgotten in its aftermath by many white Atlantans, the riot had profound consequences. Most immediately, it devastated the African American commercial district. The events of 1906 not only reflected white prejudice, but reinforced white supremacy, resulting in the passage of further restrictions on black suffrage. Finally, the riot of 1906 intensified tensions within the African American community, intensifying debates about the best path toward equality, freedom, and dignity. —C. Richard King

Further Reading Bauerlein, Mark. Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001. Mixon, Gregory. The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

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Springfield Race Riot (1908) The Springfield, Illinois, race riot was notorious for the sudden violence in which two prosperous black citizens were lynched, four white men were killed, and over 100 citizens were injured. Over the course of the two-day riot, dozens of blackowned and Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, along with many homes occupied by black families. Thousands of black citizens fled the city, fearing for their lives; some never returned. Significantly, very few rioters were held accountable for the murder and mayhem. On Friday, August 14, 1908, an angry mob of more than 5,000 assembled outside the Springfield jail, eager to take justice into its own hands. One black prisoner, George Richardson, was accused of raping a white woman and another black prisoner, Joe James, was accused of murdering a white man. When the mob discovered it had been deceived and the prisoners had been moved, it sought vengeance. Suspecting that Henry Loper’s car had played a role in moving the black prisoners, the mob demolished Loper’s car and restaurant (Senechal 1990, 27–34, 95). The Jewish-owned Fishman’s Pawn Shop was another early target. The attack appeared to have been planned in advance. The mob stole tools that they then used to destroy the black residential neighborhoods known as the “Badlands” (Anonymous 2008, 5). About one-quarter of the houses in that neighborhood were owned by Isadore Kanner, a Russian Jewish immigrant. The police did not intervene while the mob attacked the black neighborhood. The rioters attempted to protect white families living in the Badlands neighborhood by having them pin white cloths to their entrances. The riot took an uglier turn when rioters prevented firefighters from putting out flames. Rioters also attacked black invalids (Senechal 1990, 35– 37). Scott Burton, a black barber, and William Donnegan, an 80-year-old retired black shoemaker, were pulled from their homes and lynched. By 9:15 that evening, the city had requested troops from the state of Illinois, and 500 militia were sent in. By Saturday evening, 1,400 militia were stationed in Springfield, and they were able to make headway against the mob. The police arrested suspected rioters, and they prevented further attacks on black neighborhoods. Black families were permitted to take shelter in the Springfield arsenal (Senechal 1990, 40). Several times on Saturday evening, crowds formed, but in the major trouble spots, they were dispersed by the militia. The crowds noted the pattern in the

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way the militia were deployed, and they exploited the militia’s weaknesses by causing trouble in areas where only small groups were on the loose. By Sunday morning, the riot was over (Senechal 1990, 43–45). On the first day of the riot, the rioters were seen as reformers who were ridding the city of black people and of disreputable businesses such as gambling parlors, saloons, and houses of prostitution. By the second day of the riot, perceptions had changed. Upstanding citizens no longer stood among the crowds of onlookers, offering tacit approval. The rioters wanted white-owned businesses to stop employing black workers. However, those who used black employees depended upon them and did not want anyone dictating their employment practices. This segment of the populace did not desire an “all-white” Springfield (Senechal 1990, 126). Also, by this time, the national press had picked up the story and residents were conscious of Springfield being cast in an unfavorable light (Senechal 1990, 48). In another twist to the narrative of the Springfield riot, only black-owned businesses in the vice district were destroyed; all of the comparable white-owned businesses went untouched. The mob also destroyed black-owned businesses such as barbershops, restaurants, shoemakers, an upholstery shop, and a bicycle shop (Senechal 1990, 14). The black community had believed that assimilation would come because of hard work and economic success. The attacks that took place during the Springfield riot suggested that black citizens were targeted specifically because of their economic success, a sobering repudiation of the American dream. Many rioters were disadvantaged people who resented the achievements of the black middle class. Even though the riot was over within two days, for several weeks afterward, there were sneak attacks on black citizens. The police denied that this was happening and provided no protection (Senechal 1990, 136). Mabel Halle, the married white woman who accused a black man of raping her, exonerated the man she originally accused, implicated another black man, then finally conceded that she had had sexual relations with a white man who was someone she knew. Her accusation had been one of the tinderboxes setting off the riot, yet Springfield authorities never charged her with filing a false report. She moved away within a few months (Senechal 1990, 158–159). The grand jury brought 107 indictments against 80 people, including four police officers who were accused of failing to stop the riot. There was only one conviction. Rioters threatened people who were called to testify, and white juries refused to find rioters guilty (Crouthamel 1960, 176). The acquittal of Abraham Reimer (sometimes spelled Raymer) was one of the most publicized. He was an itinerant Jewish peddler who participated in the riot and who was accused of lynching William Donnegan. Reimer’s case was unusual in that most people in the Jewish community of Springfield had been victims of the riot, not perpetrators. His case received national coverage, and it sent the message that regardless of the evidence,

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there would be little accountability for an incident that had exacted a heavy toll in deaths, injuries, and property damage. Six years after the riot, the city of Springfield was still compensating victims for damages (Senechal 1990, 159, 181). The lack of legal consequences for rioters fit in with local perceptions of what had happened. Before the riot, Springfield had the reputation of being one of the most corrupt Midwestern cities; this poor opinion only intensified afterward. In the early hours of the riot, the mob wanted to exact revenge on two black prisoners. After the prisoners were moved, the mission shifted to ridding Springfield of disreputable businesses, under the guise of “reform” (Senechal 1990, 85). However, the unspoken mission was to attack black-owned and Jewish-owned businesses, and to attack homes occupied by black families. Local law enforcement was intimidated by the size of the crowd, and police did little to stop the rioters until more forces arrived. By Saturday, when the militia arrived in force and it looked as though order would be restored, Springfield’s four newspapers called the rioters “bums and hoodlums” and “riff raff” (Senechal 1990, 37, 47). This change of opinion signaled more than semantics. Most Springfield residents avoided thinking of the disturbance as a race riot (Senechal 1990, 169, 176). The focus shifted from racism to issues of class. In their rush to put the race riot behind them, Springfield residents looked for larger trends, such as the fallout from urbanization and industrialization (Goldstein 2006, 62). If influential citizens could think of the riot as stemming from hooliganism rather than racism, they could avoid examining the role of racism in Springfield. No one had to accept responsibility for the deaths of six citizens. Springfield citizens refocused the blame on lax law enforcement and on corrupt city officials. Black victims received no sympathy. In the wider arena of public opinion in the North, the riot and its aftermath were harshly criticized. Spurred by the riot, black citizens worked with social workers, activists, and philanthropists to hold an organizational meeting for the NAACP in Springfield, on February 12, 1909 (Crouthamel 1960, 178–181). —Merrill Evans See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Anonymous. Springfield, Illinois, Race Riot of 1908. Springfield, IL: Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2008.

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Springfield Race Riot (1908) Crouthamel, James L. “The Springfield Riot of 1908.” Journal of Negro History 45, no. 3 (1960): 164–181. Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Senechal, Roberta. The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Jewish Americans For Jewish and black citizens, a history of contradictory relationships—both solidarity and distrust—marked the run-up to the 1908 riot in Springfield. Like many other northern cities, Springfield experienced swift social and economic change, straining connections among citizens. Some saw Springfield’s leaders as corrupt, because they did not crack down on businesses such as brothels, gambling parlors, and opium dens, facilitating a scofflaw atmosphere (Senechal 1990, 134). Jewish and black citizens found themselves excluded from many business and social opportunities. They felt they were treated with equal unfairness, but it was hard for them to work together because of conflicting social currents. Jewish immigrants to Springfield were quick to recognize anti-black attacks as similar to the anti-Semitic pogroms that had caused them to flee Europe. However, some Jewish citizens were afraid close associations with black people would drag down their hard-won social status. Some Jews resolved this conflict by thinking of the victims of pogroms as “innocent” Jews, while believing race riots had been sparked by black criminality (Goldstein 2006, 62–67). For Springfield Jews who had emigrated from cosmopolitan cities in Eastern Europe, it seemed natural to do business with black customers. Additionally, this group of Jews tended to have higher occupational skills and did not perceive black people as competing with them for jobs. These Jews often owned businesses such as grocery stores, pawnshops, secondhand stores, and saloons. Most black writers avoided criticizing Jews even in instances when they felt Jewish business owners may have exploited the black community (Adams and Bracey 1999, 237–238). Paradoxically, the black community continued to view the economic success of Jewish business owners as an example to be followed (Franklin 1998, 204). Thus, the business relationships between blacks and Jews were less than solid. A national recession in 1907 strained these already-fraying alliances. The 1908 riot was a clear departure from business as usual in Springfield, in that one of the ringleaders was a Russian Jew, Abraham Reimer (sometimes spelled Raymer). Many Jews were ashamed of his racist activities, but an all-white jury acquitted him of murder and of property crimes. Around the country, Jews suspected Reimer had been a scapegoat (Senechal 1990, 97). The riot defied any single interpretation. The mob destroyed 21 black-owned businesses and many Jewish businesses, to the extent that the element of antiSemitism was unmistakable. The attack on Fishman’s Pawn Shop appeared to have been planned in advance, with rioters stealing weapons that were used to destroy the black residential neighborhoods known as the “Badlands” (Anonymous 2008, 5). Many other Jewish businesses were looted (Senechal 1990, 33). Isadore

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Kanner, a Russian Jewish immigrant, owned one-quarter of the buildings that were destroyed in the Badlands. During the mayhem, some Jewish citizens risked their lives to protect their black neighbors (Senechal 1990, 147). In the aftermath of the Springfield riot, Jews and blacks recognized that together, they had been targeted for acts of terror. Together, they formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People within one year. —Merrill Evans

Further Reading Adams, Maurianne, and John Bracey, eds. Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Anonymous. Springfield, Illinois, Race Riot of 1908. Springfield, IL: Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2008. Franklin, V. P., et al., eds. African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Senechal, Roberta. The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Riding a wave of outrage over the unpunished crimes of the Springfield riot of 1908, the NAACP sprang to life in 1909. It was a diverse coalition that included abolitionists, black radicals, social justice progressives, and socialists (McPherson 1975, 388). The group formed on a national level and quickly started branches in Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. (Thornbrough 1961, 494). The founders planned for the NAACP to serve as a resource for black citizens, helping with public relations, social research, law, politics, and education (Rudwick 1957, 413). When it was founded, the group was originally called the National Negro Committee but changed its name to the NAACP within the first year. One of the NAACP’s first actions was to investigate the arrest of a black man in Asbury Park, New Jersey, who was charged with murder. There was no evidence, and the NAACP was able to secure his release (Ovington 1947, 108).

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Participants of the 20th annual session of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, June 1929. (Library of Congress)

The NAACP drew its members from several organizations that had preceded it, particularly the National Afro-American League, led by T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who campaigned against mob law and lynching. The eminent sociologist, scholar, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois joined the National AfroAmerican League in 1905, re-energizing it and helping it launch the Niagara Movement, a group frustrated with the slow pace of social justice for black citizens (Thornbrough 1961, 494–495, 509). At the NAACP’s first conference in New York City, Du Bois presented scientific evidence that blacks are not inferior to whites. He also showed the close relationship of politics and economics. Without mentioning the name of Booker T. Washington, a black leader who advocated a “gradualist” approach, Du Bois said the de-emphasis on voting rights hurt rights for blacks overall (Rudwick 1957, 415). At this conference, the NAACP adopted resolutions similar to those of the National Afro-American League, including strict enforcement of the U.S. Constitution, particularly civil rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. The group endorsed equal educational opportunities, with equal expenditures in public schools, and equal voting rights in accordance with the Fifteenth Amendment (Thornbrough 1961, 511). The NAACP denounced the economic and political repression of black citizens. President William Howard Taft was admonished to remove illegal restrictions on the hiring of black applicants for federal positions. The group declined to denounce lynching but opposed violence in general (Rudwick 1957, 417–418). Du Bois’s role in the NAACP was one of applied sociology. He was editor of the group’s journal, The Crisis, which advocated social justice for black citizens in the United States and around the world (Deegan 2002, 63). The NAACP kept a map with pins marking lynchings. It also tracked the destruction of black homes (Ovington 1947, 112). In its first decade, the NAACP’s achievements included building mass membership, working against segregation in the federal civil service, working for legal

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victories against the Supreme Court over segregation and the grandfather clause, building circulation for The Crisis, and pursuing a neo-abolitionist agenda (McPherson 1975, 390). —Merrill Evans

Further Reading Deegan, Mary Jo. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience against Ancient Evils. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. McPherson, James M. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Ovington, Mary White. The Walls Came Tumbling Down. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947. Rudwick, Elliott M. “The National Negro Committee Conference of 1909.” Phylon Quarterly 18 (4th Quarter 1957): 413–419. Thornbrough, Emma Lou. “The National Afro-American League.” Journal of Southern History 27 (November 1961): 494–512.

Black Patch War (1909) The Black Patch War of 1904–1909 involved a violent uprising of farmers against a cartel of tobacco buyers who were attempting to keep tobacco prices low. The conflict pitted neighbor against neighbor in the Black Patch counties of Logan, Todd, and Christian in Kentucky and Robertson and Montgomery in Tennessee. The revolt is notable for being one of the few violent affairs to involve agrarian workers. The term “Black Patch” comes from the production of black, or dark-fired, tobacco in western Kentucky and middle Tennessee. The dark green, heavyleafed tobacco was cured with open fires and smoke in the 19th century for sale primarily to the European market. After the Civil War, the Black Patch region gradually reduced production of wheat and corn to focus on the cash crop of tobacco. By the 1880s and 1890s, Black Patch tobacco growers were ensnared in the same debt, tax, and mortgage problems that plagued other farmers in the South and the West. They searched for solutions to their problems by joining such groups as the Grangers, the Farmers’ Alliance, and the Populist Party. By 1904, when tobacco sold for three cents a pound or less, growers blamed much of the farming crisis on price fixing by three tobacco buyers: the American Tobacco Company, the Italian Regie, and the British Imperial. The companies would not compete with each other, offering only one price instead of competitive bids. Prices for good tobacco had never been so low, falling far below the cost of production. Overproduction of tobacco and a change in American consumer preferences from chewing tobacco to mild smoking blends compounded the economic problems of the growers, but the majority of farmers were unaware of these trends within the industry. They blamed their poverty on monopolies. Black Patch growers feared the loss of their homes, their tobacco barns, and everything else that they possessed. Getting rid of the monopolies would save the Black Patch way of life. To address their plight, tobacco growers in 1904 formed the Planters’ Protective Association (PPA) and a secret force of vigilantes, known as the Possum Hunters, the Silent Brigade, or the Night Riders. Economics were not the only motivation for joining the PPA. Many growers joined because of a belief in the cultural ideal of uniting as a community to oppose outside forces and to preserve a way of life. Joining the PPA seemed the best way to both gain high tobacco prices and preserve

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the community. Both white and black growers joined the PPA, which promised African Americans equal treatment in the handling and sale of their crops. However, some Black Patch growers held values that conflicted with collectivism. Growers with an individualistic temperament and a belief in freedom of choice proudly identified themselves as “independents.” Combining with others in an association threatened their sense of freedom. They feared losing control over their crops, the sales method, and the prices. The Black Patch War would pit the PPA, consisting of about 70 percent of the growers, against the independents. PPA members viewed independents, known pejoratively as “hillbillies,” as a threat to the very existence of the Black Patch economy and culture. In essence, the independents blocked the success of the PPA. The collective needed greater than 70 percent grower participation to succeed. They viewed the refusal of the independents to join the collective as selfish, contemptible behavior. Further complicating matters, tobacco company agents attacked the PPA by offering higher prices to independent farmers, which, in turn, widened the rift between the PPA and the independents. The clash contributed to the rise of vigilante action designed to intimidate the independents into cooperating with the PPA. The PPA promoted a policy of shunning independents. Newspapers sympathetic to the collective published the names of independents. Association leaders read these names at their meetings and urged members to shun the hillbilly families. Business owners and professionals who refused to back the PPA found themselves ostracized and their businesses boycotted. As these conflicts between families and neighbors intensified, the Black Patch cultural proclivity for violence in the face of threats to one’s person, family, home, economic way of life, and culture produced the Black Patch War. Vigilantes from the PPA fought the war, but the PPA always denied knowledge of vigilante action and condemned violence despite the clear aim of the Night Riders to coerce cooperation among the growers. The vigilantes relied upon secrecy and ritual to recruit and intimidate people. Blindfolded initiates held a skull to remind them of their fate if they revealed the Night Riders’s plans of action. Not all of the vigilantes participating in vigilantism did so willingly. People who refused to cooperate with the Night Riders might be whipped or worse, resulting in a lingering fear decades later of speaking openly of the Black Patch War. Mary Lou Hollowell, shot and kicked in May 1907 in an attack in which her husband was badly whipped by vigilantes in front of their young son, had violated the rule of silence by loudly opposing the Night Riders. The vigilantes, operating in bands, initially targeted recalcitrant independents. They burned tobacco storage buildings, destroyed plant beds, dynamited tobacco barns, and threatened men affiliated with tobacco companies. Subsequently, under a second distinctive phase of night riding, violence was directed at African

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Americans who seemed to threaten the social and economic status quo. Most dramatically, the Night Riders conducted raids on the regional tobacco towns, such as Princeton, Kentucky. In this case, masked Night Riders rode into town in November 1906, captured the police officers, seized the telephone station, and then burned two large tobacco warehouses connected to the American Tobacco Company. Most Black Patch War attacks were smaller. The case of Henry Bennett is typical. Bennett, whipped by Night Riders in February 1908, owned a tobacco warehouse and had ignored previous Night Rider orders to stop buying tobacco for the American Tobacco Company. Typically, the Night Riders ordered Bennett to scream loudly so that people within hearing distance would be intimidated by the beating being inflicted upon him. Bennett never fully recovered from his wounds and died in October 1910 in Metropolis, Illinois, where he had fled with his family. By 1908, lawsuits against the Night Riders had become common and helped weaken the group. Bennett had filed suit in October 1908 for damages relating to his business losses and medical injuries. He named Dr. David Amoss, the alleged leader of the Night Riders, as well as over 100 other suspected Night Riders. Bennett received $100 for medical expenses and $15,000 for the loss of his business. Robert Hollowell, the husband of Mary Lou, won $35,000 in damages in May 1908. Hollowell’s victory prompted other victims to file damage suits. Most aggressive Night Rider activities were then abandoned, and the Black Patch War drew to a close. Tobacco farmers had also entered an era of prosperity, making collective action less necessary for survival. —Caryn E. Neumann See also all entries under Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842); Molly Maguires (1870s); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Bonus Army (1932); Battle of Athens (1946); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Marshall, Suzanne. Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Miller, John G. The Black Patch War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936.

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American Tobacco Company (ATC) During the decade between 1889 and 1899, the American Tobacco Company (ATC), through acquisitions, mergers, and backroom deals, came to dominate the tobacco trade of the American South, and thus, the world. During that decade, ATC’s founder, James B. Duke, moved to consolidate his dominance by undercutting the prices changed by the other four of the “Big Five” tobacco companies. By pursuing a similar business strategy to Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, Duke soon drove his competitors to his own door, looking to join forces with the ATC juggernaut. Finally, in October 1899, an agreement was signed that merged the “Big Five” into ATC, ensuring that the company would have an overwhelming controlling interest in the tobacco industry for the foreseeable future. That dominance, however, came with a price for the small, independent tobacco farmers of Kentucky and Tennessee (Campbell 1993, 21–23). During the early 1900s, the consolidation of the “Big Five” resulted in tobacco prices falling so far as to dip below the cost of production. Small family tobacco farmers in Tennessee and Kentucky decided to take action. Meeting in churches, schoolhouses, and courthouses, tobacco farmers fought back by forming cooperatives that would be able to collectively bargain with ATC, resulting in fairer pricing for the farmers (Campbell 1993, 2). This protectionist impulse ultimately led to the formation of the Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA) on September 24, 1904, the group that would directly challenge ATC’s control over tobacco prices. The goal of the DTDPPA was to force ATC to raise tobacco prices through cooperative marketing. The conflict became violent during 1905–1907, when some DTDPPA members, dissatisfied with the response of ATC, took more radical action, forming an unofficial group known as the Night Riders, who used violence both to force ATC’s hand and to force reluctant farmers to join the DTDPPA. By 1908, the persistent actions of the DTDPPA and the Night Riders were able to convince ATC to abandon its tactic, even going so far as to force James B. Duke out of the business altogether. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Campbell, Tracey. The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Gregory, Rick. “Beliefs of Their Fathers: Violence, Religion, and the Black Patch War, 1904–1914.” Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association 9 (1993).

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Black Patch War (1909) Marshall, Suzanne. Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Waldrep, Christopher. Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890– 1915. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA) During the first years of the 20th century, the American Tobacco Company (ATC) embarked on an attempt to corner the southern tobacco supply and, in cooperation with the Italian Regie Tobacco Company, the world market. Through eliminating competition, ATC drove down the price paid to small family farmers for tobacco. However, small tobacco farmers in what was known as the “Black Patch” of Tennessee and Kentucky staged a populist revolt, taking collaborative action in what would become an extremely successful model of standing up to “the trust,” as they called ATC, during the Progressive Era in America. The consolidation of the tobacco industry was not the only factor leading to hard times for tobacco farmers. Subject to the same pressures that impacted all farmers during the late 19th century, tobacco farmers began the 20th century with massive debt and high mortgage payments (Marshall 1994, 107). Increased production levels, thanks to the mechanization of agriculture during the Industrial Revolution, flooded the market. This left the farmers extremely vulnerable to any vacillations in the price of tobacco, making ATC’s move to dominate the industry that much more of a threat. Sporadic meetings taking place in local communities throughout the Black Patch were not creating the desired results, as ATC buyers would simply bypass less cooperative towns for those who were more desperate to sell their tobacco. In addition, the other organizations they had joined, including the National Grange, the Farmer’s Alliance, and the Populist Party, were not responsive to the needs of such a specific subset of their constituencies. As community leaders began to communicate with one another across the region, it became abundantly clear to them that the only way that they could defeat ATC was through coordinated action across the Black Patch. This led to the founding of a local chapter of the Planters’ Protective Association, called the Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA) on September 24, 1904, to coordinate efforts to combat ATC’s control over tobacco prices.

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One of many examples of southern populism, the new movement was not without its paternalist and racist aspects. Speaking before Congress, Charles H. Fort, the president of the DTDPPA, explained that they were not seeking to overthrow the southern social system, but rather to reinforce it. The elite, those white landowners who dealt directly with the trust, had a responsibility to the poorer, uneducated tenant farmers, many of whom were African American. Thus, the DTDPPA’s efforts on behalf of landowners really were on behalf of the entire southern social and economic order. The DTDPPA operated on a representative basis, with the landowners of each district electing a district chair, and the district chairs electing a county chair. These county chairmen formed the executive committee of the DTDPPA as a whole. Their objective, forcing ATC to compete with other tobacco buyers to create a better situation for the farmers, was difficult. Some members, unhappy with the slow progress of the group, organized into vigilante groups known as the Night Riders, who used violence to reach their goals. Just as there were multiple causes for tobacco farmers’ troubles in the first decade of the 20th century, a combination of factors resulted in improvements in the situation by the end of the decade. The DTDPPA and Night Riders put pressure on ATC, and the Progressive agenda of American politics at the time resulted in the breakup of the ATC’s monopoly. That, combined with declining production, led to higher prices for tobacco. However, community action by the DTDPPA certainly played a large part in the successful conclusion of the Black Patch War. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Campbell, Tracey. The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Gregory, Rick. “Beliefs of Their Fathers: Violence, Religion, and the Black Patch War, 1904–1914.” Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association 9 (1993). Marshall, Suzanne. Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Waldrep, Christopher. Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890– 1915. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Statement of Charles H. Fort, President of the Tobacco Growers’ Association of the United States, February 4, 1904 In this congressional testimony, Charles H. Fort, a tobacco farmer from Robertson County, Tennessee, and president of the Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association, tells about the hardships of tobacco farming and the impact of the “Regie” contractors,

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Mr. Fort:

Mr. Stanley:

Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort:

Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort: Mr. Stanley:

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I am glad to be before you. I want to say that I am no speaker. I am a humble farmer. I was raised on the farm and have made tobacco all my life. I know nothing else, and I know nothing about the statistics and facts these gentlemen are getting up here, but I do know the hardships that have been brought on our people. I just want to get you to say to this committee, because you raise the same tobacco as there is in my district, the amount of work that is necessary to produce a crop of tobacco; the amount that one ordinary tenant, working with his family, would produce to the acre, the work necessary to do it, and the price that tobacco would bring under present conditions. Just take your time and state that to the committee. In the course of your remarks as you go along, just as you please. Thank you, gentlemen. I do not know anything but to raise tobacco. We had one of the biggest meetings the other day that we ever had in our country, and we worked all day in getting up the statistics of what it cost our farmers in Robinson County to make a pound of tobacco, and we decided that it cost us 6 cents a pound. Before these trusts came in there we had the advantage of the balance of the counties of this district, and we have sold tobacco as high as 20 cents a pound. I have one neighbor close to me, and this Regie contractor offered him a price one afternoon, and I telephoned him and tried to get him to sell his crop of tobacco, and he said, “I can not do it; I have to consult my tenants and hired hands and men who raise tobacco on shares.” In our county we work mostly colored labor, and we give them half of the tobacco and corn they raise. We furnish all the land and all the stock and tools and we furnish them a house to live in and furnish them all the fertilizer and then give them half of what they make. Well, now, this agent came along and offered this gentleman a price for his tobacco, and he could not take it until the next morning. Next morning he went to close out the trade with this agent, and the agent would not take it, and he knocked him down $100. Of course he could not take that until he had consulted again with his people, and when he went back the agent knocked him down again; and in the next three weeks he knocked him down $250. We have our hands tied down there and we can not do a thing. Who does this knocking? The “Regie” contractors. Tell this committee how many acres of tobacco land a man can cultivate.

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Mr. Fort: Three acres is, in our country, a good crop for one hand. Mr. Stanley: Just describe it like you see it on your place. Mr. Fort: We have croppers. I do not work anything but negroes on my place,

Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort:

Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort: Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort:

and they have women and children, and they all work, and manage to work about three acres to the 8 hand—that is, the man. Now, you may not know it, but tobacco is the most slavish crop—and the dark tobacco is the worst—in the United States, without exception. We have to work fifteen months in a year on a crop of tobacco. I have my last year’s crop of tobacco in the barn now, hung up, just like that leaf that you have there, and we have to work from sunup until sundown, fifteen hours a day. Do you have to worm your tobacco very much? Sometimes the worms are so bad that you can not cultivate an acre, if the worms get as bad as I have seen them. The result is that the crop is eaten up.My brother and I own our farm in partnership, and he was down in Mississippi several years ago working on a levee contract, and I was staying on the farm, and I sent some tobacco down there to him, and if this tax had been removed from this tobacco we could have sold our entire crop for 15 to 20 cents a pound, and as it was we sold it for 5 cents. What do you mean by “twist”? Without any medication at all. The way the manufacturers sell it now, they put some sort of medication in it? Yes, sir. I will explain to you why we can handle it and why we want to be able to handle it and make it into a twist and stem it ourselves. When the rainy days come the tobacco leaf is moist and pliant, and you can take it and twist it or roll it or do anything that you please with it—make cigars out of it, or anything—and you can take the stem out of it and twist it, in this way [indicating], or you can do anything you like with it at all. I would like to answer the question of the gentleman over there. We are not fighting any trust. We want competition. We need competition. This thing has gone on down in our country until we have only one or two buyers there, and they actually have the territory prescribed and limited and laid off until there is one of my neighbors who had a barn full of tobacco on one side of the road and another barn full of tobacco on the other side, and a buyer came there and he offered him this tobacco on one side of the road and he bought that, and then he offered him the tobacco in the barn on the other side of the road and the buyer said, “I can not buy that tobacco over there; it is not in my territory.” And that man lost $2 on all the tobacco in that barn on the other side, because he could not sell to this buyer his whole crop, because it was not in his territory.

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Mr. Gaines: Mr. Fort: Mr. Gaines: Mr. fort:

Mr. Stanley: Mr. Fort: Mr. Stanley: Mr. Fort:

I think when you see these injustices that are being worked on us down there will not be any doubt in your minds. Who did this man represent? The Regie Company. Have they any competitors down there? No, sir; and I want to state also that this man who was representing the Regie contractor was a personal friend of mine, and he told me: “There is a whole world of tobacco in Robinson County that we can not use.” The result is that there is no competition and no chance to sell that, and there is no chance for this class of laborers and negroes, who are dependent on this crop for a living, and I do not know what we are going to do. Now, you say a man will raise 3 acres of tobacco? Yes, sir. And Robinson County is the best tobacco county that you have? Yes, sir.

Source: Hearings on the Relief of Tobacco Growers: Before a Subcommittee on Internal Revenue of the Committee on Ways and Means; House of Representatives, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, February 4 and 25, 1904 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908).

Ludlow Massacre (1914) Located in the arid foothills of southern Colorado, the Ludlow Tent Colony emerged over the fall of 1913 after almost 14,000 coal miners went on strike on September 16, 1913. Coal mine operators, chief among them John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), had relied on company-owned towns to attract and manage their workers in the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain region. When miners went on strike, operators evicted strikers to make room for their replacements. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union responded by providing temporary housing in 14 tent colonies established at strategic locations outside mines and at railroad stops to sustain the miners and their strike activities. Miners constructed the largest of these tent camps 18 miles north of Trinidad, Colorado, at the Ludlow Rail Depot. Operators set up their own camps of private guards who were later joined by Colorado National Guardsmen to oppose the UMWA. On April 20, 1914, ongoing tensions exploded in violence, and by day’s end, 12 children, two women and 10 men, among them one of the most effective Greek organizers Louis Tikas, had been killed, and the Ludlow Tent Colony had been burned to the ground. The Ludlow Massacre in turn touched off two weeks of armed rebellion that raged across the southern Colorado coalfields and ended only when the U.S. Army arrived to restore order. By 1900, Colorado’s southern coalfields represented the greatest concentration of bituminous coal production west of the Mississippi and the region attracted a large number of foreign-born workers. In 1888, four-fifths of Colorado’s coal miners were English-speaking, but a decade later, Colorado’s coal miners hailed from the four corners of the world and comprised one of the most polyglot workforces in the United States: Ludlow’s 1,200 inhabitants spoke 27 different languages. While most of the coal miners and their families were from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, significant numbers also had arrived from Mexico, Texas, and the American South. A wide variety of both push and pull factors brought this heterogeneous group immigrants to Colorado—wars, economic hardship, family ties, prejudice, and restlessness among them—and employers like the CF&I presumed that they could turn the ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic divisions to their advantage when it came to managing labor. Once in Colorado, however, miners and their families shared an array of challenges and hardships that tended

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to unite them and that set the stage for the bitter 1913–1914 strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre. Conditions in the southern Colorado coal mines were universally deplorable, especially for foreign-born workers. The New Immigrant miners experienced racial prejudice in an increasingly nativist nation. Native-born mine managers freely insulted the Italians, Serbs, Greeks, Mexicans, and Japanese miners that toiled in the mines. Making barely $2.00 per day, miners were treated little better than slaves. They were forced to live in company housing, buy equipment and supplies from company-owned shops with company-printed scrip, and bury their dead in company-owned cemeteries. In 1913, 464 miners died or suffered severe injuries while working in unsafe environments. The miners were paid by the ton of coal they brought to the surface, and were not compensated for what they called “deadwork,” including timbering the mines to shore them up against collapse, and laying track for the coal cars. These conditions encouraged a militant reaction in miners, who saw their struggle in terms of a class revolution. The UMWA had attempted to organize the Colorado coal miners as early as 1892. Such a large group of nonunion coal miners not only offered a fertile field for organization, but it also undermined the union’s efforts to raise the standard of living and improve the conditions for miners in the East. At first, union leadership viewed the multiethnic character of the workers as an impediment to successful organization. English-speaking leaders simply could not converse with Italians, Mexicans, and other nationalities. To overcome this obstacle, the UMWA implemented what it called the “Group System,” encouraging the formation of separate organizations for each nationality. Although the union was ineffective throughout the remainder of the 1890s, it was successful in recognizing the value of various immigrant groups. In 1903, a UMWA strike against CF&I nearly achieved a significant victory for the union and the miners, and it was defeated only when Governor Peabody declared martial law and ordered the state militia to occupy Las Animas and Huerfano counties. By June 1904, the militia had deported many of the strike leaders, including the ubiquitous and effective organizer Mother Jones. Learning from this defeat, by 1913, the UMWA had also hired ethnic field organizers, able to speak with their countrymen in ways that could harness their antagonism toward the mine operators and maintain a grassroots organizing campaign in the face of jailings and deportations. Louis Tikas, a Greek organizer, described the miner’s struggle as being analogous to Greek wars against the Turks. UMWA district leaders also published papers in many languages, ultimately adopting an Italian newspaper as the official organ of the union. These papers often employed a nationalistic tone, linking historic and contemporary struggles. Opposed to the UMWA were the coal companies, their armed guards, and the state militia, led by the giant CF&I, controlled by John D. Rockefeller and his

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son John D. Rockefeller Jr. and managed by J. F. Welborn. These managers had long abandoned the company’s efforts to gain the support of its workers through the construction of club houses, reading rooms, and the like—the hallmark of the previous owner Charles Osgood’s Sociological Department—and instead used the tried-and-true methods of segmenting work along racial and ethnic lines, employing blacklists, and threatening violence. In 1913, the coal companies immediately employed armed guards hired to police the mines, intimidate workers, and escort scabs to the mines. State militiamen, many of them CF&I employees, had been called out by Colorado governor Ammons ostensibly to keep the peace but clearly tended to sympathize with the operators, setting up entrenched positions overlooking the tent camps and bringing an impressive array of heavy weapons with them. The strikers responded by arming themselves and intercepting trains loaded with strikebreakers and additional guards. The potential for violence quickly became an ever-present reality in the strike zone. In 1913, the UMWA felt confident that the lessons it had learned in earlier strikes might lead to eventual victory, and it called workers out on September 16, 1913, demanding union recognition, an increase in wages, an eight-hour workday, pay for “deadwork” (safety work), and the right to purchase equipment wherever they pleased. Local organizers included representatives such as Louis Tikas, a Greek, as well as seasoned American organizers such as John Lawson. Almost 40, Lawson was a veteran organizer from a union family and a former Pennsylvania coal miner who had started work as breaker boy at age eight. He had moved west and taken a job with the CF&I to extend the influence of the UMWA. Mary Harris Jones, better known as “Mother” Jones, or the “Angel of the Coal Camps,” came to Colorado once again to embolden the workers with her fiery rhetoric, and the miners displayed an amazing solidarity in 1913 and 1914, persisting in their efforts and remaining in their tent camps over the challenging Colorado winter. On the night before the attack on the Ludlow tent camp, the sounds of banjos, fiddles, accordions, and tamburitzes could be heard as well as songs sung in Slavic, Italian, Spanish, and English. The camp had just celebrated Greek Easter with dancing, baseball games, and a special feast of Greek dishes, and the strikers still looked forward to eventual victory. The Ludlow Massacre instantly changed the stakes, and many warned of class war in the mountain region that might spread to the rest of the nation. A Rocky Mountain News editorial of April 22, 1914, intoned that the “machine guns which played in the darkness upon the homes of humble men and women, whose only crime was an effort to earn an honest living, were bought and paid for by agents of the mine owners. Explosive bullets have been used on children. Does the bloodiest page in the French revolution approach this in hideousness?” After the strikers had buried those killed at Ludlow, fighting resumed, and revolution

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seemed for many to have become a reality. Competing with America’s invasion of Mexico for national attention, the “Ten Day War” verged on a full-scale class uprising. As strikers and their supporters took control of the towns and mines from Walsenburg and Trinidad, one congressional report stated that there was a positive danger of a national revolution growing out of the Colorado strike. Finally, on April 28, President Wilson called out the National Guard to quell the fighting. Over 1,600 troops were required. In spite of the courage and tenacity shown by the strikers, the UMWA did not win a victory in 1913–1914, despite a great public outcry and the general belief that the owners, led by Rockefeller, precipitated violence. Instead, it led to a compromise. Once order had been restored, the Ludlow Tent Colony was rebuilt and the strike dragged on until the UMWA finally called it off in December 1914. Some of the striking miners remained on strike relief until the following year, others drifted out of the state, and still others went back to work for the mine operators. Mass arrests of miners followed, and several hundred, including John Lawson, were indicted for murder, though these charges were eventually quashed and it took a decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to overturn Lawson’s conviction for murder. The state of Colorado court-martialed over 20 of its Guardsmen, though all of them were found innocent of wrongdoing save for one who had been witnessed striking a miner, Louis Tikas, in the head with the butt of his rifle. The strike caused the federal government to initiate a two-year study of industrial violence, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, and its 1,200-page final report condemned many of the practices of employers, especially those used by mine operators in Colorado. Advised of the precariousness of the situation, John D. Rockefeller visited the strike zone and followed this up with an astonishingly expensive and comprehensive public relations offensive meant to gather sympathy from as much of the public as possible. He brought in Canadian labor expert William Mackenzie King to devise a new employee representation plan, later dubbed the Rockefeller plan by less-than-enthusiastic employees in the later 1910s and 1920s, to reconcile the interests of labor and management—opening up a new era of welfare capitalism in the process. Over UMWA objections, workers accepted the Colorado Industrial Plan of 1915 and participated in company unionism. Company unionism gave workers limited collective bargaining powers within the company without legitimizing independent employee advocacy through organized labor unions like the UMWA. Also, limited reforms improved working conditions. Payment in company scrip and questionable payroll deductions were eliminated. Indeed, the CF&I maintained the company union plan until 1933, when New Deal legislation shifted bargaining power to independent unions. —Gerald Ronning

Ludlow Massacre (1914) See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge. The Great Coalfield War. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1991. Papanikolas, Zeese. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

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Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) In 1892, Charles Osgood founded the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), his attempt to eliminate competition and dominate the coal industry in the Rocky Mountain region. Headquartered in Pueblo, Colorado, the CF&I presided over a network of railroads, coal mines, coking ovens, and iron mines that stretched from New Mexico to Utah. In Pueblo, the CF&I’s Bessemer steelworks turned out rails, wire, nails, and a host of other metal products until the nationwide decline of steel production in the 1970s and 1980s. Vilified by its critics and championed by industrialists, the CF&I served as an example of either overweening corporate power or brilliant vertical integration and played a critical role in the industrialization of the West. With the founding of the CF&I, John Osgood had become the state’s primary coal producer, only steelmaker, and one of the largest landowners in the area. The CF&I suffered from frequent labor unrest and labor turnover, however, and to combat these related problems, the company became a vanguard in another field of western industrial development: the attempt to mold and control its largely immigrant workforce. In 1902, the CF&I’s Sociological Department began to regulate the affairs of the firm’s thousands of employees in company towns across the West. The stated goals of the department were quite simple: to benefit employees and their families by educating children, improving relations in the home, creating better citizens, and fostering an appreciation for labor. The unstated goals were somewhat more complicated, and far less easy to achieve: the co-optation and assimilation of workers into their subordinate stations of life as servants of CF&I, and the erasure of their ethnic heritages, heritages that often served as foundations for strikes. Osgood was not completely prepared to do battle with his more powerful rivals from the East, however, and in 1903, John D. Rockefeller took control of the company. Labor continued to be a source of conflict as the CF&I, like many mining and manufacturing concerns, continued to drive its operating costs as low as possible at the expense of workers. In 1913 and 1914, a strike by the United Mine Workers of America led to violent confrontation at the Ludlow Tent Colony and two weeks of open warfare against employers and their allies in Colorado. The labor war shocked the nation, and forced CF&I to alter some of its practices. Rockefeller initiated one of the first company-dominated trade unions and led a new wave of welfare capitalism that lasted through the 1920s. The CF&I’s Employee Representation Plan (ERP), sarcastically called the Rockefeller plan by some employees, became a model for many other corporations. Labor strife

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did not disappear, however, and in 1927, CF&I’s miners once again walked off the job in an unsuccessful strike against poor pay and working conditions, and the ERP. The ERP remained a centerpiece of the CF&I’s attempt to control its workers until outlawed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The CF&I continued to be the Rocky Mountain region’s chief heavy industry through much of the 20th century. At the end of World War II and through the 1950s, the company experienced dramatic growth, gaining subsidiaries from around the country. In 1969, the CF&I itself became a subsidiary, and in the 1970s, it faced heavy competition from foreign steel manufacturers. Though the CF&I attempted to modernize, it could not keep pace: the collapse of the American steel market in the 1980s hit the company hard and the CF&I did not survive into the 1990s, declaring bankruptcy in 1990. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Scamehorn, H. Lee. Mill and Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Scamehorn, H. Lee. Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1872–1903. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Industrial Violence As the United States industrialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, violent confrontations between workers and management became an increasingly common phenomenon. The causes of this perennial violence were manifold. Of course, the workplace itself was the scene of everyday violence as machines, mines, and dangerous materials killed, maimed, and injured tens of thousands of workers. Workers in hazardous occupations valorized a rough masculinity that often intoned the threat of violence. Accustomed to the perquisites of class and power, employers perceived workers as mere obstacles to their industrial dreams. A national sense of crisis over the racial, religious, and ideological threat posed by millions of New Immigrants tended to dehumanize workers and legitimize authoritarian and violent measures to control the workplace. Finally, until the 1930s at least, industrial capitalism remained relatively unregulated, and state and federal governments, generally inclined to favor capital over labor, tended to foster an environment in which employers and workers felt that violence was a rational choice to defend or advance their interests. Within a decade of the end of the Civil War, U.S. industry had made tremendous strides, and a rising group of powerful capitalists who had horizontally and

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vertically integrated industries engaged in cutthroat competition to extend their mastery. Industrial violence followed close on their heels. Most costs of doing business were relatively fixed, and when boom and bust cycles compelled ambitious employers to cut costs to the bone to survive or expand, wages, and the unions that defended them, often became targets. This occurred in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region in 1875, when Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, cut the wages of coal miners. The largely Irish workforce went on strike. The strike lasted five months and was marked by violence on both sides. Miners, mine bosses, and strikebreakers beat and killed each other and miners derailed trains, sabotaged machinery, and burned down mine buildings. According to Gowen, a terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, a secret organization of Irish Catholic coal miners, engaged in arson, beatings, and murder. Gowen effectively shifted the blame for violence onto his workforce by invoking the specter of terror, and over the next two years, 30 accused Mollies were hanged. In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, wave upon wave of industrial violence followed, typically cresting during one of the periodic economic busts brought on by the ruinous Gilded Age business cycle. In 1877, the Great Uprising, the closest the United States has come to experiencing a national strike, brought railroads across the nation to a halt, literally destroyed the industrial heart of Pittsburgh, resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries, and brought out the armed force of the federal government on the side of business. In the 1880s, led by the Knights of Labor and an insurgent anarchist movement, hundreds of thousands of workers fought for the eight-hour day, among other things, only to have their hopes dashed by the paroxysms of violence leading up to the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. In the 1892 Homestead Strike, hundreds of hired Pinkerton guards and miners fought a pitched battle, and in the American West, antagonized by mine guards, Pinkerton and Baldwin Felts agents, and state militias, the president of the radical union the Western Federation of Miners advocated armed self-defense and encouraged the thousands of members of the union to purchase modern rifles. Violent confrontation continued into the 20th century—Lawrence, Ludlow, the West Virginia Mine Wars, Columbine, and the Teamsters, seamen’s, and streetcar strikes of the Great Depression—and has yet to have disappeared completely from the industrial landscape. Nevertheless, though with significant exceptions, the frequency, gravity, and intensity of industrial violence significantly diminished after the 1930s. With the legislation of the New Deal Era—section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act and later the Wagner Labor Relations Act—the formation of powerful new labor organizations like the Committee on Industrial Organizations, and the evolution of the post–World War II labor-management accord, the rules of industrial capitalism, fair or not, were increasingly recognized by both

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workers and management. Power relations worked themselves out in courtrooms rather than on shop floors or picket lines, and the truly horrific battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries came to an end. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge. The Great Coalfield War. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1991. Taft, Philip, and Philip Ross. “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome.” In The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) In the 1870s and 1880s, capitalists initiated a sweepingly ambitious industrial transformation of the United States, horizontally and vertically integrating their industries and aggressively seeking to control the costs of production—especially the costs of labor. Central to the industrial growth of the nation was a cheap and plentiful supply of energy—coal—and coal miners found themselves at the center of some of the most significant and violent confrontations of the era, such as the Long Strike of 1875 that pit the might of the Reading and Philadelphia Railroad against Irish immigrant miners and the spectral Molly Maguires. Founded in 1890 in Columbus, Ohio, by members of members of the then-beleaguered Knights of Labor and the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) emerged from a series of bitter and violent confrontations between workers and management that occurred over the tumultuous 1870s and 1880s to become one of the most significant unions of the 20th century. The UMWA grew slowly at first, but when John Mitchell took over as president in 1898, the ranks of the fledgling industrial union swelled. The son of Irish immigrants to Illinois and orphaned at age six, Mitchell inevitably enlisted into the ranks of miners in the Illinois coalfields and joined the UMWA in 1890 at

Ludlow Massacre (1914)

age 19. Over the course of the next several years, Mitchell proved himself an able organizer, achieving great success in enlisting miners into the union across ethnic boundaries. He became the vice president of the UMWA in 1897, and the president the following year. Under his leadership, membership grew almost tenfold, to some 300,000, and on the first decade of the 20th century, the UMWA won the 8-hour day and union recognition in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Victory proved to be more elusive for the UMWA in the important mining districts of West Virginia. The union made some temporary inroads in 1902, but in a series of confrontations collectively called the West Virginia Mine Wars fought over the 1910s and into the 1920s, mine owners and their hired gunmen, most notoriously the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, succeeded in holding the UMWA, and some very able organizers like Mother Jones, at bay. Success was equally elusive in the coalfields of the Rocky Mountains, where mine owners violently resisted organization at locations such as Ludlow, Colorado, and set up competing company-sponsored worker representation plans as at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Success for the UMWA in these regions did not come until the 1930s and the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act, and a new union president, John L. Lewis. In 1920, Lewis took over control of the UMWA, and while the early 1920s did mot prove to be overwhelmingly successful for the union, especially in the West and in West Virginia, he eventually presided over a stunning period of successful growth for the UMWA and the labor movement more generally. A very controversial speaker and labor advocate, he was among the nation’s most effective union presidents. He worked closely with the federal government during the Great Depression, rebuilt the UMWA, and successfully organized previously nonunion coal regions. Late in 1935, he helped to establish the Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO) within the AFL to organize the employees in massproduction industries. The CIO led dramatic strikes against the auto industry and steel industry that decade and against coal operators during World War II—leading to threats of federalizing the mines—that ultimately led to enduring labormanagement accords that lasted until the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s. After the war, the UMWA was involved in few of the battles that had been a hallmark of its existence, though the union was not moribund; in the 1960s, it became the most significant voice in lobbying for workplace safety and instrumental in the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Laslett, John H. M., ed. The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

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Excerpt from Godfrey Irwin’s Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado (1914) Godfrey Irwin, an electrical engineer then traveling through southern Colorado, witnessed the deaths of some 20 people, including women and children, when the Colorado National Guard attacked a camp of striking coal miners near Ludlow, Colorado, in April 1914. Reproduced here is part of the account of the so-called “Ludlow Massacre” that Irwin later gave to the New York World. On the day of the Ludlow battle a chum and myself left the house of the Rev. J. O. Ferris, the Episcopal minister with whom I boarded in Trinidad, for a long tramp through the hills. We walked fourteen miles, intending to take the Colorado & Southern Railway back to Trinidad from Ludlow station. We were going down a trail on the mountain side above the tent city at Ludlow when my chum pulled my sleeve and at the same instant we heard shooting. The militia were coming out of Hastings Canyon and firing as they came. We lay flat behind a rock and after a few minutes I raised my hat aloft on a stick. Instantly bullets came in our direction. One penetrated my hat. The militiamen must have been watching the hillside through glasses and thought my old hat betrayed the whereabouts of a sharpshooter of the miners. Then came the killing of Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the strikers. We saw the militiamen parley outside the tent city, and, a few minutes later, Tikas came out to meet them. We watched them talking. Suddenly an officer raised his rifle, gripping the barrel, and felled Tikas with the butt. Tikas fell face downward. As he lay there we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and deliberately fired them into the unconscious man’s body. It was the first murder I had ever seen, for it was a murder and nothing less. Then the miners ran about in the tent colony and women and children scuttled for safety in the pits which afterward trapped them. We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their machine guns and poured a murderous fire into the arroyo from a height by Water Tank Hill above the Ludlow depot. Then came the firing of the tents. I am positive that by no possible chance could they have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the northwest corner of the colony where the fire started and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch waved in the midst of militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place. What followed everybody knows. Sickened by what we had seen, we took a freight back into Trinidad. The town buzzed with indignation. To explain in large part the sympathies of even the best people in the section with the miners, it must be said that there is good evidence that many of the so-called “militiamen” are only gunmen and thugs wearing the uniform to give them a show of authority. They are the toughest lot I ever saw.

Ludlow Massacre (1914) No one can legally enlist in the Colorado state militia till he has been a year in the state, and many of the “militiamen” admitted to me they had been drafted in by a Denver detective agency. Lieutenant Linderfelt boasted that he was “going to lick the miners or wipe them off the earth.” In Trinidad the miners never gave any trouble. It was not till the militia came into town that the trouble began. Source: Walter H. Fink, The Ludlow Massacre (pamphlet, United Mine Workers of America, 1914), 7–21.

Walter Fink’s Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp (1914) In April 1914, the Colorado National Guard killed some 20 people, including women and children, when they attacked a camp of striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colorado. Following the strikers’ deaths, Walter H. Fink, the publicity director for District 15 of the United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the Ludlow strikers, wrote a pamphlet that graphically and sympathetically described the deaths of the strikers. The title of that pamphlet, The Ludlow Massacre, soon became the accepted term for the incident. Below is an excerpt from Fink’s pamphlet, which the United Mine Workers printed and sold for 25 cents per copy. REVEALING THE HORRORS OF RULE BY HIRED ASSASSINS OF INDUSTRY AND TELLING AS WELL OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR WAGED BY COLORADO COAL MINERS AGAINST CORPORATION OWNED STATE & COUNTY OFFICIALS TO SECURE AN ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAWS It was Sunday afternoon. The Greek members of the Ludlow tent colony were celebrating their Easter. John D. Rockefeller Jr., had just preached the word of God to his Sunday school class in New York City. The strikers and their families were enjoying themselves at a baseball game. They were a happy, care-free audience of twenty-one nationalities, thinking of nothing but the freedom from industrial and political slavery that they were willingly purchasing by an incessant war with the elements, with the imported assassins of John D. Rockefeller, with the corporation-owned state and county officials of Colorado. It had been a day of joy, a day such as victory in the strike will bring them every twenty-four hours of the future. The baseball game was almost over when down out of the hills, where these strikers had lived in hovels like hogs, had been robbed of their coal, had been deprived of their political, industrial and religious liberty, had been driven into unsafe mines to be slaughtered, came the gunmen of industry, the hired murderers of Sunday school teacher and “philanthropist” John D. Rockefeller Jr. There were five of these gunmen on horseback and armed with high-power rifles. They came to break up the baseball game. But they realized that even high-powered rifles

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Ludlow Massacre (1914) and machine guns trained on the baseball diamond from the hills might not be able to combat the crowd of fans, and they started away chagrined. Some of the strikers’ wives and children laughed at these imported assassins who were too cowardly to carry out their purpose. “Oh, that’s all right; have your fun today; we’ll have our roast tomorrow,” said one of the gunmen, and they rode away. Little did the peaceful men, women and children realize the horrible prophecy this thug was making. They were accustomed to the intimidation of these gunmen. They knew that these derelicts were hired to murder them, but not for a moment did they imagine that “our roast tomorrow,” as threatened by the gunmen, was to be their cremation. They did not know that the gunmen militiamen had trained six machine guns on the Ludlow tent colony the night before. They did not know that these same murderers of the State of Colorado and John D. Rockefeller had completely surrounded the camp. They did not know that their massacre was only a question of when three bombs should be exploded at the headquarters of Major Hamrock. April 20th dawned a typical morning for the strikers. Men were busy with their chores. Here and there throughout the tent colony could be heard the merry little song of the washboard. Children darted here and there out of the tents, happy, playful 300 tots, not knowing that before the sun had set they were to go through the most terrible holocaust in the history of industrial struggles. In the rear of Snodgrass’ store men and boys were playing baseball. Since last September these people had been taught nothing but peace. Their leaders had told them day after day that they could never hope to make the disinterested citizen understand their side of the controversy unless they strictly obeyed every law and “attended to their own business.” Men in every walk of life who have investigated the strike or spent any time in the district have talked of the almost ultra-conservatism of the union officials. The men and women and children of the tent colonies had absorbed this feeling of obeyance to the laws. They had patiently suffered the intimidation and tortures of the gunmen and militiamen. It was 9:55 o’clock that morning when the strikers and their wives and children were thrown into a panic of fear by the explosion of a bomb at the tent of Major Hamrock. It was the signal to the gunmen militiamen, surrounding the camp on all sides, that itwas time to start the massacre of the innocents of Ludlow and destroy the tent colony. There were not more than forty rifles in the tent colony. The men owning these scattered to the hills in a vain effort to draw the fire of the attacking party and save their loved ones. At 10 o’clock a second bomb was exploded. Ten seconds later the third shot was fired and the slaughter of Ludlow began.

Massacre of the Innocents None will know the agonies of that day. From surrounding hills poured a criss-cross rain of bullets from machine guns and high-powered rifles.

Ludlow Massacre (1914) Tents were riddled with bullets until they looked like so many fishing nets. Using the machine guns like garden hose, the gunmen cut down everything that rose in their path of death as they swerved from one end of the colony to the other and back again. Women, driven almost insane, ran like frightened hares into caves dug for their safety, their babes clutching frantically at their breasts, their older children tearing at their skirts, while around them fell the explosive bullets of the gunmen—militiamen. Quarter was given none by these assassins. They had been hired at $3 to $7 a day to do this dastardly work of exterminating the strikers, and they were determined to do it well. Into caves, cellars, wells, deserted buildings and across the open prairie fled frantic mothers and children. One well near the tent colony was packed with a hysterical, seething mass that might at any minute be slaughtered. Out of one of these safety retreats ran little Frankie Snyder, 11 years old, to get a drink of water for his mother and little sisters, who had become ill from fright. He was shot through the head and killed instantly. Throughout the day Louis Tikas, leader of the Greeks, braved the hail of explosive bullets, going here and there through the tents, rescuing women and children and taking them to places of safety. Tikas finally saw that it was impossible to save all of the women and children unless the firing stopped. He called Major Hamrock, saloonkeeper in charge of Colorado’s uniformed murderers, and arranged for a meeting.

Tikas a Murdered Hero Tikas never returned from that conference. He was taken prisoner. Some of the gunmen wanted to hang this refined, law-abiding Greek. But before they could carry out their purpose, Linderfelt, more bloodthirsty, hit Tikas on the head, crushing his skull and killing him instantly. Linderfelt has admitted that he hit Tikas, breaking the stock of his gun on the Greek’s head. While the Greek lay on the ground dead, another cut-throat kicked him in the face. And then, to cover up this terrible murder, they shot him in the back, giving out the story that he was killed when he tried to escape. One of the bullets exploded in his stomach, the jacket lodging under the skin and the bullet tearing its way through his abdomen. James Fyler, secretary of the Ludlow union, was another striker who was murdered while a prisoner of the Hamrock-Linderfelt “militiamen.” Fyler was one of the real heroes of that day. With his life in danger every minute, he remained at the telephone, giving the world the only news of the horror. He was shot with an explosive bullet, which blew out the front of his face. When his body was found, $300 which he had in his pocket that morning was missing. Another of the heroes was Charles Costa. When the gunmen militia started their murderous assault, he, with others in the tent colony who had guns, ran to the hills to do all he could to save the women and children and their homes.

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Ludlow Massacre (1914) Costa was one of the five men of Ludlow colony to pay the penalty of death for fighting for his constitutional rights, thus defying the rule of anarchy established by Governor Ammons, Adjutant General John Chase and others of the operators’ tools who hold office in Colorado. Costa was shot through the head. As he lay there, in view of his tented home where women and children were being murdered and cremated, dying, he said to his comrades, sing “Union Forever.”

Dies Singing Song They crowded around him, the bullets stirring up the dirt about their feet like a windstorm. Costa joined in the refrain— We’ve whipped them in the North, boys, We’ll whip them in the South, Shouting— And Charles Costa was dead. But the smile on his lips showed that he was willing to go. Had his comrades known what was happening down in the tent colony, they would have given that smile a two-fold meaning. They would have said that he was smiling, too, because of the anticipation of meeting his wife and three little children in Heaven, where Rockefeller’s millions do not rule, where it does not mean death to fight for those things which belong to you. For, while Costa was breathing his last, his wife and three little children were lying dead in the “Black Hole,” their bodies burned almost beyond recognition by the oil-fed fire started by Rockefeller’s murderers. Without food, without water, amid a shower of bullets that pierced their places of shelter, the women and children of Ludlow spent that day. Among them were mothers with babes at their breasts, women who were to become mothers that day and the next and the next. The militia knew there were no men in these retreats. They knew there were no arms there to return their fusillade of bullets. They knew that in those places there were only women and children, but they were the wives and daughters of “those d— red necks.” In the eyes of the gunmen militia that removed all questions of sex. It was sufficient reason to slaughter them if they could. Refugees peering from their caves, wondering whether this hail of lead would never cease, were paralyzed with fear about 7 o’clock that evening when they saw a militiaman crawl up to a tent on the outskirts of the tent colony and set it afire with a blazing torch.

Slaughtered Babes Cremated Like a cyclone, the flames swept over the tented homes, feeding on the oil of Rockefeller which saturated them and seemingly gloating over the feast provided by the women and

Ludlow Massacre (1914) children whom they burned and roasted and clasped between their jaws of death until they were an inanimate mass of crisp flesh and bones. Here and there the fire refused to spread and up would spring another assassin with a torch to set it afire. In small, ill-ventilated caves, in wells, in deserted farm houses, on the open prairie, the women and children of Ludlow spent that night, mourning the loss of fathers, brothers, husbands, of new-born babes, who had come into the world that day only to be murdered and cremated by the Colorado assassins, and all around them fell the bullets of the uniformed murderers. Nothing so wanton has ever been known as the terrible thirst for blood of these assassins. They knew that these women and children had no food, no water. But they continued their firing with the seeming purpose of driving the famished mothers and tots into the open for food and water that they might also shoot them down. Probably the most heinous feature of this massacre was the refusal of the militia officers to allow doctors or Red Cross nurses to minister to the wounded. Physicians who went there under flags of truce soon after the slaughter began, were driven back by bullets. Flags of the Red Cross Society were shot into shreds with the same utter disregard as the American flag.

Shot at American Flag It is not generally known, but it is a matter of fact that the Stars and Stripes—the flag of our nation—was fired upon when Linderfelt the Butcher and his hell-hounds turned loose their machine guns and rifles upon the unprotected tented city of Ludlow, wiping it out of existence and killing men, women and children—mostly the latter. The unionists had three American flags flying to the breeze on that bloody Monday. But this made no difference to the gunmen who were wearing the state’s uniforms. Their deadly weapons tore the Stars and Stripes from their masts, just as if they had been so many rags. They were burned when the torch was applied to the canvas homes. It is a matter of general knowledge that the men under Chase, when they were sent into the field, never raised the American flag until they were in Ludlow several months. Tuesday morning several undertakers went from Trinidad to the scene of the catastrophe, but were driven back by explosive bullets. Railroad men and passengers appealed frantically to state officials to do something for the men, women and children who were lying along the railroad tracks dead and wounded. For two days the bodies of Tikas and Fyler lay exposed. But no appeal would force the state officers to take care of the dead and wounded. The fact that none of the bodies reported by railroad men could be found Wednesday, as well as the testimony of Mrs. Pearl Jolly, sometimes called the “heroine of Ludlow,” explains this action.

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Ludlow Massacre (1914) Mrs. Jolly, with other women and children, escaped to a farm house late Monday afternoon. The next day, when the gunmen were looting the ruins of the tent colony, she says she saw them gathering bodies and placing them in a huge pile.

Dead Burned in Oil When they completed their search, she says they poured oil on them and then burned the bodies. There are more than fifty women and children missing and it is believed that all traces of their murder were obliterated by the militia on the huge funeral pyre. Mrs. Jolly during the battle went here and there through the tent colony, rescuing women and children and aiding the sick and wounded. Although she wore a Red Cross insignia on her arm, the uniformed gunmen tried to kill her, one bullet tearing off the heel of her shoe. John R. Lawson, National Board member of the mine workers, went to Ludlow Monday and Tuesday to save the women and children, and the militia riddled his flag of truce and drove him back. William Snyder was coming from the tent colony Tuesday morning with his family, the body of his dead son on one arm and his baby daughter in the other, when he was discovered by some of the gunmen. One of the gunmen pointed a gun at him and said, “—you, I have a notion to kill you, too.” Dave Stuart, a young boy, spent Monday and Monday night in the cellar of the Snodgrass store. When he went to the depot to go to Trinidad, he was lined up with other boys, from ten to twelve years of age, and told that the gunmen militia were going to use them for target practice. Ludlow that morning presented a deep contrast to the day before. Where for seven months 1,200 strikers had lived in peace, had subsisted on as little as possible, and had been happy in the realization that the dawn of a new day was at hand, now stood the charred ruins of their homes. Where the day before 300 children had romped and played and had been happy now lay the distorted, roasted bodies of some of them and their mothers. Louis Tikas, than whom there was none among the strikers more beloved, lay battered and dead along the railroad track, while the day before he had been visiting each tent, adding cheer to the men and their wives, trudging along with three or four children hanging to him, each one of them wanting him to come and help play their own particular game. There lay the ruins of the Ludlow tent colony, the largest in the history of the world, and none of them knew or ever will know how many of its family of 1,200 paid the penalty of fighting for their constitutional rights in corporation-ridden Colorado. Trinidad men who want to repair the telephone lines, cut by the murderers that the outside world might not know of their work of carnage, told one of the many pitiful stories of the massacre. Tuesday they started toward Ludlow to repair the wires. They were going along the road when they saw a little girl lying at the side of the roadway.

Ludlow Massacre (1914) She was lying there with the side of her head badly burned. In one hand she clasped a doll while the other arm was held across her eyes. Just as the linemen were about to pick up the little sufferer, one of the brutal, murdering gunmen of Linderfelt’s command stepped up to the lineman and told him to leave the little girl where she was. None know what became of the little tot. It is believed that she contributed to the blaze on the funeral pyre erected to John D. Rockefeller Jr., Sunday school teacher and philanthropist. Thirty women and children who escaped to the Powell ranch were held prisoners there until Tuesday night. They had nothing to eat or drink and appealed frantically to Trinidad for relief. Appeals were sent to Major Hamrock “to have mercy, for God’s sake.” Acting Governor Fitzgarrald, who vies with Ammons for the honor of being the real spineless executive of Colorado, finally ordered Saloonkeeper Hamrock to release the women. Relief automobiles started from Trinidad at about the same time several wagons left Aguilar to their assistance. When the wagon approached the house Mrs. Pearl Jolly, wearing a Red Cross insignia on her arm, went to meet it. She was shot in the arm made prominent by the Red Cross band. The women, however, made their escape after a forty-eight-hour siege. Mrs. M. H. Thomas was another of the women who was shot at by the murderers. She, with other women and children, escaped to a nearby ranch, where most of them were forced to sleep in filthy stable stalls to evade the exploding bullets from machine guns and high powered rifles. When they ran for shelter Mrs. Thomas was so close to death that a bullet clipped out a part of her hair, and around the feet of her two little children played the machine gun bullets. A freight train that came down the track about noon Tuesday enabled this party of refugees to escape. Knowing that the train would be between the gunmen and her people, Mrs. Thomas ran to the well and told others to try to make their escape. The entire party got away, but it was only because of poor marksmanship on the part of the gunmen, who riddled the air about them with hundreds of bullets. Realizing that they had been betrayed by the state of Colorado and that they could hope to secure no protection from its militia, union men sent out an official call to arms, asking workers of the state and country to arm themselves and be ready to march at any minute.

The Call to Arms The official call was as follows: Denver, Colo., April 22, 1914. Organize the men in your community in companies of volunteers to protect the workers of Colorado against the murder and cremation of men, women and children by armed assassins in the employ of coal corporations, serving under the guise of state militiamen.

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Ludlow Massacre (1914) Gather together for defensive purposes all arms and ammunition legally available. Send name of leader of your company and actual number of men enlisted at once by wire, phone or mail, to W. T. Hickey, Secretary of State Federation of Labor. Hold all companies subject to order. People having arms to spare for these defensive measure are requested to furnish same to local companies, and, where no company exists, send them to the State Federation of Labor. The state is furnishing us no protection and we must protect ourselves, our wives and children, from these murderous assassins. We seek no quarrel with the state and we expect to break no law; we intend to exercise our lawful right as citizens, to defend our homes and our constitutional rights. JOHN R. LAWSON, U. M. W. A. JOHN McLENNAN E. L. DOYLE JOHN RAMSAY W. T. HICKEY, Secy. State Fed. of Lab. E. R. HOAGE T. W. TAYLOR CLARENCE MOOREHOUSE ERNEST MILLS, Secy.-Treas. W. F. of M. Source: Walter H. Fink, The Ludlow Massacre (pamphlet, United Mine Workers of America, 1914), 7–21.

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History An Encyclopedia Volume 3

Steven L. Danver, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Revolts, protests, demonstrations, and rebellions in American history : an encyclopedia / Steven L. Danver, editor. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59884-221-0 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-59884-222-7 (ebook) 1. Protest movements—United States—History. 2. Revolutions—United States—History. 3. Protest movements—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Revolutions—United States— Encyclopedias. I. Danver, Steven Laurence. HN57.R48 2011 303.48’40973—dc22 2010038363 ISBN: 978-1-59884-221-0 EISBN: 978-1-59884-222-7 15 14 13 12 11

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

xix xxi

VOLUME 1 BACON’S REBELLION (1675–1676) Bacon, Nathaniel (1647–1676)

1 9

Berkeley, Sir William (1605–1677)

11

House of Burgesses

13

Indentured Servants

15

Susquehannock Indians

17

Tobacco

19

Nathaniel Bacon’s Manifesto (1676)

21

Nathaniel Bacon’s “Declaration of the People of Virginia” (1676)

24

PUEBLO REVOLT (1680)

27

Franciscans (1209–Present)

37

On˜ate, Juan de (c. 1552–1626)

39

Otermin, Antonio de (dates unknown)

41

Pope´ (dates unknown)

43

Pueblo Religions

45

Santa Fe´

47

Declaration of Pedro Naranjo, December 19, 1681 LEISLER’S REBELLION (1689–1691) Calvinism Dominion of New England (1686–1689) Leisler, Jacob (c. 1640–1691) Religious Conflict in 17th-Century New York Jacob Leisler’s Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety at Boston, June 4, 1689 Jacob Leisler: “A Modest and Impartial Narrative” (1690)

v

49 53 57 58 60 61 62 63

vi

Contents

STONO REBELLION (1739)

69

Slave Codes

73

South Carolina

75

Description of the Rebellion by Georgia Governor James Oglethorpe (1739) NEW YORK SLAVE INSURRECTION (1741)

76 79

Fires

83

Manhattan Island

84

Investigation into a New York Slave Conspiracy (1741) PHILADELPHIA ELECTION RIOT (1742)

85 91

Anglicanism

95

Quakers

96

PIMA REVOLT (1751)

99

Jesuits

103

Oacpicagigua, Luis (d. 1755)

104

Parrilla, Diego Ortiz (c. 1715–c. 1775)

105

Tohono O’odham

106

PONTIAC’S REBELLION (1763)

109

Amherst, Jeffrey (1717–1797)

117

French and Indian War (1754–1763)

118

Neolin (dates unknown)

119

Ohio River Valley

121

Pontiac (d. 1769)

122

Smallpox

124

STAMP ACT PROTESTS (1765)

127

Adams, Samuel (1722–1803)

139

Declaratory Act (1766)

140

Salutary Neglect

142

Stamp Act Congress (1765)

144

Taxation without Representation

145

Stamp Act Resolutions of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1765)

147

An Account of the Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston (1765)

148

Contents

BOSTON MASSACRE (1770)

151

Adams, John (1735–1826)

157

Attucks, Crispus (c. 1723–1770)

158

Broadsides

159

Preston, Thomas (1722–1798)

161

Revere, Paul (1734–1818)

162

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

164

Richard Palmes’s Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)

166

REGULATOR MOVEMENT (1771)

169

Battle of Alamance (1771)

177

Dobbs, Arthur (1689–1765)

178

Husband, Herman (1724–1795)

179

Tryon, William (1729–1788)

181

PINE TREE RIOT (1772)

183

Royal Authority

187

Shipbuilding

188

BOSTON TEA PARTY (1773)

191

Coercive Acts (1774)

199

First Continental Congress (1774)

200

Sons of Liberty

202

Townshend Acts (1767)

203

George R. T. Hewes’s Account of the Boston Tea Party (1773)

204

SHAYS’ REBELLION (1787)

207

Bowdoin, James (1726–1790)

217

Massachusetts General Court

218

Shays, Daniel (1747–1825)

220

Taxes

222

An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion (1786)

223

A Letter to the Hampshire Herald Listing the Grievances of the Rebels (1786)

224

WHISKEY REBELLION (1794) Federal Supremacy

227 237

vii

viii

Contents

Hamilton, Alexander (1755–1804)

239

Martial Law

241

Tom the Tinker

243

President George Washington’s Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

245

President George Washington’s Second Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

248

ANTEBELLUM SUPPRESSED SLAVE REVOLTS (1800s–1850s)

251

Boxley, George (c. 1779–1865)

261

Deslondes, Charles (d. 1811)

262

Gabriel (d. 1800)

263

Vesey, Denmark (c. 1767–1822)

265

Description of Denmark Vesey (1822)

266

NAT TURNER’S REBELLION (1831)

269

Abolitionists

279

Confessions of Nat Turner

280

Moses Story

282

Slave Preachers

283

Turner, Nat (1800–1831)

285

A Contemporary Account of Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831) TEXAS REVOLT (1835–1836)

286 289

Battle of the Alamo (1836)

303

Austin, Stephen F. (1793–1836)

305

Houston, Samuel (1793–1863)

307

Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de (1794–1876)

308

DORR REBELLION (1841–1842)

311

Charterites

315

Dorr, Thomas Wilson (1805–1854)

316

Universal White Male Suffrage

318

Luther v. Borden: The Judicial Aftermath of Rhode Island’s Dorr Rebellion (1849)

319

Contents

PHILADELPHIA NATIVIST RIOTS (1844)

ix

325

Catholicism

329

German Americans

330

Index

I-1

VOLUME 2 BEAR FLAG REVOLT (1846)

333

Bear Flaggers

339

Fre´mont, John Charles (1813–1890)

341

Sonoma

343

William B. Ide’s Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic (1846) BLEEDING KANSAS (1854–1858)

345 347

Guerilla Warfare in Kansas and Missouri

353

Jayhawkers

354

Missouri Compromise (1820–1821)

356

Popular Sovereignty

358

Pottawatomie Massacre (1856)

359

Topeka Constitution (1855)

361

PORTLAND RUM RIOT (1855)

365

Immigrants

369

Temperance

370

KNOW-NOTHING RIOTS (1855–1856)

373

Bloody Monday (1855)

377

Nativism

378

Plug Uglies

379

Rip Raps

380

Vigilance Committees

381

UTAH WAR (1857–1858)

383

Buchanan, James (1791–1868)

389

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

390

Nauvoo Legion

391

Polygamy

392

x

Contents

State of Deseret

394

Young, Brigham (1801–1877)

395

Major J. H. Carleton’s Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1859) HARPERS FERRY RAID (1859)

396 415

Brown, John (1800–1859)

423

Causes of the Civil War

425

Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870)

427

“Secret Six”

429

John Brown’s Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution (1859)

430

Southern Editorial Responses to John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1859)

432

NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS (1863)

435

Civil War (1861–1865)

441

Conscription

442

Copperheads

443

Racism

444

Excerpts from a New York Times Account of the New York City Draft Riots (1863)

446

A Rioter’s Letter to the New York Times and the Newspaper’s Response (1863)

447

NEW ORLEANS RIOT (1866)

449

Carpetbaggers

453

Reconstruction (1863–1877)

454

Voting Rights

456

MOLLY MAGUIRES (1870S)

459

Irish Americans

463

Pennsylvania

464

Unionism

465

Excerpts from an Article Describing James McPartland’s Infiltration of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s (1894)

467

Contents

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT (1870S)

473

American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)

483

Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906)

484

Dix, Dorothea (1802–1887)

486

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

487

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

489

Congressional Debate on Women’s Suffrage (1866)

491

Sojourner Truth Urges Women to Continue the Fight for Equal Rights for All Women, White and Black (1867)

493

Address of Victoria C. Woodhull to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives (1871)

494

The Comstock Law, Enacted to End the Circulation of Obscene and Immoral Literature (1873)

496

U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony: The Sentencing of Anthony for Voting Illegally (1873)

497

Bradwell v. Illinois: The Rights and Privileges of a Citizen (1873)

499

Excerpts from Susan B. Anthony’s “Social Purity” Speech (1875)

501

Declaration of Rights for Women (1876)

504

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1881)

508

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self” Address (1892)

510

Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (1895)

512

Muller v. Oregon: The Weakness of Women (1908)

515

Excerpts from History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910)

516

Excerpts from Emma Goldman’s The Traffic in Women and Marriage and Love (1910)

522

Excerpts from Anna Garlin Spencer’s Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1912)

529

Margaret Sanger on Sex Education and Contraception (1913)

533

COLFAX MASSACRE (1873)

537

Freedmen

541

Klanism

542

xi

xii

Contents

BROOKS-BAXTER WAR (1874)

545

Baxter, Elisha (1827–1899)

549

Brooks, Joseph (1821–1877)

550

Republican Party

551

FLIGHT OF THE NEZ PERCE´ (1877)

553

Indian Reservations

557

Joseph, Chief (1840–1904)

558

Relocation

560

Surrender Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´, October 5, 1877 GREAT RAILROAD STRIKES (1877)

561 563

Pittsburgh

569

Railroad Workers

570

Robber Barons

571

Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS)

572

HAYMARKET RIOT (1886)

575

Anarchism

585

Bombings

586

Eight-Hour Workday

587

May Day

589

McCormick Harvesting Machine Company

590

The Circular of Anarchist August Spies (1886)

591

Excerpts from the Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887)

592

SEATTLE RIOT (1886)

593

Chinese Immigrants

597

Knights of Labor

598

WOUNDED KNEE I (1890)

601

Dakota Uprising (1862)

611

Sioux

613

Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890)

614

Excerpts from Philip Wells’s Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)

616

Contents

HOMESTEAD STRIKE (1892–1893)

619

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA)

629

Carnegie Steel

630

Lockouts

631

Pinkerton National Detective Agency

632

Yellow-Dog Contracts

633

Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards (1892)

634

Account of the Course of the Strike (1892)

637

Two Examples of Yellow-Dog Contracts (1904 and 1917)

640

PULLMAN STRIKE (1894)

643

American Railway Union (ARU)

651

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926)

652

Pullman Palace Car Company

654

Wage Cuts

656

Two Excerpts from U.S. Strike Commission Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894

657

LATTIMER MASSACRE (1897)

661

Eastern European Immigrants

665

Miners

666

Strikers’ Resolutions and Editorials Appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger Following the Deaths of Striking Coal Miners at the Lattimer Mine, Hazleton, Pennsylvania (1897) NEW ORLEANS RACE RIOT (1900)

668 671

Charles, Robert (c.1866–1900)

675

Jim Crow Laws

676

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

678

ATLANTA RACE RIOT (1906)

681

Economic Competition

685

White Supremacy

686

SPRINGFIELD RACE RIOT (1908)

689

Jewish Americans

693

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

694

xiii

xiv

Contents

BLACK PATCH WAR (1909)

697

American Tobacco Company (ATC)

701

Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA)

702

Statement of Charles H. Fort, President of the Tobacco Growers’ Association of the United States, February 4, 1904 LUDLOW MASSACRE (1914)

703 707

Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I)

713

Industrial Violence

714

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)

716

Excerpt from Godfrey Irwin’s Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado (1914)

718

Walter Fink’s Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp (1914)

719

Index

I-1

VOLUME 3 PLAN DE SAN DIEGO (1915–1916)

727

Mexico

733

Tejanos

735

Texas Rangers

736

GREEN CORN REBELLION (1917)

739

Conscription Act (World War I, 1917)

743

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

744

Socialism

746

HOUSTON RIOT (1917)

749

Black Soldiers

753

Discrimination

754

BOSTON POLICE STRIKE (1919)

757

Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933)

761

Unionization

762

RED SUMMER (1919)

765

Great Migration

773

Lynching

775

Race Riots

777

Contents

Excerpt from the Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riots (1920)

778

Excerpts from the “Anti-Lynching” Hearings Held before the House Judiciary Committee (1920)

782

Excerpts of Testimony from Laney v. United States Describing Events during the Washington, D.C., Riot of July 1919 (1923)

789

BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN (1921)

793

Coal Mining

797

Hatfield, Sid (1893–1921)

798

Matewan Massacre (1920)

799

TULSA RACE RIOT (1921)

801

Ku Klux Klan

805

Segregation

806

Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot (1921)

808

Excerpts from the Preliminary and Final Reports of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2000 and 2001)

809

BONUS ARMY (1932)

829

Battle of Anacostia Flats (1932)

835

Great Depression (1930s)

836

Hooverville

837

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964)

840

Veterans’ Rights

841

Waters, Walter W. (1898–1959)

843

Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia: Excerpts of President Herbert Hoover’s Letter to the District Commissioner and from His Press Conference (1932) TOLEDO AUTO-LITE STRIKE (1934)

844 847

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

851

Battle of Toledo (1934)

852

National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)

854

WEST COAST LONGSHOREMEN’S STRIKE (1934)

857

Bloody Thursday (1934)

861

Bridges, Harry (1901–1990)

862

xv

xvi

Contents

Communism

864

International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)

865

San Francisco

866

ZOOT SUIT RIOTS (1942)

869

Mexican Americans

877

Police Brutality

878

Servicemen

880

BATTLE OF ATHENS (1946)

883

Mansfield, Pat (dates unknown)

887

Political Corruption

888

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (1953–1968)

891

Carmichael, Stokely/Kwame Ture (1941–1998)

903

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1929–1968)

904

Malcolm X (1925–1965)

907

March on Washington (1963)

908

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

910

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

912

President John F. Kennedy’s Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi (1962)

913

Excerpts from the Civil Rights Act of 1964

915

ANTIWAR MOVEMENT (1960S–1970S)

925

Counterculture

937

Kent State (1970)

938

The Moratorium (1969)

941

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

943

Speech Delivered by Paul Potter, President of Students for a Democratic Society, at the Washington Monument (1965)

945

Students for a Democratic Society Leaflet Distributed at the Antiwar March on Washington (1965)

950

Statements of the Fort Hood Three (1966)

951

Excerpts from United States v. Spock: Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Others Accused of Conspiring to Aid and Abet Draft Evasion (1969)

957

A Father’s Disgust with Antiwar Demonstrations (1970)

960

Contents

Displaying the Flag on the Seat of His Pants: Excerpts from Smith v. Goguen (1974) WATTS RIOT (1965)

961 965

Arson

973

Looting

974

Excerpt from the Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California (1965) DETROIT RIOTS (1967)

976 987

Excessive Force

993

Housing

994

Kerner Commission (1967–1968)

995

Excerpts from Cyrus R. Vance’s Report on the Riots in Detroit (1967) CHICAGO RIOTS (1968)

997 1009

Chicago Seven

1019

Daley, Richard J. (1902–1976)

1021

Democratic National Convention (1968)

1022

Hayden, Tom (1939–)

1024

Hoffman, Abbie (1936–1989)

1025

National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe)

1027

ALCATRAZ ISLAND OCCUPATION (1969–1971)

1031

Indians of All Tribes

1035

Oakes, Richard (1942–1972)

1036

Termination

1038

Trudell, John (1946–)

1039

The Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father and His People, November 1969 FEMINIST MOVEMENT (1970S–1980S)

1040 1043

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

1053

Roe v. Wade (1973)

1055

Steinem, Gloria (1934–)

1056

ATTICA PRISON RIOT (1971)

1059

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

1063

Rockefeller, Nelson A. (1908–1979)

1064

xvii

xviii

Contents

TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES (1972)

1067

American Indian Movement (AIM)

1071

Indian Treaties

1072

Red Power

1073

WOUNDED KNEE II (1973)

1075

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

1079

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

1080

Pine Ridge Reservation

1081

Wilson, Dick (1934–1990)

1082

SAGEBRUSH REBELLION (1979–1981)

1085

Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976

1089

Public Lands

1090

Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004)

1091

Watt, James G. (1938–)

1093

LOS ANGELES UPRISING (1992)

1095

Denny, Reginald (1953–)

1101

King, Rodney (1965–)

1102

Los Angeles Police Department

1103

Williams, Damian Monroe (1973–)

1105

Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery (1992) WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS (1999)

1106 1121

Direct Action Network

1125

Economic Justice

1126

Globalization

1127

DAY WITHOUT AN IMMIGRANT (2006)

1129

Undocumented Immigrants

1133

List of Contributors Index About the Editor

1137 I-1

Plan de San Diego (1915–1916) One of the largest but least-known rebellions in U.S. history, the uprising associated with the Plan of San Diego took place at the southern tip of Texas in 1915 and 1916. By the time that the uprising ended in the summer of 1915, hundreds lay dead, the United States and Mexico had nearly gone to war, and the groundwork for a racially segregated social order in the region had been laid. The Plan of San Diego was a manifesto issued in South Texas in early 1915 that called for a “liberating army of all races” to overthrow U.S. rule in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Found on Basilio Ramos in January 1915 when he was arrested for attempting to enlist support for the venture, the document contained incendiary provisions. The first goals named, according to a translation later made by U.S. authorities, were the “proclaiming [of] the liberty of the individuals of the black race” and “the independence and segregation of the states . . . Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California, of which states the Republic of Mexico was robbed in a most perfidious manner by North American Imperialism.” These states, once liberated, would in the best case rejoin Mexico when the mother country was itself redeemed, but might be made for a time into an independent nation. In any event, blacks would be aided in “obtaining six [other] states of the American Union . . . and they may form from these States a republic and they may be therefore independent.” The “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples,” to operate with formal military discipline under the command of a “Supreme Revolutionary Congress” based in San Diego, Texas, would be the vehicle for these ambitious goals (Sandos 1992, 81). All prisoners taken would be executed, as would Anglo males of 16 years or older. Ancestral lands would be returned to the Apache and other Indian groups of the region in exchange for their support. The authors and the precise circumstances of the document’s creation remain as unclear today as in 1915, though it was named after the town of San Diego, Texas, and clearly modeled on proclamations associated with the Mexican Revolution (see the entry “Mexico”), which by that point had toppled a brutal dictator but resulted in mass warfare and dislocation as different factions struggled for control of the nation. Because no uprising materialized on February 20 or seemed in the offing months later, Ramos was released on bail in May.

727

728

Plan de San Diego (1915–1916)

Starting in July, however, groups of Mexican-American ranchers in South Texas launched a series of raids targeting prominent landholders, irrigation works, and railroad infrastructure. By October, they had succeeded in mounting scores of raids (sometimes striking multiple targets on the same day), killing several prominent Anglo farmers known locally for mistreating their hired hands, and pressuring hundreds of Anglo ranchers to move out of the countryside to the relative safety of towns and cities, all while avoiding pitched battles with the federal soldiers who so badly outnumbered them. As many as 80 men participated in the largest attacks, sometimes clearly adhering to a military-style command structure that differentiated between officers and soldiers. The leaders of the uprising claimed at various points to be implementing the plan, and issued an altered version of it stressing the grievances of local Mexicans and Mexican Americans, but their precise connection to the manifesto remains unclear. Local conditions created the impetus behind the uprising. A decade before, a railroad connection prompted the influx of thousands of Anglo farmers into what had remained a majority-Hispanic area since its conquest by the United States in the 1846–1848 war with Mexico. Economic pressure, violence, and fraud deprived many Hispanic ranchers of their land, and racially exclusionary personal and political conduct by newcomer Anglos further inflamed tensions. These dispossessed and threatened ranchers constituted the uprising’s base of support, as many U.S. authorities at the time recognized. “[I]t is undoubtedly true that majority of bandits operating in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties are residents of the United States,” concluded General Frederick Funston in August. The raiders also relied on their neighbors for shelter, food, and water as they misled their pursuers. “The population of the county is more than 95 percent Mexican birth and a very large proportion of this element is in sympathy with the raiders or bandits, now apparently trying to get together,” wrote a frustrated army commander in Rio Grande City at the height of the raids. “This makes it most difficult to get information. I am endeavoring to work in harmony with civil authorities but these are active only in protection of towns” (Johnson 2003, 96). The Mexican Revolution, which had toppled the hemisphere’s oldest regime and begun redistributing land to the dispossessed, had inspired many of those who joined the rebellion, especially rancher Aniceto Pizan˜a, who had long read and distributed the publications of the Partido Liberal Mexicano, a key instigator of the Revolution. In at least a few cases, revolutionary partisans directly participated in raids in August and September. Emiliano Nafaratte, the commander of the revolutionary faction in control of northeastern Mexico at the time, gave logistical support and arms to the uprising. Although not traditionally a supporter of the rights of those of Mexican descent in Texas, Nafarrate may have viewed the

Plan de San Diego (1915–1916)

rebellion as a useful vehicle to express widespread Mexican anger at the United States for its military occupation of Vera Cruz the year before. A response to the uprising was not long in coming. The state government dispatched several companies of Texas Rangers (see the entry “Texas Rangers”) with permission to enlist “Special Rangers” to suppress the revolt. The federal government bolstered the presence of the army, soon calling up reserve units from as far away as New York. The first vigilante executions took place less than three weeks after the initial flurry of raids, as sheriff’s deputies shot the brothers Lorenzo and Gorgonio Manrı´quez in Mercedes, Texas. The justification—resisting arrest by attempting to flee—became a common refrain as local law enforcement authorities, private citizens, and Texas Rangers initiated a campaign of terror against anybody suspected of involvement with the raids, no matter how slender the evidence. Local papers openly supported this campaign, as in the Lyford Courant’s declaration that “Lynch law is never a pleasant thing to contemplate, but it is not to be denied that it is sometimes the only means of administering justice” (Johnson 2003, 87). The uprising itself continued to grow, its ranks bolstered by outrage at vigilantism. (Aniceto Pizan˜a, who became one of the two principals of the revolt, along with Luis de la Rosa, did not participate until his ranch was attacked and his brother grievously injured at the instigation of an Anglo neighbor who had long coveted his land.) On August 8, Luis de la Rosa led about 60 men in an assault on the headquarters of one of the divisions of the King Ranch, one of the largest and most politically connected landholdings in the state. The rebels continued their attacks on railroads and other infrastructure, burning four bridges within a 20-mile radius of Browsnville and cutting telegraph line connections to many of the region’s small towns. Still undaunted by the increasing number of U.S. soldiers that they faced or by the transfer of Nafaratte away from the border, on October 19, the rebels scored their most dramatic coup with the derailing of the morning train some 12 miles north of Brownsville. With engine and front-most cars on their sides, the assailants succeeded in killing several soldiers and a prominent Brownsville officer, missing the district attorney and a former officer of the Texas Rangers. Two days later, a group of 60 to 80 accompanied with by a trumpeter playing battle songs fired on a cavalry bunkhouse stationed near the border. While most of the raids were aimed at Anglo targets, raiders also killed and harassed numerous Tejanos, especially deputy sheriffs and prominent landholders. In other words, the uprising reflected not only racial divisions, but also economic tensions. For example, Florencio Saenz, one of the few Tejanos to profit from the agricultural boom of the early 20th century, was singled out for four attacks in August and September by his Tejano neighbors, who succeeded in forcing him to close his badly damaged store and abandon his productive fields for the better part of three

729

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years. Some local Anglos were attuned to the predicament of more elite Tejanos. As one observer put it, in the racial language of the time, “[t]here are a number of well-known Mexicans who are law abiding and good citizens, whose condition is worse at present than that of the Americans” (Johnson 2003, 85). But what Tejanos might have to fear from one another soon paled in comparison to what they had to fear from Anglos. Those suspected of joining or supporting the raiders constituted the most obvious of targets, and so ethnic Mexicans were lynched after nearly every major raid in 1915. Unlike the U.S. Army, which offered protection to Tejanos even as it pursued the raiders, the Texas Rangers played a prominent role in many such occasions. The most notorious came after the attack on the King Ranch, when several rangers posed with their lassos around the corpses of three men in a photo that soon circulated, like many depictions of lynching across the country, as a postcard. Observers reported multiple incidents of mass lynchings. In late September, for example, an army scout came across a dozen or more bodies of men killed by Rangers near Ebenoza. The bodies remained in the open for months. “I saw the bones about five or six months afterwards, the skeletons,” recalled a local farmer. A prominent regional politician, James Wells, remembered coming across the decomposing bodies after he saw buzzards circling overhead and smelled something foul. Another description of bodies “with empty beer bottles stuck in their mouths . . . near Ebenezer” likely referred to the same victims (Johnson 2003, 115). Such killings became common by early fall, common enough to claim hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. In mid-September, for example, a New York reporter noted that “The bodies of three of the twenty or more Mexicans that were locked up overnight in the small frame jail at San Benito were found lying beside the road two miles east of the town this afternoon. All three of the men had been shot in the back. Near Edinburg, where Octabiana Alema, a mailcarrier, was shot and beaten by bandits whom he came upon accidentally in the brush, the bodies of two more Mexicans were found. They had been slain during the night. During the morning the decapitated body of another Mexican roped to a large log floated down the Rio Grande.” One Texas paper spoke of “a serious surplus population that needs eliminating.” Prominent politicians proposed putting all those of Mexican descent into “concentration camps”—and killing any who refused. “There have been lots who have evaporated in that country in the last 3 or 4 years,” remembered one Anglo lawyer in early 1919 (Zamora 1919, 273–274). The uprising itself was suppressed by the summer of 1916, after a long hiatus from November to June. The flight of hundreds of Tejano residents into Mexico in the fall of 1915, a stunning reversal of the large pattern of migration from Mexico to the United States over the decade of the 1910s, may have deprived the rebels of much of their base of support. The heavy deployment of federal soldiers

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disrupted many of the raids, and revolutionary authorities in Mexico stopped supporting them. In early June 1916, the rebels regrouped further north and mounted several large raids to the south of Laredo. Smaller raids took place about 10 miles west of Brownsville, and several U.S. Army units crossed into Mexico in pursuit. The two nations were on the brink of war: with U.S. forces already in northcentral Mexico chasing Pancho Villa after his March raid on Columbus, New Mexico, both Mexican and American diplomats feared that an all-out U.S. invasion was in the offing. Reports of the arrest of Luis de la Rosa began circulating, and the bands of rebels did not reform or mount further attacks. In early July, U.S. Army commanders stationed in south Texas reported that all was quiet. The uprising never resumed. The uprising and the orgy of racial violence that it unleashed had long-term reverberations. On the one hand, the years after the revolt saw the creation of a racial caste system in south Texas, with Tejanos confronted by segregated schools, public accommodations, and denial of political rights such as voting and jury service in much of the region that had been one of the bastions of Mexican-American power since its conquest in the U.S.-Mexico War some six decades before. On the other hand, the crisis of 1915–1916 helped to convince key Tejano leaders in south Texas of the futility of armed resistance against Anglo dominance. In the 1920s, key figures who had found themselves caught between the partisans of de la Rosa and Pizan˜a on the one hand, and the Texas Rangers and vigilantes on the other, played key roles in the founding of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest surviving Mexican-American civil rights organization, which devoted itself to agitating on behalf of the citizenship rights of Mexican Americans by challenging segregation and disfranchisement. The Plan of San Diego and the uprising tied to it never became a fixture of widespread historical memory in the United States. Folk songs and family memories did circulate amongst the Tejano population. Local Anglo newspapers and historical societies produced accounts and recollections of the uprising, but these accounts’ emphasis on “banditry” divorced the uprising from its roots in AngloMexican relations and the economic development of south Texas. For decades, professional historians paid the events little attention, in large part because of the marginal role of the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexican American history within the academy. But by the 1970s the increasing militancy of the Mexican American population and the entry of numerous Mexican Americans into the ranks of professional historians helped to make the Plan of San Diego the subject of professional historical inquiry. The first issue of Aztla´n, a pioneering journal founded in 1970s to cover Mexican American history, contained an analysis of the manifesto and revolt, and since then two books dealing centrally with the uprising have been published.

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Translations of the original Plan of San Diego may be found in the U.S. v. Basilio Ramos Jr., et al., Criminal #2152, Southern District of Texas, RG 21, Fort Worth Federal Records Center; in the “Gray-Lane Files,” Records of International Conferences, Commissions, and Expositions. Records of the United States Commissioners of the American and Mexican Joint Commission, 1916, RG 43, United States Nation Archives, Memo #11; in the Walter Prescott Webb Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Box 2R290; and in General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, M 274 (“Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1910–1929, 812.00/23116”) —Benjamin H. Johnson See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Zoot Suit Riots (1942); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Go´mez-Quin˜ones, Juan. “Plan de San Diego Revisited.” Aztla´n 1 (Spring 1970): 124–130. Johnson, Benjamin Heber. Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Sandos, James. Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Texas State Legislature. Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and House in the Investigation of the State Ranger Force. Austin: State of Texas, 1919. Zamora, Emilio. The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993.

Mexico The United States and Mexico have experienced a fraught, sometimes explosive, but inescapable relationship for nearly two centuries. Both nations were born in anti-imperial revolts. Their early leaders had much in common, viewing their republics as harbingers of a more enlightened and progressive future. They both faced parallel challenges in resolving the question of who would count as citizens, in securing the loyalty of culturally and ethnically diverse populations, dealing with independent Indian peoples, and in resolving the tensions between regional and national governance. The influx of American citizens and capital into the Mexican north in the 1820s and 1830s ended up in a war that re-drew the map of North America. In 1836, the Texas Revolution, launched by Anglo-American colonists and Tejanos concerned with the centralizing tendencies in Mexico, resulted in the formation of the Republic of Texas, whose independence the Mexican government never recognized. When the United States annexed Texas in 1845, some kind of conflict between the two nations seemed inevitable. The following year, President James Polk sent troops across the Nueces River, which Mexico claimed was the border, and toward the Rio Grande, which the United States insisted was the proper international line. Polk used the inevitable clash with Mexican forces as the justification for the massive invasion that eventually cost the weaker nation more than half of its territory. This defeat was followed by civil war in the United States. Protracted conflict over the standing of the Catholic Church and the powers of the central government was intensified by a French intervention in the 1860s. Greater political stability was secured in the long rule of Porfirio Dı´az (1877–1911), but at the cost, many charged, of authoritarian rule and subordination to foreign (mostly American) capital. In 1911, revolution broke out, forcing Dı´az out of office. But the rebels were divided amongst themselves, particularly over the question of the distribution of the nation’s lands, which had been consolidated into fewer and fewer hands during Dı´az’s regime. Moreover, elements of the old regime, particularly the federal army, yearned for a return to power. So civil war wracked Mexico for the rest of the decade, killing a tenth or more of its population, driving perhaps another tenth of its population to flee to the United States, and prompting two military occupations by the United States. The Mexican Revolution had an enormous impact on the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees dramatically expanded ethnic Mexican settlements, restoring their ties to Mexico and ultimately redrawing the ethnic geography of the Southwest. The number of Mexican-descent people in

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Guerrilla warfare, or hit-and-run attacks on small parties of soldiers and supply trains, was a frequent Mexican tactic during the Mexican-American War. Here, Mexican guerrillas carry lances into battle in 1848. (Library of Congress)

the United States tripled, at least, between 1910 and 1920. Some turmoil and controversy accompanied this process, as the episode of the Plan of San Diego indicates. Mexican migration to the United States has been a constant since the revolution, with the exception of the depression decade of the 1930s. Revolutionaries defeated the representatives of Dı´az’s old regime and consolidated their rule in the 1920s, in the process creating a much more unified nation with a strong sense of national identity. —Benjamin H. Johnson

Further Reading DeLeo´n, Arnoldo. The Tejano Community, 1836–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

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Tejanos “Tejano” is a term that has come to be widely employed for people of Mexican descent living in Texas. The word was first employed as early as the 1820s, when Mexican officials used it to describe the population of the state of Tejas, and its usage by Tejanos and non-Tejanos alike became a commonplace in the second half of the 20th century. The origins of the Tejano population are the Spanish settlements established in present-day Texas during the 18th century, but the Tejano community has been continuously influenced by Mexican migration and the evolution of Mexican society. Since the annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845, Tejanos have been part of the larger Mexican American and Hispanic or Latino populations of the United States. The historical experiences of Tejanos have thus been shaped by regional, national, and transnational forces. Tejanos were a small minority of the Republic of Texas upon its founding in 1836. Most lived in the triangle between San Antonio, Laredo, and Brownsville, generally referred to as “South Texas,” which in turn became one of the areas of greatest Mexican-descent population in 1848, when Mexico ceded its northern territories to the United States with the latter’s victory in the U.S.-Mexico War. Natural increase and migration from the Mexican northeast during the second half of the 19th century ensured a steady growth in the size of the Tejano population. By 1900, Tejanos were the center of gravity of the entire Mexican American population. In 1920, for example, there were more people of Hispanic descent living in Texas than in California, New Mexico, and Arizona combined. (It was not until the 1950s that California surpassed Texas as the state with the largest Mexicandescent population). Tejanos continued to comprise a greater and greater percentage of the Lone Star State’s population, more than 30 percent by 2000. Demographers estimate that Hispanics will be a majority of the Texas population by 2050. Although their ancestors were the founders of Texas, Tejanos have been subjected to marginalization, oppression, and discrimination by the state’s dominant Anglo-American population. Tejanos living in east Texas were expelled and subjected to mob violence in the 1830s and 1840s, despite being guaranteed the rights of U.S. citizens by the treaty ending the U.S.-Mexico War. In South Texas and many other parts of the border region, however, they remained a majority well into the 20th century, and continued to exercise substantial political power despite their increasing economic marginalization. The early 20th century saw a decline in their status. By then, vast majority of Tejanos experienced U.S. society as a racially oppressed working class, subjected to effective political disfranchisement, occupational discrimination, and systematic residential segregation. The extreme racial

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violence of the Plan of San Diego of 1915–1916 may be the nadir of the Tejano experience. Tejanos sought to defend their rights and enhance their status in a wide range of ways, ranging from migrating out of the state (which hundreds of thousands did over the course of the 20th century), to labor strikes, to the formation of political organizations, most notably the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929. —Benjamin H. Johnson

Further Reading DeLeo´n, Arnoldo. The Tejano Community, 1836–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

Texas Rangers Formally established in 1835 as a state law enforcement agency, the Texas Rangers for the next century mixed the characteristics of a volunteer militia and a professional paramilitary organization. In the 19th century, the constabulary was a critical way for Lone Star authorities to assert control over restive populations, ranging from Mexicans and Tejanos, to independent Indians, to disgruntled white ranchers and farmers. The force, which at its largest size included more than 500 enlisted men led by a small officer corps, was under the command of an adjutant general appointed by the state governor. The Rangers played important roles in most of the significant episodes of civil unrest in 19th- and early-20th-century Texas. Ranger battalions, for example, clashed with native peoples in North Texas and Indian Territory in the 1850s. Together with the U.S. Army, they fought the forces of Tejano rebel Juan Cortina in South Texas in 1859 and 1860, returning to the region after the civil war to police a still-restive border. Rangers were critical to the breaking of the massive 1886 Southwest Strike against the Missouri-Pacific network, and a strike of coal miners in Thurber two years later, when Adjutant General W. H. King vowed to crush labor organizers “with the mailed hand” (Graybill 2007, 177). The Rangers helped to secure the dominance of large, corporate cattle ranches in much of the western portions of the state by suppressing labor unrest by cowboys and smalltime ranchers (many of whom turned to cutting the fences of large ranches that they felt had seized their own land or illegally restricted access to water supplies).

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Texas’ Mexican-descent, or “Tejano,” population often bore the brunt of Ranger violence. For much of the period from 1848 to 1910, the bulk of the force was deployed to the border region, especially the Nueces Strip (the area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande), where a substantial and entrenched population resented and resisted Anglo racial chauvinism and economic dominance. Here, Ranger-administered justice was generally arbitrary and brutal, as in 1875 when legendary Ranger captain Leander McNelly killed a dozen Hispanics suspected by Anglos of cattle theft and stacked their bodies in Brownsville’s plaza. Ranger N. A. Jennings later boasted that along the border the force had a “set policy of terrorizing the residents at every opportunity . . . to let no opportunity go unimproved to assert ourselves and override the ‘Greasers’ ” (Jennings 1899, 71). This wanton violence reached a new level of intensity in 1915–1919, during and in the aftermath of the Plan of San Diego uprising. Here, Texas Rangers, their ranks augmented by emergency measures that allowed for the enlistment of unpaid “Special Rangers,” played a key role in the violent response to the Plan of San Diego uprising, engaging in numerous murders and reprisals. One Ranger captain even threatened state representative J. T. Canales, whose charges that Rangers had killed scores and perhaps hundreds, led to several weeks of hearings at the state legislature in early 1919. Since the Plan of San Diego, the Rangers have shed some of their distinctive characteristics and reputation for anti-Mexican violence. The constabulary was dramatically reduced in size in the 1920s and incorporated in the newly formed Department of Public Safety in 1935 as a smaller, more professional investigative force. In the 1960s, however, the Rangers again found themselves at the center of Anglo-Mexican conflict, playing controversial roles in strikes by Mexican agricultural laborers and in political mobilizations associated with the Chicano movement. —Benjamin H. Johnson

Further Reading Graybill, Andrew. Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Jennings, Napoleon August. A Texas Ranger. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1899. Repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Utley, Robert. Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Utley, Robert. Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Green Corn Rebellion (1917) During World War I, in August 1917, a small revolt of poor tenant farmers broke out in rural Oklahoma. Organized to protest the Conscription Act of June 1917, the Green Corn Rebellion resulted in a few minor skirmishes and the arrest of almost 500 participants. Though the “revolt” was a relatively minor protest in the larger prosecution of the war, it has become a symbol of the antiwar resistance in rural areas of the United States during World War I. Conditions in Oklahoma had been bad for farmers for a number of years preceding the rebellion. Oklahoma was settled late, in the 1890s, and much of the land was owned by speculators who became landlords to tenant farmers. Due to the presence of a substantial amount of Indian land, much of the property in Oklahoma was not subject to taxation, ensuring poor-quality education and government services for rural Oklahomans. Indeed, only about 1 in 15 men arrested in the Green Corn Rebellion could read and write. Though farm prices had risen at the outbreak of World War I, tenant farmers in the area felt that bankers, speculators, and local businesses victimized them with foreclosures, high interest rates, high rents, and low crop prices. Farmers began to look at the socialist ideology as a viable alternative to the capitalist system. By 1915, thousands of Oklahoma farmers had joined the Working Class Union (WCU), a socialist organization based in Van Buren, Arkansas, that had over 10,000 members among the rural poor in Oklahoma. The WCU program for rural socialism included making more federal land available for poor farmers to purchase; it also called for a progressive, or graduated tax on landlords, and marketing cooperatives to bypass middlemen in the agricultural system. Farmers in the area were angry with the federal government for fostering a program to dip cattle in chemical dips to combat the “Texas Fever” plague in the area. (Many rural dwellers thought the chemical dips actually hurt the cattle.) Socialism was very popular in the heart of the rural United States in the years leading up to World War I. Many small towns had socialist newspapers, and one of the most popular socialist periodicals in the period was published in nearby Girard, Kansas. Thousands of rural dwellers in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and other states would attend weeklong socialist “camp meetings” that featured speakers and songs much like an evangelical revival. In 1914, socialists held over 100

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political offices in the state. Farmers, especially poor farmers, felt that the emerging global capitalist system had left them behind, and now they were being asked to submit their sons to a fight in a war that was, in their eyes, the fault of that same system. When the government announced that the military draft would begin in June 1917, protests broke out across the country, particularly in rural areas where socialists and pacifists had sewn their ideology in the years before the war. Ironically, rising farm prices in 1916 led to less activity with the WCU in Oklahoma, but the group reformed to protest the implementation of the Conscription Act. (Rural resistance to the draft in World War I was poignantly portrayed in the 1941 film Sergeant York, about World War I draft resister–turned–war hero Alvin York of rural Tennessee.) The WCU looked favorably on the “direct action” tactics of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a union formed in 1905 that was popular in working-class America for confronting the capitalist system in a series of oftenviolent strikes and protests in the years leading up to the war. Ironically, the IWW had rejected WCU overtures because tenant farmers and small business men in the WCU were “capitalists” in the eyes of IWW leaders. When President Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916, he had witnessed a great outpouring of pacifism in rural areas. Farmers felt betrayed when the leader who had “kept the boys out the war” led the country into the maelstrom in April 1917. The implementation of the military draft further convinced these impoverished farmers that they were being conscripted to fight a “rich man’s war.” In the first days of August 1917, the movement began to coalesce under a red banner flying on the farm of local socialist John Spears near Sasakwa on the Canadian River. Hundreds of white, black, and Native American tenant farmers planned a program of protest and resistance. Hearkening back to the day of Coxey’s Army in 1890s, the farmers planned to march on Washington. Along the way, the protesters would eat “green” corn from the fields, hoping that their numbers would grow on the way to the Capitol. In the weeks preceding the Green Corn Rebellion in August, WCU leaders “Rube” Munson and Homer Spence had already been arrested for obstructing the draft. On August 2, 1917, around 300 protesters (some of them armed) began to cut telephone and telegraph lines and light bridges and oil pipelines afire. (Approximately 1,000 rebels and their supporters were involved over the course of the rebellion.) The local sheriff Bob Duncan quickly organized a “posse” that confronted the rebels, eventually killing four in skirmishes over the next few days. The revolt was easily put down within a week with the assistance of deputy U.S. marshal Frank Whally, and of the 450 men arrested, 150 of the Green Corn rebels were convicted, many of whom received 10-year terms in federal prison at

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Leavenworth. Other groups, including the Socialist Party of the United States and the IWW, were also suppressed and effectively shut down in the state in the wake of the Green Corn Rebellion. In the decades after the war, few historians discussed the Green Corn Rebellion. There was a novel about the episode published several years later, The Green Corn Rebellion, by Oklahoma author William Cunningham. In the 1950s, a groundbreaking study, Opponents of War, 1917–1918, was written by historians Gilbert Peterson and H. C. Fite. The book places the Green Corn Rebellion in the context of the crackdown of antiwar resistance and radicalism in the United States during World War I. The Green Corn Rebellion, as Peterson and Fite noted, was a small thread in a larger tapestry of resistance to the war. In rural areas throughout the United States, numerous socialists and their supporters were arrested for violating the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and other laws designed to suppress dissent during the conflict. The quick and thorough suppression of the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma was part of a comprehensive campaign to reduce or eliminate socialism and radical unionism in the United States that started during the war and continued in the postwar Red Scare that began in 1919 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Socialism also became tainted with its association with the newly created Soviet Union, which had withdrawn from the war effort just as Americans were landing in Europe in force. In the 1920s, groups like the Ku Klux Klan became popular in places like rural Oklahoma, where aversion to radical politics was also associated with immigration and the values of the city. Once a vibrant ideological force in the rural heartland of the United States, the socialist movement effectively died in an increasingly conservative rural population in the 1920s. Episodes such as the Green Corn Rebellion hastened that decline. —Randal Beeman See also all entries under New York Draft Riots (1863); Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford, 2004. Murphy, Paul L. World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States. New York: Norton, 1979.

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Green Corn Rebellion (1917) Peterson, H. C., and Fite, Gilbert C. Opponents of War, 1917–1918. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Pope, Daniel. American Radicalism. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Sellars, Nigel Anthony. Oil, Wheat & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Conscription Act (World War I, 1917) The Conscription Act, formally known as the Selective Service Act, was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 18, 1917. The law authorized the government to begin drafting American males into the armed forces starting on June 5, 1917. The Conscription Act was seen as a military necessity by the government, but the law was very controversial among those who opposed American involvement in the European conflict. World War I (known as the “Great War” at the time) began in the summer of 1914. Though the United States was involved in the war economically from the beginning, the American people were very reluctant to send combat troops into the fight. After a series of problems with Germany, including submarine attacks on U.S. vessels and a potential German alliance with Mexico, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. American military planners wanted to amass an army of over four million men in France, and then train, equip, and drill them before sending them into the front lines to hopefully overwhelm the Germans. Though nearly two million men volunteered for duty, the Conscription Act was created to fill out the ranks with draftees. At least 24 million men registered for the draft, and 2.8 million of them were inducted into the armed forces of the United States. Initially, the Conscription Act called for a draft of all males aged 21 to 30, but that age limit was subsequently expanded to include all males aged 18 to 45. The majority of those drafted were farmers and common laborers. Resistance to the Conscription Act was strong, but those who opposed the law were eventually overwhelmed by the patriotic sentiments that emerged in the war. Draft resisters were targeted as slackers and traitors, and the government employed repressive mechanisms to stifle resistance to the draft. Some who resisted as conscientious objectors viewed the draft as a violation of their religious and pacifist principles. Fewer than 350,000 individuals avoided the draft; thus, the Conscription Act was viewed by the U.S. government as a very successful enterprise. Among the draft resisters was a man from Tennessee named Alvin York, who sought to be released from duty due to his religious convictions. York later changed his mind and became one of the nation’s top war heroes during the conflict in Europe. His story was retold in the classic Hollywood film Sergeant York (1941). Anarchists, socialists, communists, and other radicals were often leaders in opposition to the Conscription Act. Mother Jones, a radical New York–based magazine, declared June 5, 1917, as the day democracy died in America. In

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Oklahoma, impoverished rural dwellers started a well-known yet short-lived draft resistance campaign known to history as the Green Corn Rebellion in June 1917. The Selective Service system differed from the previous draft in the Civil War in that it did not allow draftees to hire substitutes to take their place in the military. Refusal to sign up for the draft was a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. Many opponents of the Conscription Act were also thrown in prison during the war for impeding the draft and violating the Espionage or Seditions acts. —Randal Beeman

Further Reading Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford, 2004. Peterson, H. C., and Fite, Gilbert C. Opponents of War, 1917–1918. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a radical socialist-anarchist movement that advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system via the organization of all wage workers into “one big union.” From the beginning, the IWW was controversial due to the fact that many IWW members (who were labeled “Wobblies”) advocated direct action, or violence, as a means to achieving their goals. The IWW was involved in a number of violent strikes and protests on behalf of free speech. The IWW was also hampered by critics within the socialist movement, and from attacks by industrialists and the government. During and after World War I (1914–1918) and the subsequent First Red Scare (1919–1921), IWW members often faced arrest and physical violence due to their opposition to the war. After the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), workers across the United States began to organize trade unions to fight for better pay and working conditions. While some of these unionists supported socialism and welcomed all workers into their folds, the major unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) restricted membership to skilled white workers. Radicals such as William “Big Bill” Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones founded the IWW for all wage workers irrespective of job skills, race, ethnicity, or gender.

Green Corn Rebellion (1917)

Though the IWW was never very specific about how their union would lead to the overthrow of the capitalist system, the union won support for its attempt to organize itinerant farm workers, miners, and lumbermen for the first time. IWW activities met with stiff resistance from both corporations and the government. IWW members braved arrest and jail in their successful campaigns for free speech in Spokane, Washington, and San Diego and Fresno, California, in 1910–1911. Some IWW members believed that workers should organize politically to create better conditions in the workplace. Other leaders, such as Haywood, insisted that strikes, boycotts, and protests were more effective. By 1908, several key leaders such as Debs and Daniel Deleon resigned from the IWW due to its advocacy of violence to achieve its goals. By World War I, the IWW had at least 50,000 members and many more supporters in the labor movement. IWW members participated in and led numerous strike actions including famous confrontations in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and Paterson, New Jersey, and Wheatland, California, in 1913. Numerous IWW members were jailed and killed in these and other strikes. IWW member Joe Hill was hanged in Utah in 1914 for murder, even though the evidence was circumstantial at best. Other IWW members were killed in skirmishes with the law in places such as Everett, Washington, in 1916. During World War I, the IWW opposition to the war and military conscription led to militant persecution of the union by the authorities. The Sedition Act, Espionage Act, and various criminal syndicalism laws in the states effectively made it illegal to protest the war and the military draft, and to call for an overthrow of the capitalist system. IWW offices were raided and shut down across the country, and hundreds of “Wobblies” were thrown in jail. Haywood was among the IWW members sentenced to prison, though he eventually escaped to the Soviet Union, where he lived the remainder of his life. After World War I, the IWW did have a brief resurgence, but the union’s advocacy of socialism was increasingly unpopular, and the IWW eventually faded from the spotlight in the 1930s and 1940s. —Randal Beeman

Further Reading Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Chace, James. 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed the Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Dubofsky, Melvin. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

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Socialism Prior to World War I, the socialist movement in the United States was a small yet vibrant third party that presented an alternative political path for many Americans. The socialist message of public ownership of the nation’s infrastructure and the more equitable redistribution of wealth appealed to working people, rural folks, intellectuals, reformers, and idealists. Though World War I created an atmosphere that was highly antagonistic toward socialism, the socialist movement did have an influence in the United States in a variety of ways, including public ownership of many municipal utility systems, strict governmental controls over the nation’s industrial system during World War I, and a progressive income tax enacted in 1913. The roots of American socialism lay in the organization of worker’s unions after the Civil War. Socialism spread from Europe to the United States, influenced by thinkers such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. The Socialist Labor Party was founded in 1876, and the Socialist Party of the United States was formed in 1901. As industrialism swept Europe and the United States, many workers felt trapped in the capitalist system, in which they often faced horrific working conditions, arbitrary wage cuts, and a sense that their lives were controlled by wealthy business owners. The American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, eventually rejected socialism in favor of a program for higher wages and better working conditions. Other unions, such as the American Railway Union (led by Eugene V. Debs) advocated public ownership of the railways and other “natural monopolies” such as the telephone system and other basic industries. Many socialists, including so-called Fabian and utopian socialists, were urban reformers and assorted idealists who felt that the harsh system of capitalist competition was wasteful and inefficient. Some religiously oriented people viewed socialism as a more humane approach to organizing society. In rural areas of the United States, socialism was particularly strong in the years prior to World War I, especially among small farmers who often faced excess debt, unfair crop prices, and high transportation rates. Socialist organizations and newspapers were endemic in American rural areas, and the top socialist magazine, Appeal to Reason, was published in the small town of Girard, Kansas. Socialist strength also came through in the polling booths, with Debs receiving 12 percent of the national vote in the 1912 presidential election and with another socialist, Victor Berger, elected to Congress in 1910. When World War I began in 1914, most American socialists denounced the war as a capitalist-imperialist conflict, and they were mostly united in their opposition to American involvement in the war. After the United States entered the war in

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April 1917, the socialist movement divided over support for the conflict. Socialists, anarchists, communists, and other radicals led the opposition to the war and to military conscription. Eugene V. Debs, Kate Richards O’Hare, and other prominent socialists were arrested and jailed during the war for violating the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and other laws designed to limit protest against the war and military conscription. After the Russian Revolution in October 1917 and the newly founded Soviet Union pulled out of the war, socialism fell into further disregard. Ironically, the wartime economy in the United States required a near absolute governmental takeover and consolidation of major industries, such as the railroad system, which had long been a dream of the socialist movement. The socialist movement lost even more strength after the war during the first Red Scare (1919–1921), but the socialist cause did enjoy a revival during the Great Depression of the 1930s. —Randal Beeman

Further Reading Chace, James. 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed the Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Pope, Daniel. American Radicalism. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.

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Houston Riot (1917) In an era of race riots, the Houston Riot of 1917 stood out because of several grim phenomena. It was the first race riot in which the deaths of white people (16) outnumbered black fatalities (4). All of the black participants were soldiers, making it the first race riot in which black civilians did not take part. The army tried its black soldiers in the largest court-martial that had ever taken place. Many interpreted the Houston Riot as the beginning of a trend in which black people were less likely to endure violence without fighting back (Mennell 1999, 284). The Houston Riot involved the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry, a unit of black soldiers who had served with distinction in the American West and in the Philippines. Pressed to prepare military units for World War I, the War Department sent the 3rd Battalion to Camp Logan, near Houston, contrary to the previous practice of avoiding Jim Crow locations for black soldiers. The battalion’s mission was to guard a new camp that was under construction. A series of decisions diverted leaders and seasoned soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, creating a deficit in leadership and experience. Captain William Newman, who tried to soothe a rocky relationship between the community and the battalion by relaxing visitation rules in the camp, was lulled by a false sense of tranquility; he departed for a new duty station just before the riot (Haynes 1976, 43–46). The weaknesses of the 3rd Battalion exacerbated the soldiers’ anger and frustration when they rode the streetcars into Houston. Depending on the attitudes of the motormen and conductors enforcing Jim Crow laws, the ride could easily turn into a miserable, humiliating experience, and the officers at Camp Logan seemed powerless to change the situation (Schuler 1944, 311). The Houston police force contained notorious race-baiters, and this placed the black soldiers in a potentially hazardous situation, as they were required to leave their weapons in camp when they were off duty. Tensions reached a boiling point when the Houston police detained and beat two unarmed black soldiers who were military police (Schuler 1944, 317). The new battalion leader, Major Kneeland S. Snow, thought the trouble had blown over, and he prepared to leave the camp for a night of entertainment (Haynes 1976, 100–113). However, he noticed some soldiers behaving strangely and attempting to carry off ammunition. Major Snow ordered that all of the soldiers’

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weapons be locked up, which was ineffective and left them vulnerable to panic (Haynes 1976, 136–137). A group of about 30 armed soldiers threatened Major Snow as he traveled through the camp. Sergeant Vida Henry and a few other black organizers had plotted to march into Houston armed, to take revenge against the police. Taking advantage of the commotion over the ammunition and rifles, Henry began a march of between 100 and 150 soldiers into Houston, threatening nonparticipants with death (Haynes 1976, 115–127). However, the hastily organized march, which quickly deteriorated into a riot, was so disorganized that it deviated wildly from its goals. Of the 16 white people who were killed as a result of the riot, only 4 were policemen. Although the soldiers had not set out to kill civilians, in the ensuing chaos, they shot many at random. Most of the property damage occurred when panicked citizens looted guns from downtown stores. Armed citizens were allowed into riot areas to serve as unofficial police (Haynes 1976, 148–164). The Houston police chief had been caught unaware, going to bed early that night, while the sheriff was an hour’s drive from Houston when the riot broke out (Haynes 1976, 167–169, 176). The police department sent only a few officers at a time; thus, the soldiers faced little opposition. The police who did show up quickly retreated because they were outnumbered (Haynes 1976, 140–147). The head of the Texas National Guard asked the governor to declare martial law, which he did. The Guardsmen sealed off the riot area by 11:00 p.m., just two hours after the riot started. The black soldiers were demoralized by the deaths of civilians. Their leader, Sergeant Henry, committed suicide rather than be captured. Three other black soldiers died from the stray bullets of their own colleagues. The Texas National Guard prevented civilians from reaching Camp Logan, where soldiers were armed with Springfield rifles, the most powerful weapon available. Next, the National Guard conducted a house-to-house search in the black community, arresting anyone who had weapons, who had a military uniform, or who was suspected of sheltering rioters. There were 138 black suspects. The black community had had nothing to do with the riot, and many of the charges were dropped (Haynes 1976, 182–185). In fact, black Houstonians perceived the riot as an event that would make their lives worse, and they were correct. There was a tightening of Jim Crow laws, and in the aftermath of the riot, several black citizens were shot and killed by police (Haynes 1976, 203). The Houston chief of police, Clarence Brock, was demoted to his previous position as superintendent of parks. The most notorious race-baiter on the police force, Lee Sparks, was fired for using excessive force. The city board of inquiry

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exonerated Houston of any responsibility for the riot (Haynes 1976, 228–230). The NAACP sent an investigator who concluded that the riot was the result of friction between police and soldiers (Haynes 1976, 231–234). One hundred fifty-six soldiers suspected of participating in the riot were briefly transferred to Camp Furlong in New Mexico. They were then moved to San Antonio, in part to make it easier for Houstonians to testify at the series of three courtsmartial (Haynes 1976, 210–211). The unannounced sentencing and hanging of 13 soldiers by the first court-martial led the NAACP to call for reform. W. E. B. DuBois protested death sentences for rioters who had served their country honorably, only to be mistreated in Houston (Haynes 1976, 274, 299). The second and third courts-martial resulted in death sentences for 16 more men, but these were reviewed by President Woodrow Wilson, who let six death sentences stand while commuting the remainder of the sentences to life in prison. Many of the other participants received life sentences. Wilson stressed that the lessons of the riot had been sufficiently learned. Wilson pointed out that it was important to recognize the loyalty of black troops as a whole, to inspire further enthusiasm for military service. The lessons of the riot were absorbed in different ways. In Houston, civic leaders attempted to redefine the riot as happening because of vice and drink, a popular misconception that allowed Houstonians to avoid any soul searching. Within a month after the riot, the discourse had shifted to the point where the riot was discussed as a mass slaughter rather than as retaliation against police brutality (Schuler 1944, 335). The NAACP identified one important result of the riot. The mayor and new chief of police vigorously attempted to halt police brutality against black people (Arnesen 2003, 95). Black citizens of Houston pressed to have their own branch of the NAACP, which was started. One of the most telling results of the riot was the mass exodus of black citizens from Houston, estimated at many thousands, sometimes more than 100 in one day, by NAACP statistics (Arnesen 2003, 94–96). This emigration caused a shortage of black laborers. The city of Houston banned northern recruiters from approaching black citizens, only to find that nothing could prevent its black population from leaving. —Merrill Evans See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

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Further Reading Arnesen, Eric, ed. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Haynes, Robert V. A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Mennell, James. “African-Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917.” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 3 (1999): 275–287. Schuler, Edgar A. “The Houston Race Riot, 1917.” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 3 (1944): 300–338.

Black Soldiers Before 1900, the U.S. military had been one of the least segregated institutions, but in the early years of the 20th century, it became one of the most segregated. When the Selective Service Bill of 1917 was debated in Congress, many southerners argued against conscription of black men, fearful that large numbers of armed black servicemen might cause trouble. President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker reached a compromise: black men would be drafted, but they would serve in segregated units (Mennell 1999, 275–276, 284). Despite the segregated military units, W. E. B. DuBois and the NAACP called for black citizens to close ranks and work for the greater good during World War I, in hopes that more equality would follow after the war (Arnesen 2003, 98–99). Until the run-up to World War I, the custom had been for black troops to serve overseas or in the North or West, where they were not exposed to Jim Crow laws. When the 3rd Battalion of the black 24th Infantry was assigned to Houston, the community was uneasy. Houston had the largest black population, 30,000, of any Texas city in 1917. Some feared that black soldiers and black civilians might work together to press for better treatment (Haynes 1976, 23, 198). The conscription of black soldiers posed thorny problems about whether the races would be separated for training and fighting (Mennell 1999, 277). The military began training black officers, but they were not in place when the 3rd Battalion came to Houston with 654 black enlisted men and eight white officers. Within a few weeks of the black soldiers’ arrival, racial tensions had boiled over. The abrasive enforcement of Jim Crow laws was a sore point among the black soldiers, but assaults on black servicemen by white policemen pushed members of the 3rd Battalion into action (Haynes 1976, 215). Hastily organized, about 150 black soldiers departed Camp Logan and marched on Houston, determined to exact revenge on the white police force. In the panic that resulted when black servicemen thought a white mob was after them, and white citizens thought a black mob was after them, a total of 16 white people were killed, including four policemen. Many of the black soldiers did not wish to attack civilians, and they fell away from the rogue group. The riot was over in two hours. A total of 156 men suspected of mutiny and riot were disarmed and sent to the stockade at Camp Furlong in New Mexico (Haynes, 1976, 210). The ensuing court-martial, one of three related to the Houston Riot, was the largest that had ever taken place in the United States. Eighteen defendants were hanged, and 79 received life sentences (Haynes 1976, 253). Despite the handling of the Houston Riot, black Americans still sought out the military as the best opportunity for advancement, because of a lack of alternatives.

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The Houston Riot did not seem to have much of an effect on black enlistment, but it did influence Army policy. The War Department returned to its practice of stationing black soldiers in remote areas of the West and avoided sending them to the South (Haynes 1976, 305). —Merrill Evans

Further Reading Arnesen, Eric, ed. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Haynes, Robert V. A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Mennell, James. “African-Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917.” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 3 (1999): 275–287.

Discrimination Discrimination laid the groundwork for the Houston Riot of 1917. The black troops that were stationed in Houston had served with distinction in the Philippines and in northern and western cities of the United States, where racist policies were not an issue. Many troops and civilians of color looked at military service as a step toward greater respect that would lead black Americans to a position of equality under the law. When the black troops arrived at Camp Logan in Houston, they were jolted by Jim Crow laws compelling segregation of the races in every aspect of public life, such as business, work, shopping, housing, school attendance, and public transportation. During the Jim Crow era, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Texas enacted 27 of its own Jim Crow laws, over and above federal segregation policies. Right away, the law forcing segregation on public streetcars was a flash point, with some black servicemen ripping segregation signs off of the streetcar walls. By mid-August, the Houston police force, a haven for several notorious race-baiters, began physically assaulting black soldiers (Haynes 1976, 80–85). Some Houstonians had fiercely opposed the stationing of black troops in a city following Jim Crow, out of fear of racial unrest. However, there was an urgent need to prepare troops and equipment for World War I, and the War Department gave the sensitivities of Jim Crow a lower priority. Also, building Camp Logan brought an estimated $2 million to the local economy (Haynes 1976, 47–52). It was against Houston’s financial interest to appear as a city consumed by racial tensions (Schuler 1944, 301).

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Many black soldiers in Houston felt white officers were too narrow-minded to judge the behavior of black soldiers impartially. Therefore, black soldiers did not report instances of abuse to their officers, leading to a false aura of contentment. This lack of communication helped set the stage for racial violence (Haynes 1976, 80–85). During Houston’s two-hour riot, when a partial battalion of black soldiers set out to avenge mistreatment by white police officers, 15 white people were killed, with another victim dying later. In its investigation, the NAACP noted that the police gave arms to white citizens while confiscating weapons from black citizens. The NAACP determined that the riot was the result of conflicts with police (Arensen 2003, 96). City leaders had attempted to smear the black soldiers, a minority of whom had rioted, as being corrupted by women and alcohol in the camp (Haynes 1976, 233–234). In a series of courts-martial, 29 black soldiers were sentenced to death. A military review of the circumstances of the riot recommended that two white officers, and perhaps a third, be court-martialed for dereliction of duty. The white officers were never tried, feeding suspicion that there was a racial double standard of military justice (Haynes 1976, 304). Some historians place the Houston Riot of 1917 in the larger context of black citizens’ rising expectations of equal enforcement under the law. Under this interpretation, the riot was one of the earliest militant protests for equality (Haynes, 1976, 318; Mennell 1999, 284–285). —Merrill Evans

Further Reading Arnesen, Eric, ed. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Haynes, Robert V. A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Mennell, James. “African-Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917.” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 3 (1999): 275–287. Schuler, Edgar A. “The Houston Race Riot, 1917.” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 3 (1944): 300–338.

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Boston Police Strike (1919) The Boston Police Strike of 1919 occurred during a period of post–World War I labor unrest amid growing public fears of communism following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although members of the Boston police force had legitimate labor grievances, public opinion quickly turned against the striking policemen, and organized labor suffered major losses during the 1920s. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge took a strong stand against the strike, and his position in opposition to the unionization of public employees helped him secure the 1920 Republican vice presidential nomination as the running mate of Warren G. Harding. War readjustment produced considerable social, political, cultural, and political conflict within the United States during 1919. Suffering from a stroke, President Woodrow Wilson was unable to thwart growing disillusionment with the Versailles Treaty and League of Nations, which was eventually rejected by the Senate. The Great Migration of African Americans from the southern United States to the North in pursuit of employment contributed to racial conflict in cities such as Chicago along with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Associating the new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe with a rising tide of Bolshevism, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer unleashed a series of government raids to arrest and deport immigrants suspected of harboring radical political views. American labor was beset with postwar inflation and a flooded labor market due to returning war veterans. A series of labor strikes swept the nation, with almost one-fifth of the workforce on strike at some point during the turbulent year of 1919. Over 400,000 steel workers left their jobs, while fears of radicalism were flamed by the Seattle General strike from February 6 to 11, which began with walkouts in the city’s shipyards. When Seattle mayor Ole Hanson suppressed the strike, he was the target of several assassination attempts. In Massachusetts, textile workers at Lawrence were on strike in support of a nine-hour day and six-day week, while telephone operators and elevated train workers in Boston also engaged in work stoppages that disrupted public services. Amid this background of discontent, the Boston police force sought a redress of long-standing labor grievances. New police recruits in Boston received a salary of only two dollars a day; a figure established in 1857. Work weeks sometimes exceeded 90 hours as officers labored seven days a week with a day off every other week. Constantly on call, officers were unable to leave the city on their days off

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without written permission. Accordingly, the overworked officers were often required to sleep between their 10-hour shifts in police stations that lacked sanitary facilities for baths and toilets. In addition to these grievances regarding wages and working conditions, the ethnic divisions of Boston were evident in a Protestant Yankee political establishment that sought to control the rank-and-file policemen who were predominantly of Irish Catholic ancestry. Political authority over the Boston police department was divided. In 1885, city police were placed under the control of a police commissioner appointed by the governor, although the police budget was assigned to the city’s mayor. When neither Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis nor Mayor Andrew Jones Peters responded to their grievances, Boston police attempted to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which had bestowed charters to over 30 police unions. After an AFL charter was granted to Boston police on August 15, 1919, Commissioner Curtis responded that the police could not unionize as they were not employees, but officers of the state. Later that month, Curtis suspended 19 police officers for serving as union organizers. Mayor Peters, who was in Maine on vacation when the officers were suspended, took a more conciliatory approach, forming a commission led by prominent Boston banker James Jackson Storrow to examine police labor complaints. The commission concluded that while the Boston police, indeed, had legitimate labor grievances, it would violate the public interest for the city to negotiate with a police union. Issues of public safety ostensibly trumped collective bargaining rights. When city officials remained unresponsive, the Boston police voted overwhelmingly, by a margin of 1,134 to 2, for a strike. On the evening of September 9, approximately three-quarters of the force walked off the job at 5:45 p.m. followed by unrest in the city streets. By 8:00 that evening, a crowd of over 10,000 gathered in Scollay Square. The restive crowd, fueled by unruly sailors, engaged in public looting, gambling, and fighting throughout the night. Mayor Peters called for volunteers to be deputized and restore order. Harvard president Lawrence Lowell urged students to heed the mayor’s request. Many of the Harvard student volunteers, however, were attacked by working people supporting the police strike. With fighting in the streets and the police walkout termed by President Wilson as “a crime against civilization,” Mayor Peters also called for the deployment of the state guard, but Governor Coolidge made it clear that he would retain command of the troops. The soldiers quickly restored order, although five Boston residents were killed in clashes with the military along with another three fatalities suffered at the hand of civilian violence. National public opinion also turned against the strike, with the New York Times on September 10 asserting, “A policeman has no more right to belong to a union than a soldier or a sailor. He must be ready to obey orders, the orders of his superiors, not those of any outside body.”

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In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times embraced the Red Scare and proclaimed, “No man’s house, no man’s wife, no man’s children will be safe if the police force is unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses.” Faced with military intervention and widespread denunciation of the strike, which was associated in the public mind with communist agitation, the AFL attempted to negotiate an end to the work stoppage by insisting that the striking police be reinstated to restore order while a new contract was negotiated. Governor Coolidge took a hard stand against the union, informing AFL president Samuel Gompers, “There is no right to strike against the public safety anywhere, anytime.” Rather than being reinstated, approximately 1,100 officers were fired and replaced with a new police force drawn from a pool of unemployed World War I veterans. The new recruits, however, were provided with higher salaries, additional vacation days, and uniforms purchased by the city. The demands of the strikers were essentially met with the conditions offered to the newly constituted police force, but there was to be no unionization of the Boston police department. In wake of the negative public reaction to the Boston police strike, the AFL curtailed their organization of police unions, while union membership declined in the 1920s following the labor unrest of 1919 and postwar Red Scare. As for Coolidge, he was reelected as governor by over 124,000 votes before joining Harding on the Republican ticket in the fall of 1920. After ascending to the presidency following the death of Harding, Coolidge remarked, “No doubt it was the police strike in Boston that brought me into national prominence.” —Ron Briley See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Asinof, Eliot. 1919: America’s Loss of Innocence. New York: D. I. Fine, 1990. Ferrell, Robert H. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Greenberg, David. Calvin Coolidge. New York: Times Books, 2007. Klingaman, William K. 1919. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. McCoy, Donald R. Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Russell, Francis. A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Sobel, Robert. Coolidge: An American Enigma. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishers, 1998.

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Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933) Calvin Coolidge garnered national recognition for his strong opposition to the unionization of public employees during the Boston police strike of 1919. After breaking the strike, Coolidge secured the 1920 Republican nomination for vice president, ascending to the presidency following the death of Warren Harding in 1923. Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872, in Plymouth, Vermont, to an established New England family. His father was a local farmer who also served as a justice of the peace. After graduating from Amherst College, Coolidge opened a law practice in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he met schoolteacher Grace Ann Goodhue whom he married in 1908. The young attorney also joined the Republican Party, and in 1900 Coolidge was elected to the state House of Representatives, where he gained a reputation as a moderate Republican. After two terms in the Massachusetts house, Coolidge was elected mayor of Northampton. In 1912, Coolidge sought election to the Massachusetts state Senate, where he served until his 1916 selection as lieutenant governor. Two years later, Coolidge won the governorship of Massachusetts by a narrow margin over his Democratic opponent, Richard Long. When Boston police went on strike September 9, 1919, and unrest occurred in the city, Coolidge dispatched state guard units to Boston and fired the striking officers. Hiring a new force to replace the striking police, Coolidge told American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time” Perceived as a champion of order against postwar radicalism, Coolidge emerged as a favorite of conservative Republicans. After easily winning reelection as governor, he was tapped by party leaders to serve as Warren Harding’s running mate in the 1920 presidential contest. After ascending to the presidency following Harding’s death on August 2, 1923, the taciturn Coolidge restored a reputation for governmental honesty and integrity following the scandals of the Harding administration such as Teapot Dome. In 1924, Coolidge won reelection over Democratic candidate John W. Davis and the third-party Progressive candidacy of Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. During this full term, Coolidge enjoyed a reputation for a conservative business administration epitomized by his 1925 statement, “The chief business of the American people is business.” Coolidge favored reduced taxes and vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm bill calling for federal intervention on behalf of the nation’s farmers suffering from an agricultural depression during the 1920s. Although usually perceived as an isolationist, Coolidge supported the Kellogg-Briand Pact of

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1928, which, while failing to outlaw war, provided a foundation for international law in the post–World War II period. Coolidge declined to seek another presidential term in 1928. After retiring from the White House, Coolidge returned to his family home in Northampton, where he died suddenly from a heart attack on January 5, 1933. Coolidge acknowledged the importance of the 1919 police strike in fashioning his career, remarking, “No doubt it was the police strike in Boston that brought me into national prominence.” —Ron Briley

Further Reading Ferrell, Robert H. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Fuess, Claude M. Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. McCoy, Donald R. Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Unionization Unionization of public employees was a major issue in the Boston police strike of 1919. Seeking to redress grievances regarding low wages and poor working conditions, Boston police attempted to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Amid public concerns regarding a wave of postwar strikes and fears of radicalism, the police strike was crushed, setting back the cause of public employee unionism and labor during the 1920s. In response to the growth of industry in the post–Civil War period, making the United States the world’s leading industrial nation, labor unions were formed to address the poor wages and working conditions, including 12- to 14-hour working days, which characterized the nation’s rapid economic growth. In 1869, the Knights of Labor was formed as a mass organization of producers, including women, blacks, and unskilled workers. After considerable growth in the early 1880s, the Knights declined as some business leaders sought to divide the labor movement along racial and ethnic lines. The Knights also became associated in the public mind with radicalism after the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago. During the 1890s, the Knights were replaced by the AFL, formed in 1886, as the nation’s dominant union. The AFL was a federation of skilled trades such as carpenters, iron molders, and cigar makers, leaving out unskilled workers along with many women and blacks. The union enjoyed a stable leadership, with British immigrant Samuel Gompers serving as president of the AFL from 1886 until his

Boston Police Strike (1919)

death in 1924. Under the leadership of Gompers, the AFL eschewed political entanglements while focusing upon such issues of “bread and butter unionism” as higher wages, the right to organize, safety conditions, and the eight-hour day. While Gompers preferred the direct action of the strike or boycott to state intervention, the AFL supported President Woodrow Wilson and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), which exempted unions from antitrust legislation. The AFL split from more radical elements in the labor movement by endorsing American entry into World War I. The AFL, nevertheless, could not avoid the inflation and waves of strikes sweeping America following the war. Attempting to expand into the organization of public employees, the AFL issued over 30 charters to police unions before extending affiliation to the Boston police union in 1919. Following the condemnation of the police strike in Boston, the AFL abandoned the organizing of public employees, and union membership declined during the 1920s. During the 1930s and the Great Depression, the AFL was challenged by the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. The CIO focused upon the organization of unskilled industrial workers, and the two labor organizations combined to form the AFL-CIO in 1955. As the largest federation of unions in the United States, the AFL-CIO expanded its organization of public employees with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers, the largest union within the AFL-CIO. In 1965, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association was formed and affiliated with the AFL-CIO. —Ron Briley

Further Reading Fogelman, Robert M. Big-City Police. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Postwar Struggles, 1918–1920. New York: International Publishers, 1988. Livesay, Harold C. Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Robertson, David Brian. Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

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Red Summer (1919) “Red Summer” is a term used to describe a series of race riots that broke out across the United States in the summer and fall of 1919. Between May and October of that year, an estimated 25 race-related disturbances took place (Tuttle 1970, 23). Nearly half of them took place in cities and smaller industrial towns in northern and border states. They ranged from Charleston, South Carolina, and Longview, Texas, in May, to Chicago in July, to New York, Omaha, Nebraska, and Elaine, Arkansas, in October. Overall, more than 120 people died (Tuttle 1970, 14). The three deadliest, in terms of lives lost were in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. The riots, along with the accompanying “Red Scare,” grew out of a climate of fear and intolerance that was a product of the economic, political, and cultural mobilization that came along with the United States’ participation in World War I. Although the period of American belligerency (April 1917–November 1918) had been a time of national unity, by the spring of 1919, that unity had evaporated amid growing social tension. What remained was the wartime super patriotism and zeal, with its need of an external enemy, which was channeled into hatred of dissenters, political radicals, and racial and ethnic minorities—particularly blacks. Fueling that suspicion and hate was the reality of 1919 as a year of transition growing out of rapid demobilization that produced inflation, unemployment, and housing shortages. These dislocations fed racial tensions that found expression in the riots and lynchings that plagued American society throughout that summer and fall. Moreover, the United States’ social structure in 1919 was conducive to both anti-radical and racial violence. American society was predisposed to violence against blacks because of the country’s prevailing social mores. Almost universally, whites viewed blacks as inherently inferior and also as unable to control their sexual urges, which made them a danger to white women. In addition, working-class whites feared black competition for low-skilled and low-paying jobs. These fears were heightened by black migration from the rural South. The potential for racial conflict in this mass movement was apparent in the rising number of race riots that had occurred in cities and industrial towns in all regions of the United States since the turn of the century.

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With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, however, this steady flow of African Americans into northern industrial cities became a flood. Between 1915 and 1919, more than 450,000 blacks migrated (Tuttle 1970, 21). They were subject to forces that both drew them north and forced them from their homes in the South. The war shut off the flow of cheap immigrant labor from Europe that American business counted on to keep labor costs down. At the same time, war orders from the Allies and President Wilson’s 1916 preparedness campaign led to economic expansion and a tightening of the labor market. These trends induced industrial leaders to open manufacturing jobs to black workers for the first time. Advertisements in northern black newspapers and labor recruiters who fanned out throughout the rural South made sure that blacks were aware of these opportunities. The attractions of moving north were reinforced by events driving southern blacks from their traditional homes. Many left out of fear and anger over violence by southern whites against blacks that, combined with disenfranchisement and segregation, kept blacks in a state of permanent servitude in a white supremacist society. In addition, the great Mississippi Flood of 1916 forced thousands of sharecroppers off their lands in the Delta. Southern white landowners, concerned over the effect of the massive exodus on the security of their labor pool, often resorted to violence and duplicitous economic measures to keep blacks in their place, with only mixed results. Whatever their reasons for leaving, the biggest consideration for leaving was wages. Migrants moving north could easily make more money, even as unskilled workers, than they could in any occupation in the South. On average, hourly pay in the South was only three-quarters of that in the North (Marks 1985, 152). The North was hardly the paradise they envisioned. They found crowded conditions made worse by housing discrimination, inadequate schools, overloaded public transportation, and intense competition from whites for jobs and political influence. Whites viewed blacks, with their differing appearance and behavior patterns, as alien and threatening. Blacks were scapegoated for everything from rising crime to breakdowns in city services. Most of all, whites feared that blacks would undermine their social and economic status. For their part, black men and women, wherever they lived, entered the postwar period with aspirations for greater social and political equality as well as wider economic opportunities. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans had served in the armed forces and had worked in war industries at home. They expected recognition for their service. Their ambitions collided with a general white determination to keep them at the bottom of the nation’s socioeconomic structure. While wartime patriotism and mobilization kept conflict to a minimum, signs of racial anxiety and the potential for violence were evident throughout the country. There was a threshold of tension, which, when exceeded, made racial violence

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almost inevitable. All it took was a precipitating incident and the lack of adequate law enforcement to restrain the rioters. In 1919, these tensions repeatedly coalesced in an unprecedented outbreak of racial violence. The East St. Louis, Illinois, outbreak of July 1917 was a harbinger of the trouble to come. East St. Louis had all the ingredients—corrupt city politicians, labor violence, and manufacturers who sought to play black and white workers off against each other. White labor unions were striking for higher pay in the city’s retail stores and public transportation. Both the city’s political leaders and manufacturers were courting black workers, luring them north to replace striking whites. Blacks were also being blamed for rising crime rates. On July 2, whites, infuriated by reports that local businesses were bringing in black strikebreakers on special trains, rampaged through black neighborhoods. Over the ensuing two days, rioters indiscriminately attacked blacks with either firearms, clubs, or baseball bats and burned businesses and homes. A grand jury later estimated that 245 buildings had been burned and over 100 people (mostly black) had been killed (Barnes 2008, 193). Another wartime sign of heightening racial tensions was the upswing in the frequency of lynchings in 1917 and 1918. In 1917, 44 lynchings were reported; in 1918, 64 more (Hagedorn 2007, 13). Most of these incidents occurred in the South and were connected with the maintenance of white supremacy and the social and economic status quo. A smaller number that occurred in the Midwest or the Far West grew out of wartime anti-German hysteria and fear of labor unrest and radical union organizers growing out of the reaction to the Russian Revolution. The Armistice of November 1918 began the process by which these pent-up resentments repeatedly exploded into racial violence in 1919. Precipitate demobilization, carried out with little thought to the consequences, added fuel to racial and class divisions throughout the country. The U.S. Army was broken up, wartime price and production controls were terminated, and entire industries either were shut down or drastically curtailed production while converting back to production for civilian consumption. By July 1919, the army had discharged 2,600,000 men, thus increasing the labor surplus at a time of rising unemployment. Conflicts between discharged white soldiers seeking jobs and black soldiers demanding equality for their service were to be a common occurrence in the first year of the peace. Social and economic conditions were thus conducive to the wave of racial violence that swept the United States in the summer of 1919. The first outbreak occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 10, after an altercation between an African American male and a white sailor that resulted in the fatal wounding of the black man by a gunshot. Hundreds of sailors on liberty in Charleston descended on the city’s black district. Two blacks died in the violence, and 17 more

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were injured. Seven sailors and a policeman were also injured (Tuttle 1970, 23). On June 16, a white mob rampaged through through the black neighborhoods in Longview, Texas, after reports circulated that a black male had been discovered in a white woman’s bedroom. Tensions between the white and black communities had been ratcheted up by black efforts to organize cooperative stores to compete with local white merchants and by attempts by black farmers to circumvent local white brokers by selling their produce to directly to buyers in Galveston. The third major race riot of 1919 broke out in Washington, D.C., amid lurid rumors fanned by the local press that black rapists had been assaulting white women. These inflammatory reports (which were unsubstantiated) generated widespread anger among whites, particularly white servicemen stationed near the Capitol. On July 20, Washington erupted. Bands of soldiers, sailors, and marines roamed through the city attacking any black they encountered. When the Washington police proved unable or unwilling to control the rioters, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker ordered 2,000 regular troops into the city. Their presence, combined with the arrival of a weather front that generated showers and thunderstorms on July 22, brought the violence to a halt. The riot left six dead and more than 100 injured (Tuttle 1970, 30). The May and June disorders paled, however, in comparison to the Chicago riot of late July. Racial tensions in Chicago had been high for decades before the war. White gangs, who referred to themselves as “athletic clubs,” consisted of young men in their teens and early 20s and spent years terrorizing blacks. Many of them, nearly as poor as their targets, were of Irish descent. The Chicago police, many of whose members came from the same neighborhoods and the same social and ethnic background, sympathized with the “athletic clubs” and did little to restrain them. They were intensely territorial going so far as to claim stretches of Lake Michigan beachfront as their own. These discontented whites were augmented in 1919 by returning white servicemen and unemployed workers who blamed blacks for the shortage of jobs. Throughout the spring and early summer, they had been anticipating a riot. Indeed, many sought to instigate one themselves. Blacks, on their part, felt mounting anger over white violence toward their community. Many, including a number of discharged soldiers, armed themselves to defend their neighborhoods. The precipitating incident took place on Sunday afternoon, July 27, on a South Side beach when four young black men on a raft on the lake inadvertently floated into white territory. At around the same time, five young blacks on the beach strolled close to the white boundary, triggering a barrage of curses, stones, and bricks. Blacks, in turn retaliated. The arrival of the police only added fuel to the fire. They arrested several blacks but no whites, further angering other African Americans. Shots were fired, killing one white policeman and a black man. The race war that so many had feared or anticipated had begun.

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By the next morning, white gangs were roaming through black neighborhoods near the Chicago Stockyards. In this area where blacks and whites worked together and lived in close proximity to one another, there was a constant potential for violence. Streetcar transit points were particularly dangerous. Gangs of whites dragged blacks off the streetcars and beat them savagely. The patterns established on July 27 and 28 repeated themselves at a steadily declining rate over the next week. Whites invaded black areas, indiscriminately shooting at and beating any blacks they saw. Blacks often used violence in selfdefense, but these instances only inflamed whites. Rain and the arrival of Illinois National Guardsmen combined to slow down the rioters and by August 1, the rioting had ceased. Over five days, 38 men had died (23 black and 15 white) and 537 men, women, and children (342 of whom were black) had been injured (Hagedorn 2007, 316). Hundreds of homes and businesses, most of them owned by blacks, had been burned or vandalized. What made the Chicago riot unique, apart from the scale of the destruction and the number of deaths, was that it was the first to have occurred in a large northern industrial city. In addition, Chicago was different because of the organized nature of the violence. Organized white gangs of hoodlums had targeted specific black neighborhoods, and black resistance was far more extensive and organized than in any other riot. The Chicago riot came closest of all the urban riots of that summer to a pitched racial battle. Most of the outbreaks following the Chicago riot were not as organized or destructive but had fundamentally the same cause—postwar economic dislocations that fed tensions between blacks and whites. The most serious of these northern outbreaks occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, in September, when a mob lynched a black man accused of raping a white woman. When the mayor and the police tried to intervene to stop it, the mob turned on them and burned the city jail to the ground. Federal troops from Iowa, Kansas, and North Dakota finally quelled the violence. The worst of the Red Summer racial incidents did not occur in the North, but in the vicinity of Elaine, Arkansas, when armed bands of whites engaged in a wholesale massacre of blacks. It made clear how far southern whites and their leadership were willing to go to maintain white supremacy and how dangerous it was for blacks to organize to assert their rights. White anger and anxiety in the Mississippi Delta region had been growing all spring and summer because of the black exodus to the North over the previous two years. Reports of racial and labor violence in the North contributed to their concern. They were all too willing to believe reports of the involvement of pro-Bolshevik and radical agitators in these disorders. The return of large numbers of black soldiers from overseas was a focal point of white anxiety. There were rumors that French women were writing love letters to

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blacks urging them to demand equality. These lurid reports also fed white fears that blacks were planning an insurrection aimed at massacring whites. African American soldiers wearing their uniforms were frequently targets of harassment, threats, and beatings. Particularly alarming for the leaders of the white economic and political establishment were reports that black sharecroppers, frustrated over not getting a fair price for their cotton, were organizing a union to bargain for a larger percentage of the cotton revenue. These organizing efforts became the flash point from which the violence in the Arkansas Delta grew. On September 30, black sharecroppers met in a church near Hoop Spur, Arkansas, near Elaine, to discuss the possibilities of seeking legal assistance to sue white landowners, merchants, and mill owners to gain a larger share of the profits from the cotton crop. A group of whites arrived at the church and tried to break up the meeting. In the resulting altercation, shots were fired and one white was killed. The white reaction was one of unprecedented savagery as whites at virtually every social level in eastern Arkansas panicked at the prospect of a black conspiracy to commit mass murder. Over the ensuing week, whites, including many trucked in from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee and federal troops sent from Fort Pike, killed anywhere from 100 to 800 blacks; five whites died (Hagedorn 2007, 379; Whitaker 2008, 327–329). Even after the killing subsided, hundreds of blacks remained in hiding. Incredibly, not a single white was ever prosecuted or even investigated in connection for the Elaine Massacre. Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) investigated the massacre at great personal risk and identified a number of whites who were involved, but his report was received with derision and anger by whites in Arkansas. White authorities in Elaine engaged in mass arrests of blacks and brought 73 of them to trial in November 1919. Of these, 12 were sentenced to death for conspiring to instigate an uprising and for murder. The others were sentenced to life imprisonment (Whitaker 2008, 180–184). The result of the Elaine incident reflected a pattern in the response to the violence of the summer of 1919. In seeking to explain the causes for the Red Summer riots, the authorities initially examined those black persons involved. If blacks had resisted, white investigators associated them with radical agitators sympathetic to the Russian Bolsheviks. This was the case in the established authorities’ reaction in Elaine and in other disorders in the South. If blacks had not fought back or had been overwhelmed, authorities blamed labor agitators or foreign Communist agents. Most of the investigations were not thorough and were colored by the prejudices and social outlook of the local authorities. Most law enforcement officials viewed increased repression of blacks as the answer for preventing more violence,

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and the violence of 1919 led to calls for more money to hire more police. An exception to this pattern was the investigation of the Chicago riot by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which used tools developed by the sociology department at the University of Chicago to provide analyses of the conditions that had caused the outbreak. The violence of the summer of 1919 gradually abated. Although sporadic rioting occurred during the interwar period (particularly the Tulsa Riot of 1921), there were no further widespread disorders until the 1960s. The conspiracy theories surrounding the disorders at the time were never proven, and the prevailing analysis is that a climate of economic dislocation and social unrest caused the violence. The most important consequence of the Red Summer of 1919 was the galvanizing of the civil rights movement. One of the earliest legal victories for the NAACP grew out of the Elaine, Arkansas, tragedy, when the Supreme Court in Moore v. Dempsey overturned the convictions of all 73 black defendants in the Elaine case because of how their trials had been conducted. The result was an extension of the authority of the federal courts to oversee the states’ treatment of defendants’ rights and the application of the due process clause as a regulator of state criminal procedures. Although the civil rights revolution did not come to full fruition until the 1950s and 1960s, the violence of the World War I era strengthened the arguments of groups such as the NAACP and their white liberal allies and of individuals such as Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois for legislation to protect blacks and other minorities and furthering the education of Americans of the need to ensure black social, economic, and political equality. It would take 40 years, but the seeds of the 1960s civil rights revolution were planted in the mob violence of 1919. —Walter F. Bell See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Barnes, Harper. Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker & Company, 2008. Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Marks, Carole. “Black Workers and the Great Migration North.” Phylon 46, no. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1985): 148–161.

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Red Summer (1919) Tuttle, William M., Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Voogd, Jan. “Red Summer of 1919.” In Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Knight. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. History Reference Online at http://www.historyreferenceonline.abc-clio.com. Whitaker, Robert. On the Laps of the Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Great Migration The phrase Great Migration refers to the movement of African Americans from the rural areas of the southern United States to the industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1960. Some scholars divide the Great Migration into two phases—the First Great Migration (1910–1930) and the Second Great Migration (1940–1970)—but both followed similar patterns. The sources of the movement were the desire among blacks for more freedom from the oppressive conditions they faced in the Jim Crow South as well as economic opportunities in northern cities. In addition, they found themselves being pushed out of their homes in the South by economic and environmental changes. African Americans had been moving to cities—both southern industrial centers such as Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Norfolk, Virginia; and northern industrial centers—since the Civil War. The migration north accelerated in the 1880s and 1890s as southern states enacted laws that virtually stripped blacks of the rights they had gained during Reconstruction and unleashed a wave of violence and intimidation against blacks aimed at enforcing white supremacy. Nevertheless, in 1910, over 60 percent of the black population in the United States was employed in southern agriculture, mostly as sharecroppers on large cotton farms, and 18 percent worked as domestic servants (Marks 1985, 150). The steady movement of African Americans to the North accelerated with the outbreak of war in Europe. The onset of World War I shut off the flow of immigration, thus denying northern industries a pool of cheap immigrant labor they could draw on to maintain a labor market surplus. At the same time, war orders from the European belligerents and President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 preparedness campaign stimulated higher demand for labor. In this context, northern industry turned to black labor. To an extent unknown before the war, industrial employers began to experiment with hiring blacks into positions that had previously been closed to them. At the same time, conditions in the South served to push many blacks into leaving the South. A series of severe floods in 1916 forced thousands of sharecroppers from their farms. Disenfranchisement, segregation, and the continuing threat of violence—particularly an increase in the frequency of lynchings—also worked as inducements for blacks to leave. The biggest consideration, however, was wages. Migrants moving north could easily make more money, even as unskilled laborers, than they could in any occupation in the South. On average, hourly pay in the South was only three-quarters of those in the North (Marks 1985, 152). Whatever their reasons for leaving, between 1915 and 1920, an estimated 400,000 African Americans left the South for northern cities (Barnes 2008, 65). They concentrated in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio,

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Typesetters work at their keyboards at the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper founded in Chicago in 1905. The Defender was the most influential African American newspaper in the United States during the early and mid-20th century and played a major role in the migration of African Americans from the South to the North. (Library of Congress)

in the Midwest and New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh in the East. The influx of black migrants into northern cities put a strain on housing and city services. The greatest strain, however, was on race relations between the burgeoning black communities and working-class ethnic whites with whom they competed for jobs. White fears of black competition exploded into violence that became more common in 1919 as large numbers of returning black and white servicemen put even more pressure on the depressed. These tensions culminated in the Chicago riot of July 1919. The Great Migration continued in the 1920s driven by increased mechanization of southern agriculture and continuing violence and oppression in the Jim Crow South. Although it slowed during the Depression decade of the 1930s, the Migration surged again during and after World War II, permanently altering the political, social, and demographic landscape in the United States. —Walter F. Bell

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Further Reading Barnes, Harper. Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker & Company, 2008. Marks, Carole. “Black Workers and the Great Migration North.” Phylon 46, no. 2 (2nd Quarter 1985): 148–161. Trotter, Joe William, Jr., ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Lynching Lynching is the killing of individuals by mobs acting outside the law. It was common in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lynching often occurred on the western frontier or in newly settled areas, where social conflict prevailed and where legal resources were remote or distrusted by members of the community. It became widely associated with the enforcement of white supremacy in the southern United States after the American Civil War when the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations, used lynching and other forms of violence to keep African Americans from voting or organizing against the white power structure. Lynching, however, was not confined to the South, nor was it always racially motivated. It usually occurred during times of change and social unrest. The Progressive Era and World War I was an unsettled period of social conflict. As such, the conditions were conducive for frequent lynching incidents. During the years of American belligerency against Germany (1917–1918), the number of lynching incidents shot up as the stresses of wartime change aggravated social and racial divisions. These tensions were further inflamed by anti-radical hysteria growing out of the Russian Revolution and wartime anti-German and anti-ethnic feeling. Mobs frequently harassed and often killed German American citizens and their sympathizers. Vigilantes in the western states regularly attacked striking workers and labor organizers, especially those affiliated with the International Workers of the World (IWW). Mob violence and lynchings in the wartime and early postwar periods occurred most frequently, however, in the South and were connected with the maintenance of white supremacy and the social and economic status quo. Tensions revolved around African Americans attempting either to organize themselves to demand economic justice and political equality or to leave the oppressive conditions in the rural South and migrate north to take jobs in wartime industries. White southern planters and mill owners, seeking to maintain a cheap and docile workforce, were infuriated by northern newspapers that advertised the availability more jobs and economic freedom outside the South. In 1917, 44 blacks had been lynched, mostly in southern locations. In 1918, 64 more had died (Hagedorn 2007, 13).

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Red Summer (1919) Two African American men, the victims of a lynching, hang from the limbs of a tree in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. (Library of Congress)

The incidence of lynching shot up after the Armistice of November 1918. Between November 1918 and June 1919, there were 28 reported lynchings. Nearly half of these incidents involved allegations of sexual assault by black men against white women. Discharged African American soldiers were a frequent target because of fears that they would use their record of service in the war to demand equality. The reaction of the federal government to this mob violence was mixed. The Wilson administration was indifferent to lynching as was most of the American public. Despite appeals from prominent blacks and longtime agitation from prominent northern Progressives for federal antilynching legislation, Wilson took no action. In the face of growing racial violence in the South, many blacks fled to northern cities, particularly Chicago, where the influx of so many poor migrants fed racial tensions that contributed to racial violence in the North. The rash of lynchings and other attacks on African Americans that were part of the violence of 1919 pointed up the lack of legal protections for racial minorities and political dissenters in the United States. In the years after World War I, these incidents gave ammunition to supporters of federal antilynching laws—individuals such as Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Robert Wagner and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Calls for legal equality and passage of antilynching laws intensified. Lynching virtually ended in the West, Midwest, and Northeast, but the practice continued in the South, although at a steadily declining rate, until after World War II. —Walter F. Bell

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Further Reading Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Pfeifer, Michael J. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Race Riots Race riots are communal disorders in which mobs, incited by resentment or fear of another racial or ethnic group they view as alien or threatening, carry out violent acts against property, institutions, or individuals associated with that group. In the United States, race riots were a frequent occurrence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most often the targets were African American neighborhoods in industrial cities where racial tensions were high because of the influx of large numbers of blacks and the competition between them and working-class whites for housing and jobs. They happened with growing frequency in the years during and immediately following World War I, a time of intense racial and class conflict. In almost every instance, whites were the aggressors. Riots generated by racial and ethnic conflicts were hardly new. Bloody and destructive race riots targeting blacks occurred before the Civil War in Philadelphia (1834) and Cincinnati (1841).The Draft Riot that took place in New York City in July 1863 at the height of the Civil War resulted from resentment of poor whites, particularly Irish immigrants, against conscription into the Union Army and what they perceived as preferential treatment of blacks. The rioters killed more than 100 black men, women, and children. The seeds of the racial violence of the Progressive Era were sown as many blacks, frustrated over the growing racial oppression by whites in the South in the 1890s, left the rural South for what they hoped was more freedom and a better life. They concentrated in Chicago, St. Louis, and smaller industrial centers in the Midwest and upper South. They encountered conflicts between large corporations and white ethnic immigrant workers seeking to organize into unions and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. In the depressed economic conditions of the 1890s and early 1900s, corrupt local politicians and business leaders played blacks and whites off against each other. Poverty and economic insecurity among lower-class whites who were unemployed and desperate bred intense anger and resentment. White racist politicians—abetted by propaganda that often focused on allegations of black sexual assaults on white women—made sure that anger was directed downward against blacks rather than against the political and economic establishment.

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The ensuing racial disorders followed a similar pattern. They broke out in industrial centers that had experienced large influxes of blacks from the South. Riots occurred in Springfield, Illinois (1908), Evansville, Indiana (1903), and Springfield, Ohio (1904 and 1906). The worst outbreak happened in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906. Race riots reached their height during the World War I era during the period of American participation in 1917 and 1918. Mobilization accelerated economic and social trends, including black migration and urbanization, that aggravated already class and racial divisions. These tensions exploded into violence in East St. Louis, Illinois, in July 1917 after whites, infuriated by reports that local businesses were bringing in blacks to depress the labor market, stormed through black areas of the city burning hundreds of buildings and killing 100 people, almost all of them black. The immediate postwar period also saw numerous outbreaks of racial violence as the economy contracted and returning servicemen further saturated the labor market. The worst of these riots took place in Chicago in late July 1919. Over four days, more that 20 blacks were killed and nearly 400 injured. The violence of the first two decades of the 20th century helped to galvanize a growing civil rights movement in the United States. For many Americans, the mob violence of the period pointed up the need for an extra effort to protect the civil rights of African Americans. The indifference of the local white authorities led to increasing calls for federal legislation to safeguard black rights and liberties. It would take 40 years, but the seeds for the 1960s civil rights revolution were planted in the mob violence of the early 20th century. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Barnes, Harper. Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker & Company, 2008. Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Excerpt from the Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riots (1920) Reproduced below is an excerpt from one of several reports by the Cook County Coroner’s Office on the causes and results of a series of race riots that occurred in Chicago in 1917, 1918, and 1919. The passage given here is from the report of the Coroner’s Jury investigating the particularly serious riot of the "Red Summer" of July and August 1919. The jury finds the main causes of the riot to be criminal activity on the part of both whites and African Americans as well as, to a lesser extent, the friction created by a greater mixing of the races resulting from a great influx of African Americans from the South, who came north during the war seeking work.

Red Summer (1919) The true facts regarding the race riots in the City of Chicago in July and August, 1919, should be presented to set at rest the many grossly exaggerated tales and rumors and the misrepresentations which have been spread broadcast throughout the City of Chicago and the United States. The number of lives lost, the manner of losing the same, the causes of the riots, and all known facts attending the dark and frightful days beginning July 27, 1919, are matters of vital interest to all orderly citizens who live and work in Chicago and for Chicago. That these facts may become known and studied and analyzed is the purpose of this report. Five days of terrible heat and passion let loose cost the people of Chicago thirty-eight lives, wounded and maimed several hundred, destroyed property of untold value, filled thousands with awful fright, blemished the good name of our City, and left in its wake fear and apprehension for the future. Race feeling and distrust reaches far back into the history of the past. While new, perhaps, to Chicago, other cities and communities have tasted of its frightfulness, and yet race antagonism in itself rarely gets beyond bound and control. The real danger lies with the criminal and hoodlum element, white and colored, who are quick to take advantage of any incipient race riot conditions to spread the firebrands of disorder, thieving, arson, lust and murder—and under the cover of large numbers, to give full sway to cowardly animal and criminal instincts. The riot jury was impaneled July 28, 1919, and our investigations and inquiry have proceeded continuously through one form and another, to the present time. We have visited hospitals, undertakers, and scenes of the rioting, received statements from the relatives and friends of the victims, attended the exhumation of one body at Lincoln Cemetery for fuller confirmation as to the course of the bullet wound; have held seventy day sessions and twenty night sessions on inquest work, examining approximately four hundred and fifty witnesses, the testimony taken amounting to fifty-five hundred and eighty-four folio pages, typewritten. Twenty men were held to the Grand Jury for murder or manslaughter, one held to court martial for murder. There were seven cases of justifiable homicide. Recommendation that unknown rioters be apprehended and punished was made in eighteen cases. One Police Officer was killed, three men were killed by Police Officers. One case—that of Joseph Lovings, a colored man—is still under investigation. Homicides, due to the riots, occurred in widely separated localities, on the south, southwest and west sides of the city. Particularly atrocious and cruel murder was committed on the persons of Morris Parel, Walter Parejko, Eugene Temple, David Marcus, Morris Lazzeroni and George L. Wilkins (white men), and Robert Williams, B.F. Hardy, John Mills, William H. Lozier, Oscar Lozier, Louis Taylor, Paul Hardwick and Joseph Lovings (colored men). . . . We have no thought of, or desire, to criticize any of the city officials, the State’s Attorney or the Police Department. In the grave emergency and riot conditions, we believe they all did their duty, as we conscientiously tried to do ours; nor do we believe that politics, so-called, or catering to the white or colored vote, had much if anything to do with the production of race rioting. The riots began on the afternoon of July 27, 1919, when Eugene Williams, a colored boy, was drowned at the 29th street bathing beach, having been prevented from landing

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Red Summer (1919) by stones thrown by a mob of white men and boys. Prior to that afternoon, this beach had been used exclusively by white people. The colored people contested the right of the white people thereto, and a pitched battle was fought with stones thrown between two mobs, the drowning of Williams being the result. The report of his death spread with great rapidity through the colored residence district, and the report was general that he had been stoned to death in the water. Evidence disclosed that no stones struck the boy, that an attempt was made to stone him and stones were thrown in his direction. He was drowned—probably by reason of exhaustion due to the inability to land. However, the reports caused a white heat of passion and desire for reprisal among a large proportion of the colored population, and the riot spread. July 27, 2 men were killed or sustained injuries causing death. July 28, 17 men were killed or sustained injuries causing death. July 29, 11 men were killed or sustained injuries causing death. July 30, 5 men were killed or sustained injuries causing death. July 31, 1 man was killed or sustained injuries causing death. One George R. Fleming, white, was slain by a soldier, white, August 5th. By August the 1st, the riots had subsided, the situation being well under control of the police and the soldiery, normal conditions being in part restored. Incomplete police reports covering the five days of the rioting, show that one police officer was killed and thirty-nine wounded or injured; twenty-three colored men and fourteen white men killed; two hundred and ninety-one white and colored citizens wounded or injured. We have no report of white or colored women outraged and but few women were mistreated during the rioting. No evidence of drunkenness was presented. To review the circumstances of all the thirty-eight homicides would be tiresome to the reader and serve no good purpose. As illustrating all of them we will review briefly the cases of Eugene Temple, a white man, and Joseph Lovings, a colored man. All verdicts rendered are on record in the Coroner’s office. Eugene Temple, a reputable citizen and proprietor of the Columbia Laundry, located at 3642 South State Street, steeped from the doorway of his place of business, accompanied by his wife and another lady, and was thus upon the sidewalk about to enter his automobile. He was leisurely approached by three colored men, who grabbed him, one on either side, at his back. While securely held by two of the men, the third man lifted up Mr. Temple’s left arm and plunged a sharp and long knife, evidently a stiletto, through his heart. Then they as leisurely walked away, leaving their victim dead upon the sidewalk. Apparently, this was a cold blooded, calculated murder, without the element of race passion. There was evidence that some attempt had been made to rob him at the same time. These men have not been apprehended and presumably are walking the streets of Chicago, a constant and continual menace. The slaying of Joseph Lovings, colored, was an atrocious, savage crime. He, a defenseless man, caught like a rat in a trap, by a surrounding mob, was dragged from his place of concealment and refuge, beaten, skull fractured, and shot fourteen times—left lying a

Red Summer (1919) bruised and broken semblance of a man, on the grass plot in front of a city home in the heart of the west side. This crime has not a single redeeming feature. It particularly illustrates the savage animal nature of a mob. To hunt down, apprehend and punish the dastardly criminals who killed this man, is the duty, not alone of the Police Department, but of every citizen who values the security of life. No wonder that reports of this crime grew to large proportions as it spread. It was published by the press of this and other large cities that he had been sprayed with gasoline and burned alive. Comments were made in Congress at Washington regarding the rumor. It gives us satisfaction to say that this rumor, from our investigation, is false and unsubstantiated—but the subtraction of this rumor mitigates the crime but a very slight degree. Persistent reports have been circulated that the total number of deaths far exceeded thirty-eight. Intelligent citizens have approached the Coroner and members of this jury and gave their opinion that the number of deaths was far in excess of the number found. These reports were freely handed about and believe. We have made a thorough investigation to verify or disprove these reports. Bubbly Creek has been the favorite cemetery for the undiscovered dead, and our inquiry has been partly directed to that stream. In our inquiry we have been assisted by the Stock Yard officials and workers, by adjacent property owners and residents, by private detective bureaus, the Police Department, Department of Health, State’s Attorney’s Office, by observing and intelligent colored citizens, and by other agencies, and we are firmly of the opinion that these reports, so widely circulated, are erroneous, misleading and without foundation in fact, the race riot victims numbering thirty-eight, and no more, nor are there any colored citizens reported to us as missing. It has been said that the importation of colored labor from the South, congesting the south side residence district, caused ill feeling and friction, and was one of the causes of the rioting. The labor situation was a war condition; at the same time taking thousands of young men from the factory and shop for war service. Labor was needed, and employers turned to the South as their source of supply. Neither the Government, the employer nor the southern laborer is to be criticized for that condition. And while some friction was produced, we doubt very much whether it was in any considerable measure productive of the rioting. Nevertheless, it was unfortunate that negroes in large numbers, and unacquainted with northern ways, were induced to come or did come to the City of Chicago without adequate steps being taken to properly house and care for them. Naturally they gathered in the south division, where others of their race were to be found, and where there was congestion, abominable housing, and bad sanitary conditions. This, with the inadequate transportation facilities, notably in the rush hour, which resulted daily in the mixing of white and colored in the overcrowded street cars and elevated trains, tending to friction and bad feeling, can be readily understood. These conditions can and should be changed. We believe that a representative committee of white and colored people, working together, could suggest and bring about the necessary and advisable changes. The movement of the southern negro to the North, and mainly to the large northern cities, has brought the race problem to the North. It is serious indeed, but not

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Red Summer (1919) necessarily a great danger, unless we allow it to become so. The problem is new to the North and must be solved by Northern people. This problem is so large and entails such serious consequences that this jury feels itself powerless to do more than suggest its seriousness to the civilized thinking people of the North, both white and colored, in the hope that the initiative may be taken in the solution of the race problem, which is here now and here to stay. In our investigations, numerous visits were made to the home district of the colored population, and we observed the housing conditions of which we had heard much. Overcrowded and unmistakably bad living conditions were found, and we were impressed with the fact that the colored people justifiably for cleanliness and health had moved in considerable numbers to the east of Michigan Avenue and to the south of 39th Street, encroaching on the residence districts of the white people. The streets mentioned have been the boundaries voluntarily accepted by the colored population to within the past few years. The inrush of colored labor from the South caused congestion and resulted in a movement of considerable extent into the white neighborhoods where homes were purchased or leased. Unquestionably this movement was encouraged by unscrupulous dealers in real estate, both white and colored, who were interested solely in the profits to be derived. In our pinion the situation described was not a vital or material cause of the riot, but the rioting certainly awakened the public to the changing conditions of the south side residence district, and thoughtful men must consider that unless some remedy is found and applied, the situation is fruitful of unsettled and in harmonious relations in the future. Source: Cook County (IL), Coroner, The Race Riots: Biennial Report 1918–1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August, 1919, Whereby Fifteen White Men and Twenty-three Colored Men Lost Their Lives and Several Hundred Were Injured (Chicago, 1920), 19–22.

Excerpts from the “Anti-Lynching” Hearings Held before the House Judiciary Committee (1920) Reproduced below are excerpts of testimony given before the House Judiciary Committee in January 1920. Responding to the many serious race riots that had erupted over the previous three years, and especially during the “Red Summer” of 1919, the committee heard testimony regarding the need for antilynching legislation to protect African Americans from the growing racist violence being offered them throughout the country. The hearings accompanied the House’s consideration of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was introduced into the House in 1918 by Congressman Leonidas Dyer, a Republican from a heavily black district in St. Louis. Although passed by the House in January 1922, the Dyer bill, which made participation in a lynch mob a federal crime, was defeated in the Senate shortly thereafter. No federal antilynching legislation was ever passed by Congress.

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Statement of Mr. Neval H. Thomas Mr. Thomas: In the first place, I am representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Locally we have 7,000 members whom I am representing, and nationally we have 100,000 members in 310 branches, which are organized to oppose just such a recommendation as has been presented here to-day. I do not know where this man comes from— Mr. Dyer: He says he comes from St. Louis. How long have you lived in St. Louis, Mr. Madden? Mr. Madden: About two years: I came there from Oklahoma. Mr. Dyer: I thought so. Mr. Thomas: I am acquainted with the leaders of thought among colored people all over this country, and I never even heard of this man before. He represents nothing but himself. Beware of any Negro who comes recommending a segregation scheme to you: he is simply seeking to be head of the group if we are segregated. When Woodrow Wilson became President, there were some venal Negro politicians who asked him to segregate the colored clerks in one department, and at the same time everyone presented an application for the leadership of that department; so pay no attention to them. The masses of the colored people are unalterably opposed to segregation. Civilization has been spread and prejudices softened by the contact of peoples with each other. Even President Wilson is on record as saying that you can not hate a man whom you know, although he has segregated men to keep them from knowing, so that they can hate. We recognize, in the first place that every man is lord of his castle; complete master of his own home. We seek no association, but cooperation with the white people of this country in the up-building of the things which belong to us all. When we go upon a common carrier, we are not seeking contact with the other people, we simply want to travel from place to place; we do not even expect another passenger to say “Good morning” to us. This is an ordinary civil right. The common carrier, like all other institutions, belongs to all of us alike. They are supported by our taxes, protected by the police power of our State, and every one is a taxpayer because the ultimate consumer is the taxpayer. The owner of property does not pay the taxes. He charges enough rent to make a profitable return on his investment, plus the insurance, water rent, and all other expenses, and the tenant pays it. The owner of the property is simple a messenger through whom the tenant sends his taxes to the tax gatherer. Therefore, we have equal rights to all public places, such as the common carrier, the theaters, restaurants, and hotels, and we will never cease to clamor for our rights until we gain admission. What we

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Red Summer (1919) want the Congress to do, and also the Department of Justice, is to enforce the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. Even the thirteenth amendment, forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude, is violated in the Southern States by the infamous system of peonage. We demand the ballot, for in a Government where men vote the voter is king, and the disfranchised man is the victim of the man who does vote. We demand the abolition of the infamous “JimCrow” car, which was simply made to insult us. We demand admission to all public places, in fact, we demand equality of treatment everywhere, and equality before the law. Again, I say that segregation keeps men apart and is opposed to all sound principles of Government. My own experience in this country and Europe with white people has taught me how segregation works against my people. I have met people in this country and in Europe who were surprised that I could write; that I knew history; that I knew what I was traveling for; could explain a painting or a piece of sculpture or a great work of architecture. They had lived side by side with me for all these years, the segregation had kept them from knowing me. Suppose there were no prejudices in this country, the races would mingle and discover their common humanity, and learn that color is the least of differences among men, and we would have no resulting friction. There are people living right in Boston who have gone over Boston Common, the most historic park in this country, where there is a statue of Crispus Attucks, a Negro, the first to shed his blood in the American Revolution. Nearby is the famous Robert Gould Shaw statue, dedicated to the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth regiments of Negroes in the Civil War, who died like men at Fort Pillow for the preservation of the Union, and yet have never looked up to find how much the colored men of this country have done for it. The system of segregation prevents that mutual interest that should exist between the races; we are all opposed to segregation. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is the largest institution among the Negroes, with 700,000 members. This church issued a declaration of 14 points, the number of which is in imitation on the President’s 14 points, and the strongest point in it is a declaration against segregation. This church supports 24 institutions in the South and collects from the pockets of washerwomen $350,000 every year for the education of the Negro youth, and this is in addition to the expense to which colored people are put for education of their own in the South because all the people are taxpayers. As this great church is against segregation, so are the Baptists and other denominations. The great organization for which I am talking to-day is opposed to it. We are all opposed to it, and this man is simply seeking his own personal gain. The gentleman from Oklahoma asked if we were willing to leave this country and said he believed

Red Summer (1919) three-fourths of us would not leave. No. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand would not leave. This man has falsely stated that this is a white man’s country. He knows nothing of the history of his people. The Negro came here when the white man did, and he has contributed to the upbuilding of this country by this labor, by his suffering, by his sacrifices and blood. There are none of the highest callings he has not entered. In art, the highest calling of man, the greatest name is Henry O. Tanner, a Negro, whose paintings the French Government seeks and purchases and puts in her great art galleries as soon as they are painted. So it is foolish to talk about Americans, and we are not going to leave in spite of our sufferings, but we are going to work out our destiny right here in our own land. We have almost enough law in this country. What we want is enforcement of the law. We have a Constitution with 19 amendments, and with its imperfections, it is the greatest political document that has ever come from the hand of man. What we want Congress to do is to enforce it. Think of it: even the House of Representatives has closed its public restaurants to Negroes, where we have been going for 50 years without friction. This was done at the very time that brave black boys were dying in the trenches in France. This is a new reward to give the returning black soldier for his heroic sacrifices in every part of far-off France. . . .

Statement of Prof. George William Cook, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Mr. Cook:

I have been coming to the Capitol appearing before committees for nigh onto 20 years. I must say that I have never been before a committee where the occasion was of such vast and deep importance as this appearance today. You may read it through the inference or read where the inference is given, or you may read it out of the logic of events, that this committee representing the judiciary of the United States in Congress assembled is today challenged. The presentation of facts and conditions here to-day are such that if the committee does not take a very serious consideration of it it is scarcely up to the level of its own duty. We did not come here to-day simply for the purpose of talking to you. We came here to convince you as we know it, and as we hope to show it to you that this awful carnage of lynching and injustice in so many different ways must be stopped or we have our backs to the wall. My family is broken to-day and let me give you the circumstances. As my wife and I motored from Washington last July, we heard in Baltimore that there was a race riot in Washington. It was Tuesday after Monday the last day of the riot. We hastened here because we had one son, our only child, a young boy whom we found home, and I asked him. “Where were you, George?” “I was in it.” “Why were you in it?” “You can not take me out and shoot me like a dog. I am going

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Red Summer (1919) to die fighting if I have to die.” There is an 18-year-old boy. He contemplated that thing, and he said finally, “Papa, I am not going to stay here.” He is somewhat of a law unto himself. I said, “Where are you going?” “I am going out of the country.” “Where do you propose to go first?” “I think that I will go to Canada and go to school.” He went to Canada. These holidays he returned to Washington on a visit and he was not home two days before he said, “I smelt it as soon as I reached Baltimore and I am going away again.” Now, you may consider that as an isolated case or you man consider it trivial. I have been teaching young colored men for 40 years. I have tested the opinion and growing conviction. I want to say if you want to drive out a pure unadulterated loyalty that has existed in the colored man, just allow this lynching to continue. You are all men of spirit and courage and belong to the Anglo-Saxon race. You would not stand it. You did not stand taxation without representation with very little personal violence attached to it and you were right, and I want to say here as far as I can gauge my people they are loyal to the backbone, they want no disturbance, and they will accept none until forced to. This is our position in the matter. Why did I speak of that boy? Do you want to drive citizens who are loyal from your shores. You have sent away the undesirables. We are not undesirable; no. You want the labor, but we are going to say and can say that along with that response and the giving of labor we are going to ask for our God-given rights, and it is our duty as far as possible to demand them. There was a question raised this morning as to loyalty. There seems to be some little idea that possibly the Negro is not quite as loyal as he used to be. The Attorney General of the United States shows that in 30 pages, I read almost all of it night before last and there are some in the South who feel the same way. Mr. Sumners: Just a moment. I made the statement that there was no evidence. I made the statement that there was no general evidence of disloyalty on the part of the colored man toward the Government. I made that upon my own responsibility. Mr. Cook: I meant simply the question that came before us. I want to say now, sir, that the colored man is loyal. He is loyal in secret and he is loyal openly, and there is but one way to shake that loyalty. He sings, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” with all the luster and all of the sincerity that you sing, and there is now but one way to shake that, and that is to continue the lawlessness against him, and when you find him raising his hand in defense it is against the mob. He never voluntarily raises his hand against the Government, never has, never was an assassin, political assassin or menace, never was a traitor, there is not one that betrayed the confidence in all of the wars, and in all you have had he has engaged. There never was one. Therefore, I appeal to you now to help us because we are a weak people, financially, economically, but with all the opposition we have had we are stronger that we were 50 years ago, and it is not only in strength that we would come

Red Summer (1919) and ask you, we would come and ask you in our helplessness, that we, as American citizens, in the Thomas Jefferson declaration sense, are willing to die rather than continue our serfdom. It is only necessary to be a little honest. You gentlemen who have studied the Elaine case understand it. These four brothers were not in the riot. They were out hunting when that treacherous gang came to them and told them they had better go home because they might get into trouble, and “let us have your guns in order that you will not be considered in the mob.” They got their guns and then shot them to death. They had not done anything and did not even know a riot was going on in the town. I appeal to every man on this committee and I am sorry they are not here to hear these other gentlemen speak. I am only taking up the raveled ends and appeal to you upon pure justice first, and then on the lower ground of political necessity, to give us our rights. Do not allow your communities to deny the colored man an accounting when he has given his sweat toward the cultivation of the crop. Let him have an accounting and treat him fairly. We bring this general proposition to you and we can support every one of them by cases upon cases. The most horrible thing of it all in that lynching, when they shot these four brothers to death, that they scarcely knew for what they were being shot. That was a lynching. Now, it is too late, and I am glad to see by the public press, the white press, that the white man is half ashamed of bringing attacks upon women as the great cause for lynching. The record has been too well kept by the Chicago Tribune and by The Crisis. We know why it is. Men have been lynched for nothing else but wearing the uniform of the United States Government. It was but yesterday that a young man in my class in commercial law said to me: “I will tell you something.” I went to him when I came out of the classroom. He said: “I was simply standing in the street down in South Carolina talking when a young white man came up and said, “What are you doing with this on?” He says, “I just came out of the Army.” “Well, you can not wear that down here.” Can not wear the uniform of the United States Government down there? Just a few feet away they brought up another one and he left for nothing but wearing the uniform. He said he went to the post office for his father’s mail and the postmaster said to him, “Do you want the package that is here?” He said, “No, I can not carry that, I will wait for the car to come in.” This young man said, “What did you say to me?” I said, “No, I will not take that now.” He said, “I want you to know you can not talk that way to me. You must say ‘sir’ to me, if you propose to stay about here,” and started to come out to him. He talked up and said, “If you come after me on a charge like that, one or both of us will report to God to-day.” That is just yesterday. Do you blame the man for saying it. No security from attack upon a colored man even though he had the uniform of the United States Government upon him; this young man in the post office

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Red Summer (1919) assuming to chastise a man who had given his all for the life of the Government, offered his all, for the protection of the flag of the United States. He said his father said to him, “You had better go. They might take out revenge on me and burn us out.” He was not wrong in telling that young man to go away. The other young men had gone away. These cases are not imaginary cases. These have happened. Now, there are two points I wanted to make. One is will you continue to teach the younger element of 12,000,000 of people to ask the question, Is loyalty worth while? One you have driven out of the country. We are bereft of our son, as I have told you. He made up his mind that he would not die like a dog and that he would get out of it. Are you anxious to lose loyal citizens? If the economic condition of the Negro was such, hundreds of them, would migrate upon economic grounds, you may say, and go out as pioneers, but we have been chained down in America for over 300 years, the sweat of our brow has gone into the wealth of the Nation; it is undeniable because the statistics of you own department records will show it. What we ask now is protection under the flag that we have fought to keep aloft in as many wars as you have engaged in. Well might we repeat what Carney said when he returned at Fort Wagner, “The old flag never touched the ground,” you have never heard of a Negro color bearer of the United States going to the rear unless ordered there. That is a sample of the feeling of the colored people. We are born here. “My Country, Tis of Thee,” I sing. You will find some few colored people, and probably with just convictions, who will not sing it. I sing it. Why? It is my country. Born here, my mother and father before me and my grandmother and grandfather. And what they added in honest industry went to help build up this Nation and to make it strong. It is my country. I will not forsake it. Why? I will treat it very much as I will a leaking house. I will repair the roof. I will not abandon it. The United States to the black man has a leaky roof, and we are here to-day to ask you to repair that roof in order that we may live in comfort and in peace, and the challenge that I spoke of o you was a challenge to you who have not thought the matter out to think it out and come on the side of justice. Let no man go out of here and say the Negroes are arguing for social equality. What some people call social equality we call disdain. I want my company and I never seek other company, which does not want me, and so it is with every self-respecting colored man, but I tell you what else I want, whether you want me or not, I want my civic political rights, and if you call that social equality, I say that you have made a misrepresentation and you give a wrong distinction. For me to be driven to travel from here to New Orleans and forced to ride and sit in a dirty car is what I protest against. I do not protest for social equality. I protest for civil rights, for civic privileges, for a discharge of the contract on the part of the railroad people to give me what I have paid for, and when you allow, as was done Sunday night, a man to step up and put a pistol to the body of an attorney of the District of Columbia and say

Red Summer (1919) to him, “You get out of this car or I will shoot you,” when you allow that, gentlemen, you are only inviting the downfall of the Republic, because not only will the 12,000,000 finally be affected by that, but the whole Nation will be affected. Some people speak of the unrest of the Negro. The Negro has always been the most quiet man in the United States. There are a few criminals who are among us, naturally, just like the white criminals, but the unrest in this Nation is not only with Negroes, and I pray to Almighty God that when the time comes for you to put down unrest in the form of anarchy, that the 12,000,000 of Negroes will have a just cause to be on the side of the United States, and if that is not realized, then may God help, for my country is lost. Do not misunderstand us. We are here to ask you to attempt to do something, even though there is a doubt as to the constitutionality of it. Don’t I remember when I walked down to pay my income tax? There were men who said it was unconstitutional before you passed it, and you put it up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and you remember there was some little juggling up there and finally it was declared unconstitutional. Somebody changed. The inveighed against it because there was some doubt. They all said let us do it, and to-day what have you? An amendment to the Constitution for an income tax to be operated. Now, let us for the hope of our common good and of justice to all and for a fair understanding, let us pass some bill that will look toward stopping the greatest crime that you have in the land, that of lynching. Source: “Anti-Lynching Hearings,” Hearings before the Judiciary Committee, House of Representatives, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., on House Judiciary Resolution 75; House Resolutions 259, 4123, and 11873, Serial No. 14, January 14 and 29, 1920, Part II, Anti-Lynching (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 8–10, 72–75.

Excerpts of Testimony from Laney v. United States Describing Events during the Washington, D.C., Riot of July 1919 (1923) Decided on December 3, 1923, Laney v. United States involved an appeal by William Laney, an African American man convicted of manslaughter in the death of a white man during the July 1919 riots in Washington, D.C. Laney sought a new trial based on the trial court’s refusal to allow him to assert a defense based on self-defense. The excerpts of testimony reproduced below include Laney’s description of what happened on the night of July 21, 1919, as well as the supporting statement of his lady friend, Mattie Burke. The appeals court refused to overturn Laney’s conviction, believing that he could have escaped without further incident, but instead deliberately exposed himself to the crowd to provoke further violence. VAN ORSDEL, Associate Justice. This appeal is from a verdict and judgment of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, adjudging appellant, defendant below

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Red Summer (1919) [William Laney], guilty of the crime of manslaughter. The indictment charged the defendant with the crime of murder in the first degree, growing out of the killing of one Kenneth Crall, during a race riot in Washington on July 21, 1919. The defense interposed was self-defense, and a large number of assignments of error are based upon the refusal of the court to grant certain prayers offered by the defendant relating to the law of self-defense. The court instructed the jury on this subject, but we think it will be unnecessary for us to consider the assignments of error in relation to the prayers offered, since in our opinion, viewing the evidence in the most favorable aspect, self-defense does not enter into the case. Defendant testified as follows: “On the night of the 21st of July, 1919, I went to the theater with Mattie Burke, and came back and went up on Seventh street as the request of Teresa Dobbins, to get Florence and Garfield Wood. On my return to 617 Massachusetts avenue, as I got to the corner where the Home Savings Bank is located, a large crowd that was there started to yelling ‘Catch the nigger!’ and ‘Kill the nigger!’ and started to chase me. I ran ahead of them down Massachusetts avenue. When I got near to 617 Massachusetts avenue, I pulled out my gun and the crowd stopped chasing me. I went into the back yard, and while trying to fix the safety on my gun it went off. I then put the gun in my pocket and went to the front again, intending to go back to my place of employment. The mob was attacking a house across the street, and were coming both ways on Massachusetts avenue, from the direction of Sixth and from the direction of Seventh street. While I was in the areaway between 617 and 619, the mob came across from the south side of the street, firing and hollering ‘Let’s kill the nigger!’ The mob was firing at me, and I shot in the direction towards Seventh street. I fired to protect my life. I fired three shots. My pistol had eight bullets in it at first. There were four bullets in it when it was taken by the officials; three bullets having been fired in the front yard and one in the back yard.” The witness Mattie Burke testified, in relation to the movements of the defendant, as follows: “Later he came running back, with a mob chasing him, throwing sticks and stones at him, hollering ‘Catch the nigger!’ I think Mr. Laney had his gun in his hand while he was running, but I did not see him do anything with it. He ran into the areaway between 615 and 617. The crowd, consisting of 100 or more men, then started after a house on the opposite side of the street. At that time William Laney went into the back yard and tried his gun. I was with him in the back yard at the time. Then we came out to the front again. After attacking the house on the opposite side of the street, the mob gathered in the car track as though they were coming toward 617, and then Laney fired his gun. After Laney had escaped through the back way, the crowd began to break into the house, and then I escaped myself over the back fence, and I did not see any more.” It is clearly apparent from the above testimony that, when defendant escaped from the mob into the back yard of the Ferguson place, he was in a place of comparative safety, from which, if he desired to go home, he could have gone by the back way, as he

Red Summer (1919) subsequently did. The mob had turned its attention to a house on the opposite side of the street. According to Laney’s testimony, there was shooting going on in the street. His appearance on the street at that juncture could mean nothing but trouble for him. Hence, when he adjusted his gun and stepped out into the areaway, he had every reason to believe that his presence there would provoke trouble. We think his conduct in adjusting his revolver and going into the areaway was such as to deprive him of any right to involve the pleas of self-defense. Of course, the extent to which a person assailed may go, under a given state of facts involving self-defense, is always a question of fact for the jury; but whether or not self-defense can be invoked under the evidence adduced is a question of law for the court to determine. If the facts, in the judgment of the court, are not such as to admit of this defense, the issue should not be left to the mere speculation of the jury. Source: Laney v. United States, No. 4000, Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, 54 App. D.C. 56; 294 F. 412 (1923).

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Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed insurrection within the borders of the United States since the Civil War. It resulted from a culmination of violent events that began with the Matewan Massacre. Following the deaths of the Baldwin-Felts detectives in Matewan, tensions grew extremely high within Logan and Mingo counties in West Virginia. Emotional and violent responses erupted in the coalfields when Baldwin-Felts detectives exacted their revenge for the Matewan Massacre with the murders of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers in McDowell County, West Virginia, on August 1, 1921. Coal miners from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) District 17 met in Charleston, West Virginia, on August 7, 1921, to protest the deaths of the two men and the imposition of martial law in their home county of Mingo. Law enforcement officials allied to the coal companies had used martial law as an excuse to imprison many UMWA supporters. Following the meeting in Charleston, union miners began gathering in the town of Marmet for the expressed purpose of avenging Hatfield’s murder, ending martial law in Mingo County, freeing jailed miners and UMWA activists, unionizing the coal fields of Logan and Mingo counties, and hanging Logan County sheriff Don Chafin. Chafin was particularly hated by UMWA members because he had more than 300 deputies who worked on behalf of the coal industry. On August 24, 1921, the heavily armed men left on what is now known as the “Miners March” and began a 65-mile trek toward Logan County. It is unknown how many individuals participated in the march, but estimates range from 7,000 to 20,000. The marchers, many of whom were World War I veterans, organized themselves in military fashion under the command of William “Bill” Blizzard. During the march, the miners began donning red bandanas around their necks to identify themselves as an insurgent army, which resulted in their becoming known as “red necks.” Officials in West Virginia quickly mobilized to confront the miners. Sheriff Chafin was put in charge of a force comprised of law enforcement officials, state militia, and coal company enforcers such as the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The sheriff also acquired three biplanes, ostensibly for air reconnaissance. Recognizing that Chafin was vastly outnumbered by the approaching miners, Governor Ephraim Morgan made a request of President Warren Harding that federal troops be sent to suppress the insurrection.

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The miners encountered Sheriff Chafin’s men at Blair Mountain, near the border of Boone and Logan counties. Details of the battle vary widely, but it is known that miners made their first assault on August 30, 1921. By September 1, they had managed to break Chafin’s lines at Crooked Creek Gap. In desperation, Chafin committed his reserve forces to the fight and ordered the pilots of the biplanes to drop bombs and tear gas on the miners. Fortunately for the miners, the efforts to gas and bomb them proved ineffectual. The miners were unable to capitalize upon the breaking of Chafin’s lines because General Harry Bandholtz ordered federal troops into the fray to bring the fighting to an end. Sporadic fighting continued for several days, but most of the miners had been disarmed by September 4, 1921. Despite the ferocity of the fighting between August 30 and September 1, 1921, it is estimated that only 16 people were killed. The Battle of Blair Mountain marked the conclusion of the Mine War of 1920–1921. Although the protracted conflict brought national attention to the plight of coal miners, it ultimately provided a setback for the UMWA. The economic and political elites that had industrialized West Virginia had demonstrated that they had the will and ability to impose their view of law and order in the coalfields. What force they lacked within their borders to maintain order was available through federal authorities. State officials also utilized the court system to wage war on the UMWA and its miners. More than 500 miners and UMWA officials were tried for charges such as treason and murder as a result of the Battle of Blair Mountain. While only a few miners were ever convicted on offenses related to the incident, the legal battles virtually bankrupted the UMWA’s District 17. Subsequently, the UMWA was expelled from all of southern West Virginia’s coalfields and would not prove able to return to power in the region until the mid-1930s. —John R. Burch Jr. See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Bailey, Rebecca J. Matewan before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) Hennen, John. The Americanization of West Virginia: Creating a Modern Industrial State, 1916–1925. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Savage, Lon. Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Shogan, Robert. The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America’s Largest Labor Uprising. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004.

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Coal Mining Coal has been mined in Appalachia since before the birth of the United States. It can be found in an area ranging from Alabama to Pennsylvania. The early coal mining operations were usually small scale, since the coal extracted was either used locally or shipped to nearby markets. The available technology, which primarily consisted of horse-drawn scrapers, black powder, picks, and shovels, also limited production. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the nature of coal mining changed. Local political and economic elites began working with wealthy capitalists from outside the region to industrialize Appalachia. Millions of acres of land were acquired by individuals who were to become absentee landholders. Railroads were constructed that linked the coalfields to markets around the United States. Coal mining technology began to improve, most notably with the introduction of the undercutting machine. The cost of this development on the countryside was catastrophic, as deforestation occurred rapidly and mine drainage polluted the environment. Industrialization also changed the lives of Appalachians, who had previously tended to rely on subsistence agriculture to meet their needs. The insatiable land lust of the outside capitalists resulted in many mountaineers selling the farms that had been in their families for generations in exchange for a job in the coal mines and housing in company towns. In many areas of Appalachia, the local workforce was not sufficient to meet the labor needs of the mines; thus, the coal companies began recruiting African Americans and European immigrants to the mines. The coal operators were careful to segregate the groups from each other and used their ethnic and racial prejudices to keep the miners distrustful of each other. Despite the efforts to forge divisions among the labor force, shared grievances against their employers led the miners to begin enrolling in unions. In the early 1900s, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) began to infiltrate coal mining operations in West Virginia. The refusal of coal operators across the state to recognize the UMWA as the bargaining agent for its miners led to extremely violent strike episodes. One of the most notorious events was the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1913–1914, where representatives of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency that had been deputized by local sheriffs had used machine guns on striking miners. The miners were likewise well armed and held pitched battles on occasion with guards employed by the coal companies. Governor Henry Hatfield forced a settlement of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike by addressing some of the miners’ grievances, including the institution of a nine-hour workday, but did not grant the UMWA the right to organize the miners. The solution proved temporary as the Mine War of 1920–1921, whose events

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included the Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain, erupted over the same basic issues. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Hatfield, Sid (1893–1921) Albert Sidney “Sid” Hatfield was supposedly born on May 15, 1893. Little is known of his early years as he was an orphan who was raised by members of the infamous Hatfield family of Mingo County, West Virginia, whose notoriety had arisen courtesy of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Like many young men in West Virginia’s Tug Valley, he first worked in the local coal mines and became a member of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In 1919, he left the coal mines to accept the offer from Matewan mayor C. C. Testerman to become the community’s police chief. Although no longer a miner, Hatfield continued to be active in the UMWA. During the early months of 1920, he actively aided a labor organizer’s efforts to enroll miners from the Tug Valley into the union. The Stone Mountain Coal Corporation was opposed to the efforts of the UMWA and decided to evict any of their employees and their families from company housing if they opted to join the union. The corporation hired private detectives from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to conduct the actual evictions. On May 19, 1920, Baldwin-Felts agents arrived in Matewan and evicted a number of families from their homes. Sid Hatfield allowed the evictions to occur despite believing that only he had the jurisdiction within the community to enforce evictions. Backed by Mayor Testerman and a number of angry miners, Hatfield then confronted the Baldwin-Felts agents and an argument ensued. Gunshots soon followed, which resulted in the death of Testerman, two miners, and seven Baldwin-Felts agents, including Albert and Lee Felts. The “Matewan Massacre” resulted in Hatfield becoming an icon among members of the UMWA. Two days after the massacre, he married Jennie Testerman, the widow of C. C. Testerman. Sid was disavowed by many members of the Hatfield

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family, whose loyalties lay with the coal entrepreneurs who were operating throughout West Virginia. In January 1921, Hatfield and 15 other men faced charges in Matewan for their roles in the death of Albert Felts. The prosecution was aided by highly regarded lawyers that had been hired by Tom Felts, one of the founders of the BaldwinFelts Detective Agency and the brother of both Albert and Lee Felts. The jury was not impartial, and all the defendants were acquitted. The opportunity for the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to exact its revenge occurred on August 1, 1921. Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers were scheduled to testify in a case at the McDowell County, West Virginia, courthouse and as they arrived with their wives, the men were murdered by Baldwin-Felts detectives Bill Salter, George Pence, and C. E. Lively. More than 10,000 enraged miners marched on Mingo County a month later to protest the murder of the two men. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Bailey, Rebecca J. Matewan before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Waller, Altina L. Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Matewan Massacre (1920) The Matewan Massacre was one of the opening events in the Mine War of 1920– 1921. One of the key issues that caused the labor conflict was the desire of miners to be represented by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). This was an issue that had been left unresolved at the conclusion of the previous labor conflict, the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1913 and 1914. To dissuade its coal miners from joining the UMWA, the Stone Mountain Coal Corporation made it a policy to evict miners and their families from company housing if they became union members. The actual evictions in the environs of Matewan were conducted by agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was well known for their ability to obstruct unionization efforts. The company had one of the best-developed espionage programs in the mines as many of its employees, posing as coal miners,

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actively fed information to their superiors. Some of its employees worked as labor organizers, which enabled them to gain leadership positions in the union hierarchy. Other Baldwin-Felts employees served as an armed force for coal operators. Their brutality and constant use of excessive force often contributed to an unnecessary escalation in violence in the coalfields. Baldwin-Felts agents arrived in Matewan on May 19, 1920, and began forcibly evicting families from their homes. Since the Baldwin-Felts agents were deputized, they believed they had the right to enforce eviction notices within Matewan. Matewan’s police chief Sid Hatfield, a member of the UMWA, disagreed with that assessment. Accompanied by Mayor C. C. Testerman and a group of angry miners, Hatfield confronted the Baldwin-Felts agents. It is believed that Albert Felts attempted to arrest Hatfield, which subsequently led to weapons being fired. It is not definitively known who fired first, but the fighting claimed the lives of Mayor Testerman, two miners, and seven employees of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Two of the detectives that died that day, Albert and Lee Felts, were the brothers of the agency’s cofounder, Tom Felts. The deaths of the detectives were all credited to Sid Hatfield, which made him a folk hero to miners throughout Appalachia. It also resulted in making him a target of Tom Felts and his agency’s ruthless employees. Hatfield and 15 other men were tried in Matewan for the murder of Albert Felts in January 1921 and were acquitted. A vengeful Tom Felts took the law into his own hands on August 1, 1921, and had three of his employees murder Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers in McDowell County, West Virginia. —John R. Burch Jr.

Further Reading Bailey, Rebecca J. Matewan before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Savage, Lon. Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–1921. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) The Tulsa race riot of May 31 and June 1, 1921, stands as one of the largest civil disturbances in U.S. history and resulted in the destruction of the predominantly African American Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. After 16 hours of rioting, dozens of citizens had died, hundreds more injured, and an equal number made homeless. Even with conservative casualty figures, the Tulsa riot ranks among the worst outbreaks of racial violence in the nation’s history. The violence shaped race relations in Tulsa for generations and helped to contribute to the relatively small African American community in a metropolitan area approaching one million residents. Efforts at reparations and reconciliation have stirred renewed interest in the riot and have now placed it within the larger context of American race relations. Tulsa’s location adjacent to the 1905 Glenn Pool gusher on the Mid-Continent oil field pushed the city’s population from 1,390 in 1900 to over 72,000 in 1920. African Americans also moved to Tulsa and established the Greenwood neighborhood with the oil prosperity, giving it the nickname of the “Black Wall Street” within the segregated city. Tulsa’s white citizens, however, also practiced white supremacy much like the rest of the nation, demanding the protection of white womanhood and African American deference to whites in all social and economic settings. The threat of vigilante violence buttressed that argument and underpinned those who resented the prosperity of Tulsa’s black community and feared demands for a greater role in the city’s life. These concerns mirrored an era that had experienced a host of race riots across the country in East St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Houston, and Chicago, resulting in dozens of deaths, hundreds injured, and millions of dollars in property damage. On the afternoon of May 30, 1921, a black shoeshine named Dick Rowland and a white elevator operator named Sarah Page encountered each other at the Drexel Building on South Main Street. Rowland, coming to use the “colored” restroom on the top floor, tripped upon entering the elevator and grabbed the arm of Page, who screamed. As Rowland fled the building, nearby workers found Page upset and assumed an attempted assault had happened. The police eventually detained Rowland in Greenwood and took him to the jail at the Tulsa County Courthouse. Investigators had conducted the search for the young man without the fanfare of an official manhunt, sending one of the city’s few black police officers to make the arrest.

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Crowd of African Americans during the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot of 1921. (Library of Congress)

By the morning of May 31, the Tulsa Tribune editor Richard Lloyd Jones published inflammatory accounts of Rowland and Page’s encounter, stirring anger in both the white and African American communities. The afternoon brought crowds to the courthouse and prompted the sheriff to take steps to protect Rowland from a potential lynch mob. Several groups of men both white and black gathered at the courthouse, prompting city officials and the sheriff to urge them to return to their homes. The encounter between the armed groups, whites fearful of a black uprising and blacks fearful of a possible lynching, met at the courthouse late that evening with shots exchanged and set off the main round of violent rioting. Throughout the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, African Americans outside of Greenwood were detained and taken to the National Guard armory, with others being fired upon by groups of armed whites. The deployment of the National Guard and members of the American Legion brought whites into conflict with African Americans defending Greenwood. Some incursions into the neighborhood resulted in exchanges of fire and dead on both sides, further inflaming the situation. Groups of white rioters set fires at the edge of Greenwood that

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eventually spread into the neighborhood and a full incursion by daybreak. Though some African Americans organized a defense, they were quickly overwhelmed by the mob and fire retreating out of the area. National Guard troops from Oklahoma City arrived by midmorning and reasserted order, including overseeing the hundreds of Greenwood residents held in makeshift detention centers. Travelers coming to the city could see the plume of smoke before seeing the city and encountered bands of frightened African Americans fleeing the city. Many of these families obtained transportation to towns within the region hoping to return, while others moved to other cities and sacrificed their property rather than return to Tulsa. The disruption to the community would complicate rebuilding efforts and make the records on casualties vary widely. Among the most controversial aspects of the riot involves the number of casualties. Conservative estimates place the number of dead at 36 (26 black, 10 white) while other estimates range from 300 to 3,000. Of the more than 800 injured admitted to local white hospitals, as both black hospitals had burned in the riot, the whites made up the vast majority of patients. Further, even if the hospitals had admitted blacks under these special conditions, those injured citizens would have had few avenues to travel through a city under martial law and through a still-hostile white community. Several African American casualties died while in the internment centers, and while most of these deaths have records, no records exist as to how many detainees received treatment for injuries. Within weeks of the riot, African American families returned to the ruins of the neighborhood to establish a tent city on the site of their former properties. Relief and rebuilding efforts faced resistance from city officials who expressed concern that charity would cause dependence on the part of the survivors. Unease at their own actions prompted a conflicted response, resulting in a series of policies such as zoning and codes aimed at limiting black businesses on the grounds of immorality. A series of court cases overturned many of these efforts and widened the gap between the two communities. Within a year, the Greenwood neighborhood began rebuilding with African Americans successfully returning to the prosperity they had previously enjoyed. The post–World War II era proved less successful as the softening of segregationist practices in business and the destruction wrought by the construction of an expressway prompted the area’s decline. The aftermath of the riot also saw the rapid erasure from the white majority’s memory. City histories simply ignored it or downplayed its violence, relegating it to an unpleasant part of a bygone era. Until the publishing of Scott Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land in 1982, few whites, either in Tulsa or in society as a whole, had ever heard of the 1921 riot. Within the white community, oral tradition held the riot’s cause came from the black community or that poor whites engaged in violence, not the better classes. African Americans, by contrast, preserved the

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memory of the events, but within the small Tulsa African American community. Their oral tradition reminded members of the mercurial nature of the white community and the potential for violence for what would appear to be a minor transgression in a sea of unwritten rules. The 75th anniversary of the riot resulted in the creation of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in 1997, charged with the creation of an historical account of the event. The report produced in 2001 recommended a combination of reparations to survivors and descendents, scholarships to Greenwood residents, and economic revitalization efforts for the neighborhood, among other measures. Though the Oklahoma legislature provided for some of the recommended measures later in 2001, it did not pass reparations. Further legal efforts starting in 2003 attempted to provide education and health-care improvements for the Greenwood area but have had little success either in the courts or in legislation. —Matthew Daley See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Brophy, Alfred L. Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Hirsch, James S. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Oklahoma Historical Society. “A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.” http://www.okhistory.org/trrc/freport.htm (accessed August 25, 2008). Tulsa City County Library, African-American Resource Center. “Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.” http://www.tulsalibrary.org/aarc/riot/riot.php (accessed August 25, 2008). Tulsa Reparations Coalition. “Tulsa Race Riot—A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.” http://www.tulsareparations.org/TRR.htm (accessed August 25, 2008).

Ku Klux Klan The name Ku Klux Klan comes from the Greek word kuklos, meaning “circle,” and serves as the name of several past and present entities that advocate a range of beliefs based in nativism and white supremacy. The KKK has not existed as a continuous organization under a single governing body or uniform set of goals; instead, it has waxed and waned since its founding and acted as a cipher for a host of localized issues regarding race, immigration, religion, and cultural values. The KKK had its founding in Pulaski, Tennessee, in May 1866 by Confederate Army veterans and citizens opposed to the policies of the Republican Party and its sympathy to the newly freed slaves or freedmen, the influx of northern investors (carpetbaggers), and southern whites (scalawags) who worked with them. Though it spread rapidly and had Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as a nominal leader, the KKK acted in concert with similar groups. By 1870, these masked, secret groups had helped reestablish white rule, relying on intimidation, violence, and lynchings. The federal government under the aegis of the Ku Klux Act of 1871 acted against the groups in the Carolinas, but the return of white rule had already caused a decline in the Klan. The second Klan emerged during a period of social tension regarding largescale Southern and Eastern European immigration to urban areas, rapid industrial growth and commercial expansion, and the migration of African Americans to the North. Using author Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905) and filmmaker D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) as inspiration, former minister William Joseph Simmons restarted the Klan to assert white Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over society. Far more cohesive than the original group, it grew through selling memberships, promoted the repression of African Americans and antiCatholic, anti-Communist, nativist, and anti-Semitic views. Its marketers created a set of costumes and rituals based ostensibly on Celtic folklore, including the burning cross. The second KKK reached its peak during the mid-1920s with marches in Washington, D.C., political power in Indiana and Colorado, and a national membership both rural and urban that cut across social classes. Despite this, the second KKK did not act as a monolith with local chapter activities ranging from the vigilantism to the fraternal. The Klan would decline after a series of scandals but survive until the mid-1940s. The civil rights movement led to a resurgence of independent groups invoking the name of the KKK during the 1950s and 1960s. Though not openly recognized, state and local governments relied on the support of these vigilante groups in suppressing civil rights activities. Violence in Birmingham, Alabama, the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, and the murder of three civil rights workers in

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Mississippi during the summer of 1964 all had connections to KKK members or supporters. Federal intervention, public sentiment, and a tacit acceptance of African American social and political involvement prompted a decline of these groups by the mid-1970s. The present-day Klan remains small, highly localized, and categorized as a hate group and monitored by public and private organizations. —Matthew Daley

Further Reading Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Chalmers, David Mark. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968. Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Lay, Shawn. Hooded Knights on the Niagara: The Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, New York. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Lay, Shawn, ed. The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansman: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Segregation Segregation in the United States consists of the legal or socially enforced separation of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities from mainstream society both in public and private spheres. Such practices included restrictions on public accommodations, transportation, education, and employment. It can further involve the spatial separation of groups along with the mandatory use of different and usually inferior institutions such as schools and hospitals. Institutions also foster segregation, in housing for example, through selective enforcement of codes and the provision of services, and urban renewal policies that further isolated communities. Law enforcement and sentencing guidelines, immigration policies, and other actions reach beyond individual actions and make social assumptions a matter of policy. Two major types of segregation have and continue to exist in the United States to the present day. De facto (“in-fact”) exists when members of a particular group mutually or under social pressure associate and conduct business and social relations apart from the mainstream. This type is often found in areas with large

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immigrant or migrant communities in rural regions or urban neighborhoods. De jure (by law) segregation received the sanction and enforcement of law based on the provision of separate-but-equal facilities and an acceptance of a lower level of citizenship and legal rights. Enacted through the aegis given by the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, public policies based on its provisions were targeted primarily at African Americans. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African Americans provided a lower quality of service than those reserved for whites, both North and South. Maintenance of segregation came in a variety of forms, from restrictive covenants placed in housing deeds that prohibited particular groups, discrimination in rentals, voting restrictions, institutional separation in the armed forces, and limitations placed on hiring and promotion in employment. Particularly during the period from 1890 to 1930, vigilante violence throughout the United States resulted in thousands of reported and unreported lynchings and acts of violence for real or perceived breaches of social customs. The First and Second Great Migrations from 1915 to 1930 and 1940 to 1970 brought many African Americans to northern cities, where clashes with whites and other ethnic groups resulted in new segregated areas that would offer few avenues for advancement. Though many immigrant groups eventually found acceptance into mainstream society, African Americans remained the primary targets of social and legal segregation. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, a series of court cases and congressional laws ended legal segregation. These included President Harry S Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the armed forces, the Supreme Court cases of Shelly v. Kraemer (1948) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that ended restrictive deed covenants and “separate-but-equal” policies in education respectively, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Together with federal and state enforcement, these policies ended the most egregious examples of legal segregation. Despite these changes, segregation continues to the present shaped by the movement to suburbs, continued mortgage and lending discrimination (also called redlining), and the unequal provision of education, public services, health care, housing, and employment. —Matthew Daley

Further Reading Litwack, Leon. F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf, 1998. Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension to American Racism. New York: New Press, 2005. Williamson, Joel. A Rage for Order: Black/Whites Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot (1921) In this excerpt from their final report, dated June 25, 1921, the grand jury charged with investigating the causes of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot places full blame for the violence on African Americans and completely exonerates whites of any part in starting the disorders. To the Honorable Judge Valjean Biddison, of the District Court, Tulsa County: We, the grand jurors summoned by you to make an investigation of the cause of the recent riot, and other violations of the law in Tulsa and Tulsa county, beg leave to submit to you the following report, in addition to indictments and accusations which are already in your hands. We first desire to state that we have examined a great many witnesses in our effort to arrive at the facts; we have advertised that we desired the full information of every citizen who knew facts: We have heard every one who requested to be heard in addition to the many who were summoned to appear; we have weighed the evidence impartially; we have sought to do justice to every individual and to carry out the instructions of the honorable court. We find that the recent race riot was the direct result of an effort on the part of a certain group of colored men who appeared at the courthouse on the night of May 31, 1921, for the purpose of protecting one Dick Rowland then and now in the custody of the sheriff of Tulsa county for an alleged assault upon a young white woman. We have not been able to find any evidence either from white or colored citizens that any organized attempt was made or planned to take from the sheriff’s custody any prisoner; the crowd assembled about the courthouse being purely spectators and curiosity seekers resulting from rumors circulated about the city. There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms. The assembly was quiet until the arrival of armed negroes, which precipitated and was the direct cause of the entire affair. While we find the presence of the armed negroes was the direct cause of the riot, we further find that there existed indirect causes more vital to the public interest than the direct cause. Among these were agitation among the negroes of social equality, and the laxity of law enforcement on the part of the officers of the city and county. We find that certain propaganda and more or less agitation had been going on among the colored population for some time. This agitation resulted in the accumulation of firearms among the people and the storage of quantities of ammunition, all of which was accumulative in the minds of the negro which led them as a people to believe in equal rights, social equality and their ability to demand the same. We are glad to exonerate the great majority of the colored people who neither had knowledge of or part in either the agitation or the accumulation of arms or ammunition, and recognize the possibility of such a fact as even in as public a place as a church without the rank and file of the people having knowledge of the same. We have sought to a certain the names of the particular parties who took part and the indictments returned show our findings. Source: Tulsa World, June 26, 1921, 1, 8.

Tulsa Race Riot (1921)

Excerpts from the Preliminary and Final Reports of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2000 and 2001) Formed in 1997, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was charged with determining exactly what happened during the May 1921 riot that devastated the African American Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Commission undertook both an historical and an archeological analysis of the event and, as indicated below in the cover letter to its preliminary report released in 2000, recommended that reparations be paid to survivors of the riot. Also reproduced below are excerpts of the final report of the Commission, which was compiled by Danney Goble and released in 2001. LETTER INTRODUCING THE COMMISSION’S PRELIMINARY REPORT, FEBRUARY 7, 2000 The Honorable Frank Keating Governor of the State of Oklahoma State Capitol Building Oklahoma City, OK 73105 Dear Governor Keating: The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, established by House Joint Resolution No. 1035, is pleased to submit the following preliminary report. The primary goal of collecting historical documentation on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 has been achieved. Attachment A is a summary listing of the record groups that have been gathered and stored at the Oklahoma Historical Society. Also included are summaries of some reports and the full text of selected documents to illustrate the breadth and scope of the collecting process. However, the Commission has not yet voted on historical findings, so these materials do not necessarily represent conclusions of the Commission. At the last meeting, held February 4, 2000, the Commission voted on three actions. They are: 1. The Issue of Restitution Whereas, the process of historical analysis by this Commission is not yet complete, And Whereas, the archeological investigation into casualties and mass burials is not yet complete, And Whereas, we have seen a continuous pattern of historical evidence that the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was the violent consequence of racial hatred institutionalized and tolerated by official federal, state, county, and city policy, And Whereas, government at all levels has the moral and ethical responsibility of fostering a sense of community that bridges divides of ethnicity and race,

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) And Whereas, by statute we are to make recommendations regarding whether or not reparations can or should be made to the Oklahoma Legislature, the Governor of the State of Oklahoma, and the Mayor and City Council of Tulsa, That, we, the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission, recommend that restitution to the historic Greenwood Community, in real and tangible form, would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional as well as physical scars of this most terrible incident in our shared past. 2. The Issue of Suggested Forms of Restitution in Priority Order The Commission recommends 1. Direct payment of reparations to survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot 2. Direct payment of reparations to descendants of the survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot 3. A scholarship fund available to students affected by the Tulsa Race Riot 4. Establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the historic area of the Greenwood District 5. A memorial for the reburial of any human remains found in the search for unmarked graves of riot victims 3. The Issue of an Extension of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission The Commission hereby endorses and supports House Bill 2468, which extends the life of the Commission in order to finish the historical report on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. We, the members of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, respectfully submit these findings for your consideration. COMMISSIONERS:

CHAIRMAN:

Currie Ballard, Coyle

T. D. “Pete” Chruchwell, Tulsa

Dr. Bob Blackburn, Oklahoma City Joel Burns, Tulsa

SPONSORS:

Vivian Clark, Tulsa

Sen. Maxine Horner, Tulsa

Rep. Abe Deutschendorf, Lawton

Rep. Donn Ross, Tulsa

Eddie Faye Gates, Tulsa Jim Lloyd, Tulsa

ADVISORS:

Sen. Robert Milacek, Wauikomis

Dr. John Hope Franklin, Durham NC

Jimmie L. White Jr., Checotah

Dr. Scott Ellsworth, Portland OR

FINAL REPORT OF THE OKLAHOMA COMMISSION TO STUDY THE TULSA RACE RIOT OF 1921 Compiled by Danney Goble

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission originated in 1997 with House Joint Resolution No. 1035. The act twice since has been amended, first in 1998, and again two years later. The final rewriting passed each legislative chamber in March and be came law with Governor Frank Keating’s signature on April 6, 2000. In that form, the State of Oklahoma extended the commission’s authority beyond that originally scheduled, to February 28, 2001. The statute also charged the commission to produce, on that date, “a final report of its findings and recommendations” and to submit that report “in writing to the Governor, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the Mayor and each member of the City Council of the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma.” This is that report. It accounts for and completes the work of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission. A series of papers accompanies the report. Some are written by scholars of national stature, others by experts of international acclaim. Each addresses at length and in depth issues of expressed legislative interest and matters of enormous public consequence. As a group, they comprise a uniquely special and a uniquely significant contribution that must be attached to this report and must be studied carefully along with it. Nonetheless, the supporting documents are not the report, itself. The scholars’ essays have their purposes; this commission’s report has another. Its purpose is contained in the statutes that first created this commission, that later extended its life, and that each time gave it the same set of mandates. That is why this report is an accounting, presented officially and offered publicly, of how Oklahoma’s 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission has conducted its business and addressed its statutory obligations. Its duties were many, and each presented imposing challenges. Not least was the challenge of preparing this report. Lawmakers scheduled its deadline and defined its purpose, and this report meets their requirements. At the same time, four years of intense study and personal sacrifice surely entitle commission members to add their own expectations. Completely reasonable and entirely appropriate, their desires deserve a place in their report as well. Together, then, both the law’s requirements and the commissioners’ resolves guide this report. Designed to be both concise and complete, this is the report that law requires the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission to submit to those who represent the people. Designed to be both compelling and convincing, this also is the report that the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission chooses to offer the people whom both lawmakers and the commissioners serve.

The Commission Shall Consist of Eleven (11) Members . . . The legislative formula for commission membership assured it appropriate if unusual composition. As an official state inquiry, the state’s interest was represented through the executive, legislative, and administrative branches. The governor was to appoint six members, three from names submitted by the Speaker of the House, three from nominees provided by the Senate President Pro Tempore.

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) Two state officials—the directors of the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission (OHRC) and of the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS)—also were to serve as ex officio members, either personally or through their designees. Reflecting Tulsa’s obvious interest, the resolution directed the city’s mayor to select the commission’s final three members. Similar to the gubernatorial appointments, they were to come from names proposed by Tulsa’s City Commission. One of the mayor’s appointees had to be “a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot incident”; two had to be current residents of the historic Greenwood community, the area once devastated by the “incident.” The commission began with two ex officio members and ended with two others. After Gracie Monson resigned in March 2000, Kenneth Kendricks replaced her as OHRC’s interim director and its representative to the commission. Blake Wade directed the historical society until Dr. Bob Blackburn succeeded him in 1999. Blackburn had been Wade’s designated representative to the commission any way. In fact, the commission had made him its chairman, a position he would hold until June 2000. Governor Frank Keating’s six appointees included two legislators, each from a different chamber, each from an opposite party, each a former history teacher. Democrat Abe Deutschendorf’s participation in the debate over the original house resolution echoed his lingering interest in history and foretold his future devotion to this inquiry. As a history teacher, Robert Milacek had included Tulsa’s race riot in his classes. Little did he know that he, himself, would contribute to that history as a Republican legislator, but he has. Governor Keating turned to metropolitan Tulsa for two appointees. T. D. “Pete” Churchwell’s father serviced African-American businesses in the Greenwood district, and Churchwell has maintained concern for that community and with the 1921 riot that nearly destroyed it. He was Blackburn’s replacement as chairman during the commission’s closing months. Although born in Oklahoma City, Jim Lloyd and his family moved to Turley (the community just north of Greenwood) when he was three. Raised in Tulsa, he graduated from Nathan Hale and the University of Tulsa’s College of Law. He now practices law in Sand Springs and lives in Tulsa. The governor’s other appointees entered the inquiry less with geographical than with professional connections to Tulsa and its history. Currie Ballard lives in Coyle and serves neighboring Langston University as historian-in-residence. Holding a graduate degree in history, Jimmie White teaches it and heads the social science division for Connors State College. Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage appointed the commission’s final three members. If only five in 1921, Joe Burns met the law’s requirement that one may oral appointee be a survivor of the 1921 “incident.” He brought the commission not faint childhood memories but seasoned wisdom rooted in eight decades of life in the Greenwood community and with Greenwood’s people. As the resolution specified, Mayor Savage’s other two appointees live in contemporary Greenwood, but neither took a direct route to get there. Eddie Faye Gates’s path began in Preston, Oklahoma, passed through Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, and crisscrossed two continents before it reached Tulsa in 1968. She spent the next twenty-four years

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) teaching its youngsters and has devoted years since researching and writing her own memoirs and her community’s history. Vivian Clark-Adams’s route took nearly as many twists and turns, passing through one military base after another until her father retired and the family came to Oklahoma in 1961. Trained at the University of Tulsa, Dr. Vivian Clark-Adams serves Tulsa Community College as chair of the liberal arts division for its southeast campus. In the November 1997, organizing meeting, commissioners voted to hire clerical assistants and expert consultants through the OHS. (The legislature had added $50,000 to the agency’s base appropriations for just such purposes.) They then scheduled their second meeting for December 5 to accommodate the most appropriate and most eminent of all possible authorities. John Hope Franklin is the son of Greenwood attorney B. C. Franklin, a graduate of Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School (Fisk and Harvard, too), and James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University. Recipient of scores of academic and literary awards, not to mention more than a hundred honorary doctorates, Franklin came back for another honor. He received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award on December 4 and stayed to meet and help the commission on the fifth. Commissioners were delighted to learn that Franklin was anxious to serve, even if he confessed the contributions limited by age (he was eighty-two at the time) and other obligations. They enthusiastically made John Hope Franklin their first consultant, and they instantly took his advice for another. Dr. Scott Ellsworth, a native Tulsan now living in Oregon, was a Duke graduate who already had written a highly regarded study of the riot. Ellsworth became the second consultant chosen; he thereafter emerged first in importance. As its work grew steadily more exacting and steadily more specialized, the commission turned to more experts. Legal scholars, archeologists, anthropologists, forensic specialists, geophysicists—all of these and more blessed this commission with technical expertise impossible to match and unimaginable otherwise. As a research group, they brought a breadth of vision and a depth of training that made Oklahoma’s commission a model of state inquiry. Ten consultants eventually provided them expert advice, but the commissioners always expected to depend mostly on their own resources, maybe with just a little help from just a few of their friends. Interested OHS employees were a likely source. Sure enough, a half-dozen or so pitched in to search the agency’s library and archives for riot-related materials. That was help appreciated, if not entirely unexpected. What was surprising— stunning, really—was something else that happened in Oklahoma City. As the commission’s work attracted interest and gathered momentum, Bob Blackburn noticed something odd: an unusual number of people were volunteering to work at the historical society. Plain, ordinary citizens, maybe forty or fifty of them, had asked to help the commission as unpaid researchers in the OHS collections. At about that time, Dick Warner decided that he had better start making notes on the phone calls he was fielding for the Tulsa County Historical Society. People were calling in, wanting to contribute to the inquiry, and they just kept calling. After two months,

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) his log listed entries for 148 local calls. Meanwhile, Scott Ellsworth was back in Oregon, writing down information volunteered by some of the three hundred callers who had reached him by long distance. Most commission meetings were in Tulsa, each open to any and all. Oklahoma’s Open Meetings Law required no less, but this commission’s special nature yielded much more. It seemed that every time the commissioners met at least one person (usually several) greeted them with at least something (usually a lot) that the commission needed. Included were records and papers long presumed lost, if their existence had been known at all. Some were official documents, pulled together and packed away years earlier. Uncovered and examined, they took the commission back in time, back to the years just before and just after 1921. Some were musty legal records saved from the shredders. Briefs filed, dockets set, lawsuits decided—each opened an avenue into another corner of history. Pages after pages laid open the city commission’s deliberations and decisions as they affected the Greenwood area. Overlooked records from the National Guard offered overlooked perspectives and illuminated them with misplaced correspondence, lost after-action reports, obscure field manuals, and self-typed accounts from men who were on duty at the riot. Maybe there was a family’s treasured collection of yellowed newspaper clippings; an envelope of faded photographs; a few carefully folded letters, all hand written, each dated 1921. One meaning of all of this is obvious, so obvious that this report pauses to affirm it. Many have questioned why or even if anyone would be interested now in events that happened in one city, one time, one day, long ago. What business did today’s state lawmakers have in something so old, so local, and so deservedly forgotten? Surely no one cares, not anymore. An answer comes from hundreds and hundreds of voices. They tell us that what happened in 1921 in Tulsa is as alive today as it was back then. What happened in Tulsa stays as important and remains as unresolved today as in 1921. What happened there still exerts its power over people who never lived in Tulsa at all. How else can one explain the thousands of hours volunteered by hundreds of people, all to get this story told and get it told right? How else can one explain the regional, national, even international attention that has been concentrated on a few short hours of a mid-sized city’s history? As the introductory paper by Drs. Franklin and Ellsworth recounts, the Tulsa disaster went largely unacknowledged for a half-century or more. After a while, it was largely forgotten. Eventually it became largely unknown. So hushed was mention of the subject that many pronounced it the final victim of a conspiracy, this a conspiracy of silence. That silence is shattered, utterly and permanently shattered. Whatever else this commission has achieved or will achieve, it already has made that possible. Regional, national, and international media made it certain. The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR), every American broadcast television network, cable outlets delivering Cinemax and the History Channel to North America, the British Broadcasting Corporation—this merely begins the attention that the media focused upon this commission and its inquiry. Many approached it in depth (NPR twice has made it

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) the featured daily broadcast). Most returned to it repeatedly (the New York Times had carried at least ten articles as of February 2000). All considered it vital public information. Some—including some commission members—thought at least some of the coverage was at least some what unbalanced. They may have had a point, but that is not the point. Here is the point: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission is pleased to report that this past tragedy has been extensively aired, that it is now remembered, and that it will never again be unknown.

The Commission Shall Undertake a Study to [Include] the Identification of Persons. . . . No one is certain how many participated in the 1921 riot. No one is certain how many suffered how much for how long. Certainty is reserved for a single quantifiable fact. Every year there remain fewer and fewer who experienced it personally. Legislation authorizing this commission directed that it seek and locate those survivors. Specifically, it was to identify any personable to “provide adequate proof to the Commission” that he or she was an “actual resident” of “the ‘Greenwood’ area or community” at the time of the riot. The commission was also to identify any person who otherwise “sustained an identifiable loss . . . resulting from the . . . 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.” Some considered this the commission’s most difficult assignment, some its most important duty, some its most compelling purpose. They all were right, and had Eddie Faye Gates not assumed personal and experienced responsibility for that mandate, this commission might have little to report. Because she did, However, it principally reports what she and those who worked with her were able to accomplish in the commission’s name. Commissioner Gates’s presence gave this commission a considerable and welcomed head start. She already had included several riot victims among the early pioneers whom she had interviewed for They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa. The book finished, she had an informal list of survivors, but the list kept changing. Death erased one name after another. Others appeared. Many were of old people who had left Oklahoma years, even decades, ago; but she heard about them and patiently tracked them down. As lawmakers were authorizing this inquiry, the count stood at thirteen, nineteen if all the leads eventually panned out. No one presumed that even nineteen was close to final, but no one knew what the accurate total might be either. At its very first organizing meeting on November 14, 1997, this commission established a “subcommittee on survivors,” headed by Commissioner Gates and including Commissioner Burns and Dr. Clark-Adams. From that moment onward, that subcommittee has aggressively and creatively pursued every possible avenue to identify every possible survivor. Letters sent over Dr. Ellsworth’s signature to Jet and Ebony magazines urged readers to contact the commission if they knew of any possibilities. From Gale’s Directory of Publications, Commissioner Gates targeted the nation’s leading African-American newspapers (papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier), appealing publicly for survivors or to anyone who might know of one. The commission’s website, created and maintained by the Oklahoma Historical Society, prominently declared a

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) determination to identify and register every survivor, everywhere. For affirmation, it posted the official forms used as the subcommittee’s records, including instructions for their completion and submission. An old-fashioned, intensely personal web turned out to be more productive than the thoroughly modern, entirely electronic Internet. Like historical communities everywhere, modern Greenwood maintains a rich, if informal, social network. Sometimes directly, sometimes distantly, it connects Greenwood’s people, sometimes young, sometimes old. Anchoring its interstices are the community’s longest residents, its most active citizens, and its most prominent leaders. One quality or another would describe some members of this commission. After all, these are the very qualifications that lawmakers required for their appointments. Others share those same qualities and a passion for their community’s history as well. Curtis Lawson, Robert Littlejohn, Hannibal Johnson, Dr. Charles Christopher, Mable Rice, Keith Jemison, Robert and Blanchie Mayes—all are active in the North Tulsa Historical Society, all are some of the community’s most respected citizens, and all are among this commission’s most valuable assets. The initial published notices had early results. Slowly they began to compound upon themselves. The first stories in the national and international media introduced a multiplying factor. Thereafter, each burst of press attention seemed to increase what was happening geometrically. People were contacting commissioners, some coming forward as survivors, more suggesting where or how they might be found. Names came in, first a light sprinkle, next a shower, then a downpour, finally a flood. Old city directories, census reports, and other records verified some claims, but they could confirm only so much. After all, these people had been children, some of them infants, back in 1921. After eighty years, could anyone remember the kind of details— addresses, telephone numbers, property descriptions, rental agreements, business locations—someone else could verify with official documents? Not likely. In fact, these were exactly the kind of people most likely to have been ignored or lost in every public record. Officially, they might have never existed. Except that they did, and one who looked long enough and hard enough and patiently enough could confirm it—that is, if one knew where to look and whom to ask. That is what happened. Name-by-name, someone found somebody who actually knew each person. In fact, that is how many names surfaced: a credible figure in the community knew how to find older relatives, former neighbors, or departed friends. Others could be confirmed with equal authority. Maybe some one knew the claimant’s family or knew someone that did. If a person claimed to be kin to someone or offered some small detail, surely someone else knew that relative or remembered the same detail as well. Some of those details might even be verified through official documents. It was a necessary process but slow and delicate, too. As of June 1998, twenty-nine survivors had been identified, contacted, and registered. (The number did not include sixteen identified as descendants of riot victims.) It took another fourteen months for the total to reach sixty-one. It would have been higher, except that three of the first twenty-nine had died in those months. This deadline had an ominous and compelling meaning.

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) Work immediately shifted through higher gears. In March 2000, the identification process finished for forty-one survivors then living in or near Tulsa. Just a few more still needed to be contacted. The real work remaining, however, involved a remarkable number of survivors who had turned up outside of Oklahoma. Following a recent flurry of media attention, more than sixty out-of-state survivors had been located. They lived everywhere from California to Florida, one in Paris, France! All of that work is complete. As the commission submits its report, 118 persons have been identified, contacted, and registered as living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. (Another 176 persons also have been registered as descendants of riot victims.) The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission thereby has discharged the mandate regarding the identification of persons. The Commission shall . . . gather information, identify and interview witnesses . . . preserve testimony and records obtained, [and] examine and copy documents . . . having historical significance. Whatever else this commission already has achieved or soon will inspire, one accomplishment will remain indefinitely. Until recently, the Tulsa race riot has been the most important least known event in the state’s entire history. Even the most resourceful of scholars stumbled as they neared it for it was dimly lit by evidence and the evidentiary record faded more with every passing year. That is not now and never will be true again. These few hours—from start to finish, the actual riot consumed less than sixteen hours—may now comprise the most thoroughly documented moments ever to have occurred in Oklahoma. This commission’s work and the documentary record it leaves behind shines upon them a light too bright to ignore. The Oklahoma Historical Society was searching its existing materials and aggressively pursuing more before this commission ever assembled. By the November 1997, organizing meeting, Bob Blackburn was ready to announce that the society already had ordered prints from every known source of every known photograph taken of the riot. He was contacting every major archival depository and research library in the country to request copies of any riot-related materials they might hold themselves. Experienced OHS professionals were set to research important but heretofore neglected court and municipal records. This was news welcomed by commission members. It assured early momentum for the job ahead, and it complemented work that some of them were already doing. Eddie Faye Gates, for one, had pulled out every transcript of every interview that she had made with a riot witness, and she was anxious to make more. Jim Lloyd was another. Lloyd already had found and copied transcripts from earlier interviews, including some with Tulsa police officers present at the riot. He also had a hunch that a fellow who knew his way around a court house just might turn up all sorts of information. That is how it began, but that was just the beginning. In the months ahead, Larry O’Dell and other OHS employees patiently excavated mountains of information, one pebble at a time, as it were. They then pieced together tiny bits of fact, carefully fitting one to another.

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) One by one, completed puzzles emerged. Arranged indifferent dimensions, they made magic: a vision of Greenwood long since vanished. Master maps, both of the community on the eve of the riot and of the post-riot residue, identified every single piece of property. For each parcel, a map displayed any structure present, its owner and its use. If commercial, what firms were there, who owned them, what businesses they were in. If residential, whether it was rented or owned. If the former, the landlord’s name. If the latter, whether it was mortgaged (if so, to whom and encumbered by what debt.) For both, lists identified each of its occupants by name. It was not magic; it was more. Larry O’Dell had rebuilt Greenwood from records he and other researchers had examined and collected for the commission. Every building permit granted, every warranty deed recorded, every property appraisal ordered, every damage claim filed, every death certificate issued, every burial record maintained—the commission had copies of every single record related to Greenwood at the time of the riot. Some it had only because Jim Lloyd was right. Able to navigate a courthouse, he ran across complete records for some 150 civil suits filed after the race riot. No one remembered that they even existed; they had been misplaced for thirty-five years. When Jim Lloyd uncovered and saved them, they were scheduled for routine shredding. The commission gathered the most private of documents as well. Every form registering every survivor bears notes recording information taken from every one of 118 persons. With Kavin Ross operating the camera, Eddie Faye Gates videotaped interviews with about half of the survivors. Each is available on one of nine cassettes preserved by the commission; full transcripts are being completed for all. Sympathetic collectors turned over transcripts of another fifty or more. Some had been packed away for twenty, even thirty years. Others, including several resourceful amateur historians, reproduced and gave the commission what amounted to complete documentary collections. There were sets of municipal records, files from state agencies, reports kept by social services, press clippings carefully bound, privately owned photographs never publicly seen. People who had devoted years to the study of one or more aspects of the riot supplied evidence they had found and presented conclusions they had reached. Beryl Ford followed the commission’s work as a Tulsan legendary for his devotion to his city and its history. William O’Brien attended nearly every commission meeting, sometimes to ask questions, sometimes to answer them, once to deliver his own full report on the riot. Robert Norris prepared smaller, occasional reports on military topics. He also dug up and turned over files from National Guard records. Others located affidavits filed with the State Supreme Court. The military reports usually had been presumed lost; the legal papers always had been assumed unimportant. Commissioners were surprised to receive so much new evidence and pleased to see that it contributed so much. They were delighted to note that so much came from black sources, that it documented black experiences and recorded black observations. It had not always been that way. Too many early journalists and historians had dismissed black sources as unreliable. Too few early librarians and archivists had preserved

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) black sources as important. Both thereby condemned later writers and scholars to a never ending game of hide-and-go-seek, the rules rigged so no one could win. This commission’s work changes the game forever. Every future scholar will have access to everything everyone ever had when the original source was white. In fact, they will have a lot more of it. They also will have more from sources few had before when the original source was black. Because they will, the community future scholars will behold and the property they will describe was a community of black people, occupied by black people. The public records they will examine involved black people and affected black people. Objects they will touch came from black people. Interviews they will hear and transcripts they will read were recorded from black people. The evidence they will explore reveals experiences of black people. Consider what so much new information and what so many new sources can mean for future historians. Consider what it already has meant for one. Read closely Scott Ellsworth’s accompanying essay, “The Tulsa Riot,” a rather simple title, as titles go. Much more sophisticated is the title he gave the book he wrote in 1982, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. It is fair that they have different titles. They tell somewhat different stories in somewhat different ways. The chief difference is that the one titled so simply tells a tale much more sophisticated. For one thing, it is longer. The report attached here filled 115 typed pages in the telling; the comparable portion of the book prints entirely in 25 pages. The report has to be longer because it has more to report, stories not told in the first telling. It offers more because it draws upon more evidence. The report packs 205 footnotes with citations for its story; 50 did the job for the first one. Within that last difference is the difference that causes every other difference. To write this report, Scott Ellsworth used evidence he did not have—no one had it—as recently as 1982. He cites that new evidence at least 148 times. He had information from black sources accessible now because of this commission. That knowledge contributed to Scott Ellsworth’s citations from black newspapers, black interviews, or black writings. He cites black sources at least 272 times. No wonder the two are different. From now on, everything can be different. They almost have to be. Before there was this commission, much was known about the Tulsa race riot. More was unknown. It was buried somewhere, lost somewhere, or somewhere undiscovered. No longer. Old records have been reopened, missing files have been recovered, new sources have been found. Still being assembled and processed by the Oklahoma Historical Society, their total volume passed ten thousand pages some time ago and well may reach twenty thousand by the time everything is done. The dimensions of twenty thousand pages can be measured physically. Placed side-byside, they would reach across at least ten yards of library shelving, filling every inch with new information. The significance of these twenty thousand pages has to be gauged

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) vertically and metaphorically though. Stacked high, they amount to a tower of new knowledge. Rising to reach a new perspective, they offer visions never seen before. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission thereby has discharged the mandate to gather and preserve a record of historical significance.

The Commission Shall . . . Develop a Historical Record of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot . . . The commission’s first substantive decision was to greet this obligation with a series of questions, and there was compelling reason why. Eighty years after the fact, almost as many unresolved questions surround the race riot as did in 1921—maybe even more. Commissioners knew that no “historical record” would be complete unless it answered the most enduring of those questions—or explain why not. That was reason enough for a second decision: Commissioners agreed to seek consultants, respected scholars, and other experts to investigate those questions and offer answers. Their findings follow immediately, all without change or comment, each just as the commission received it. Accompanying papers present what scholars and others consider the best answers to hard questions. The reports define their questions, either directly or implicitly, and usually explain why they need answers. The authors give answers, but they present them with only the confidence and exactly the precision they can justify. Most retrace the route they followed to reach their positions. All advance their positions openly. If they sense themselves in hostile territory, some stake their ground and defend it. The commissioners harbor no illusion that every reader will accept their every answer to every question. They know better. Why should everyone else? None of them do. All eleven have reservations, some here, some there. Some dispute this point; some deny that one. Some suggest other possibilities. Some insist upon positions squarely opposite the scholars’. None of that matters. However they divide over specifics, they also are united on principles. Should any be in need, they endorse and recommend the route they took to reach their own consensus. The way around an enraged showdown and the shortest path to a responsible solution is the line that passes through points ahead. Each point marks a big question and an important answer. Study them carefully. What was the total value of property destroyed in the Tulsa race riot, both in 1921’s dollars and in today’s? Larry O’Dell has the numbers. Any one of them could be a little off, probably none by very much. Could a lawyer argue, and might a judge decree, that citizens living now had a duty to make that good, had to repay those losses, all because of something that happened eighty years ago? Alfred Brophy can make the case, and he does. Over eight decades, some Tulsans (mostly black Tulsans) have insisted that whites attacked Greenwood from the air, even bombed it from military airplanes. Other Tulsans (mostly white Tulsans) have denied those claims; many have never even heard

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) them. In a sense, it is a black-or-white question, but Richard S. Warner demonstrates that it has no black-or-white answer. He proves it absolutely false that military planes could have employed military weapons on Greenwood. He also proves it absolutely true that civilian aircraft did fly over the riot area. Some were there for police reconnaissance, some for photography, some for other legitimate purposes. He also thinks it reasonable to believe that others had less innocent use. It is probable that shots were fired and that incendiary devices were dropped, and these would have contributed to riot-related deaths or destruction. How much? No one will ever know: History permits no black-or-white answer. Can modern science bring light to old, dark rumors about a mass grave, at least one, probably more, somewhere in Tulsa? Could those rumors be true? If true, where is one? Robert L. Brooks and Alan H. Witten have answers. Yes, science can address those rumors. Yes, there are many reasons to believe that mass graves exist. Where? They can point precisely to the single most likely spot. They can explain why scientists settle on that one—explain it clearly enough and completely enough to convince nonscientists, too. Without making a scratch on the ground, they can measure how deep it has to be, how thick, how wide, how long. Were the site to be exhumed and were it to yield human remains, what would anyone learn? Quite a bit if Lesley Rankin-Hill and Phoebe Stubblefield were to examine them. How many people were killed, anyway? At the time, careful calculations varied almost as much as did pure guesses—forty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, maybe more. After a while, it became hard to distinguish the calculations from the guesses. By now, the record has become so muddied that even the most careful and thorough scientific investigation can offer no more than a preliminary possible answer. Clyde Collins Snow’s inquiry is just as careful and just as thorough as one might expect from this forensic anthropologist of international reputation, and preliminary is the word that he insists upon for his findings. By the most conservative of all possible methods, he can identify thirty-eight riot victims, and he provides the cause of death and the burial site for each of them. He even gives us the names of all but the four burned beyond recognition. That last fact is their defining element. Thirty-eight is only the number of dead that Snow can identify individually. It says nothing of those who lost their lives in the vicious riot and lost their personal identities in records never kept or later destroyed. An accurate death count would just begin at thirty-eight; it might end well into the hundreds. Snow explains why as many as 150 might have to be added for one reason, 18 more for another reason. What neither he nor anyone can ever know is how many to add for how many reasons. That is why there will never be a better answer to the question of how many died than this: How many? Too many. For some questions there will never be answers even that precise. Open for eighty years and open now, they will remain open forever because they are too large to be filled by the evidence at hand.

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) Some of the hardest questions surround the evidence, itself. Evidence amounting to personal statements—things said to have been seen, heard, or otherwise observed— raises an entire set of questions in itself. Surely some statements are more credible than others, but how credible is that? Most evidence is incomplete; it may be suggestive but is it dispositive? Evidence often inspires inference, but is the inference reasonable or even possible? Evidence is usually ambiguous, does it mean this or does it mean that? Almost every piece of evidence requires an interpretation, but is only one interpretation possible? Responsibilities will be assigned, decisions will be evaluated, judgments will be offered—on what basis? These are not idle academic musings. On the contrary: This small set of questions explains why so many specific questions remain open. They explain how people— reasonable, fair-minded, well-intended people—can disagree so often about so much. Consider a question as old as the riot itself. At the time, many said that this was no spontaneous eruption of the rabble; it was planned and executed by the elite. Quite a few people—including some members of this commission—have since studied the question and are persuaded that this is so, that the Tulsa race riot was the result of a conspiracy. This is a serious position and a provable position—if one looks at certain evidence in certain ways. Others—again, including members of this commission—have studied the same question and examined the same evidence, but they have looked at it in different ways. They see there no proof of conspiracy. Selfish desires surely. Awful effects certainly. But not a conspiracy. Both sides have evidence that they consider convincing, but neither side can convince the other. Another nagging question involves the role of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone who has studied the riot agrees that the Klan was present in Tulsa at the time of the riot and that it had been for some time. Everyone agrees that within months of the riot Tulsa’s Klan chapter had become one of the nation’s largest and most powerful, able to dictate its will with the ballot as well as the whip. Everyone agrees that many of the city’s most prominent men were klansmen in the early 1920s and that some remained klansmen throughout the decade. Everyone agrees that Tulsa’s atmosphere reeked with a Klan-like stench that oozed through the robes of the Hooded Order. Does this mean that the Klan helped plan the riot? Does it mean that the Klan helped execute it? Does it mean that the Klan, as an organization, had any role at all? Or does it mean that any time thousands of whites assembled—especially if they assembled to assault blacks—that odds were there would be quite a few klansmen in the mix? Does the presence of those individuals mean that the institution may have been an instigator or the agent of a plot? Maybe both? Maybe neither? Maybe nothing at all? Not everyone agrees on that. Nor will they ever. Both the conspiracy and the Klan questions remain what they always have been and probably what they always will be. Both are examples of nearly every problem inherent to historical evidence. How reliable is this oral tradition? What conclusions does that evidence permit? Are these inferences reasonable? How many

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) ways can this be interpreted? And so it must go on. Some questions will always be disputed because other questions block the path to their answers. That does not mean there will be no answers, just that there will not be one answer per one question. Many questions will have two, quite a few even more. Some answers will never be proven. Some will never be disproved. Accept it: Some things can never be known. That is why the complete record of what began in the late evening of May 31 and continued through the morning of June 1 will never quite escape those hours, themselves. They forever are darkened by night or enshrouded by day. But history has a record of things certain for the hours between one day’s twilight and the next day’s afternoon. These things: • Black Tulsans had every reason to believe that Dick Rowland would be lynched after his arrest on charges later dismissed and highly suspect from the start. • They had cause to believe that his personal safety, like the defense of themselves and their community, depended on them alone. • As hostile groups gathered and their confrontation worsened, municipal and county authorities failed to take actions to calm or contain the situation. • At the eruption of violence, civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies. • In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts themselves illegal. • Public officials provided fire arms and ammunition to individuals, again all of them white. • Units of the Oklahoma National Guard participated in the mass arrests of all or nearly all of Greenwood’s residents, removed them to other parts of the city, and detained them in holding centers. Entering the Greenwood district, people stole, damaged or destroyed personal property left behind in homes and businesses. • People, some of them agents of government, also deliberately burned or otherwise destroyed homes credibly estimated to have numbered 1,256, along with virtually every other structure—including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library—in the Greenwood district. • Despite duties to preserve order and to protect property, no government at any level offered ad equate resistance, if any at all, to what amounted to the destruction of the neighborhood referred to commonly as “Little Africa” and politely as the “Negro quarter.” • Although the exact total can never be determined, credible evidence makes it probable that many people, likely numbering between one and three hundred, were killed during the riot.

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) • Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level, municipal, county, state, or federal. • Even after the restoration of order it was official policy to release a black detainee only upon the application of a white person, and then only if that white person agreed to accept responsibility for that detainee’s subsequent behavior. • As private citizens, many whites in Tulsa and neighboring communities did extend invaluable assistance to the riot’s victims, and the relief efforts of the American Red Cross in particular provided a model of human behavior at its best. • Although city and county government bore much of the cost for Red Cross relief, neither contributed substantially to Greenwood’s rebuilding; in fact, municipal authorities acted initially to impede rebuilding. • In the end, the restoration of Greenwood after its systematic destruction was left to the victims of that destruction. These things are not myths, not rumors, not speculations, not questioned. They are the historical record. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission thereby has discharged the mandate to develop a historical record of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.

The Final Report of the Commission’s Findings and Recommendations . . . may Contain Specific Recommendations about Whether or Not Reparations Can or Should Be Made and the Appropriate Methods. . . . Unlike those quoted before, these words give this commission not an obligation but an opportunity. Nearly every commissioner intends to seize it. A short letter sent to Governor Frank Keating as a preliminary report in February, 2000 declared the majority’s view that reparations could and should be made. “Good public policy,” that letter said, required no less. This report maintains the same, and this report makes the case. Case, reparations—the words, themselves, seem to summon images of lawyers and courtrooms, along with other words, words like culpability, damages, remedies, restitution. Each is a term used in law, with strict legal meaning. Sometimes commissioners use those words, too, and several agree—firmly agree— that those words describe accurately what happened in 1921 and fit exactly what should happen now. Those, however, are their personal opinions, and the commissioners who hold them do so as private citizens. Even the most resolute of its members recognizes that this commission has a very different role. This commission is neither court nor judge, and its members are not a jury. The commission has no binding legal authority to assign culpability, to determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order either restitution or reparations. In fact, it has no judicial authority whatsoever.

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) It also has no reason or need for such authority. Any judgments that it might offer would be without effect and meaning. Its words would as well be cast to the winds. Any recommendations that it might offer neither have nor need judicial status at all. Statutes grant this commission its authority to make recommendations and the choice of how—or even if—to exercise that authority. The commission’s majority is determined to exercise its discretion and to declare boldly and directly their purpose: to recommend, independent of what law allows, what these commissioners believe is the right thing to do. They propose to do that in a dimension equal to their purpose. Courts have other purposes, and law operates in a different dimension. Mistake one for the other—let this commission assume what rightly belongs to law—does worse than miss the point. It ruins it. Think of the difference this way. We will never know exactly how many were killed during the Tulsa race riot, but take at random any twenty-five from that unknown total. What we say of those we might say for everyone of the others, too. Considering the twenty-five to be homicides, the law would approach those as twenty-five acts performed by twenty-five people (or thereabouts) who, with twentyfive motives, committed twenty-five crimes against twenty-five persons. That they occurred within hours and within a few blocks of each other is irrelevant. It would not matter even if the same person committed two, three, ten of the murders on the same spot, moments apart. Each was a separate act, and each (were the law to do its duty) merits a separate consequence. Law can apprehend it no other way. Is there no other way to understand that? Of course there is. There is a far better way. Were these twenty-five crimes or one? Did each have a separate motive, or was there a single intent? Were twenty-five individuals responsible, those and no one else? The burning of 1,256 homes—if we understand these as 1,256 acts of arson committed by 1,256 criminals driven by 1,256 desires, if we understand it that way, do we understand anything at all? These were not any number of multiple acts of homicide; this was one act of horror. If we must name the fires, call it outrage, for it was one. For both, the motive was not to injure hundreds of people, nearly all unseen, almost all unknown. The intent was to intimidate one community, to let it be known and let it be seen. Those who pulled the triggers, those who struck the matches—they alone were law breakers. Those who shouted encouragement and those who stood silently by—they were responsible. These are the qualities that place what happened in Tulsa outside the realm of law— and not just in Tulsa, either. Lexington, Sapulpa, Norman, Shawnee, Lawton, Claremore, Perry; Waurika, Dewey, and Marshall—earlier purges in every one already had targeted entire black communities, marking every child, woman, and man for exile. There is no count of how many those people numbered, but there is no need to know that. Know that there, too, something more than a bad guy had committed something more than a crime against something more than a person. Not someone made mad by lust, not a person gripped by rage, not a heartbroken party of romance gone sour, not one or any number of individuals but a collective body—acting as one body—had coldly and deliberately and systematically assaulted one victim, a whole community, intending to

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) eliminate it as a community. If other black communities heard about it and learned their lessons, too, so much the better; a little intimidation went a long way. All of this happened years before, most fifteen or twenty years before Dick Rowland landed in jail, but they remained vivid in the recent memories of Greenwood’s younger adults. This, or something quite like it, was almost always what happened when the subject was race. Here was nothing as amorphous as racism. Here were discrete acts—one act, one town—each consciously calculated to have a collective effect not against a person but against a people. And is that not also the way of Oklahoma’s voting laws at the time? The state had amended its constitution and crafted its laws not to keep this person or that person or a whole list of persons from voting. Lengthen that list to the indefinite, write down names to the infinite—one still will not reach the point. For that, one line, one word is enough. The point was to keep a race, as a race, away from the polls. Jim Crow laws—the segregation commands of Oklahoma’s statutes and of its constitution—worked that way, too. Their object was not to keep some exhausted mother and her two young children out of a “white car” on a train headed somewhere like Checotah and send them walking six miles home. (Even if John Hope Franklin could recall that about his own mother and sister and himself as he accepted the Helmerich Award some three-quarters of a century afterwards.) No, the one purpose was to keep one race “in its place.” When Laura Nelson was lynched years earlier in Okemah, it was not to punish her by death. It was to terrify the living. Why else would the lynchers have taken (and printed and copied and posted and distributed) that photograph of her hanging from the bridge, her little boy dangling beside her? The lynchers knew the purpose; the photographer just helped it along. The purpose had not changed much by 1921, when another photographer snapped an other picture, a long shot showing Greenwood’s ruin, smoke rising from fires blazing in the background. “RUNING THE NEGRO OUT OF TULSA” someone wrote across it, candor atoning for misspelling. No doubt there. No shame either. Another photograph probably was snapped the same day but from closer range. It showed what just days before must have been a human being, maybe one who had spent a warm day in late May working and talking and laughing. On this day, though, it was only a grotesque, blackened form, a thing, really, its only sign of humanity the charred remains of arms and hands forever raised, as if in useless supplication. Shot horizontally, that particular photo still turns up from time to time in the form of an early use: as a postcard. People must have thought it a nice way to send a message. It still sends a message, too big to be jotted down in a few lines; but, then, this message is not especially nice either. The message is that here is an image of more than a single victim of a single episode in a single city. This image preserves the symbol of a story, preserves it in the same way that the story was told: in black-and-white. See those two photos and understand that the Tulsa race riot was the worst event in that city’s history—an event without equal and without excuse. Understand, too, that it was the worst explosion of violence in this state’s history—an episode late to be

Tulsa Race Riot (1921) acknowledged and still to be repaired. But understand also that it was part of a message usually announced not violently at all, but calmly and quietly and deliberately. Who sent the message? Not one person but many acting as one. Not a “mob”; it took forms too calculated and rational for that word. Not “society”; that word is only a mask to conceal responsibility within a fog of imprecision. Not “whites,” because this never spoke for all whites; sometimes it spoke for only a few. Not “America,” because the federal government was, at best, indifferent to its black citizens and, at worse, oblivious of them. Fifty years or so after the Civil War, Uncle Sam was too complacent to crusade for black rights and too callous to care. Let the states handle that—states like Oklahoma. Except that it really was not “Oklahoma” either. At least, it was not all of Oklahoma. It was just one Oklahoma, one Oklahoma that is distinguishable from another Oklahoma partly by purpose. This Oklahoma had the purpose of keeping the other Oklahoma in its place, and that place was subordinate. That, after all, was the object of suffrage requirements and segregation laws. No less was it the intent behind riots and lynchings, too. One Oklahoma was putting the other Oklahoma in its place. One Oklahoma also had the power to effect its purpose, and that power had no need to rely on occasional explosions of rage. Simple violence is, after all, the weapon of simple people, people with access to no other instruments of power at all. This Oklahoma had access to power more subtle, more regular, and more formal than that. Indeed, its ready access to such forms of power partially defined that Oklahoma. No, that Oklahoma is not the same as government, used here as a rhetorical trick to make one accountable for the acts of the other. Government was never the essence of that Oklahoma. Government was, however, always its potential instrument. Having access to government, however employed, if employed at all—just having it—defined this Oklahoma and was the essence of its power. The acts recounted here reveal that power in one form or another, often several. The Tulsa race riot is one example, but only an example and only one. Put alongside it earlier, less publicized pogroms—for that is what they were—in at least ten other Oklahoma towns. Include the systematic disfranchisement of the black electorate through constitutional amendment in 1910, reaffirmed through state statute in 1916. Add to that the constitution’s segregation of Oklahoma’s public schools, the First Legislature’s segregation of its public transportation, local segregation of Oklahoma neighborhoods through municipal ordinances in Tulsa and elsewhere, even the state wide segregation of public telephones by order of the corporation commission. Do not forget to include the lynchings of twenty-three African-Americans in twelve Oklahoma towns during the ten years leading to 1921. Stand back and look at those deeds now. In some government participated in the deed. In some government performed the deed. In none did government prevent the deed. In none did government punish the deed. And that, in the end, is what this inquiry and what these recommendations are all about. Make no mistake about it: There are members of this commission who are convinced that there is a compelling argument in law to order that present governments make

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Tulsa Race Riot (1921) monetary payment for past governments’ unlawful acts. Professor Alfred Brophy presses one form of that argument; there doubtless are others. This is not that legal argument but another one altogether. This is a moral argument. It holds that there are moral responsibilities here and that those moral responsibilities require moral responses now. It gets down to this: The 1921 riot is, at once, a representative historical example and a unique historical event. It has many parallels in the pattern of past events, but it has no equal for its violence and its completeness. It symbolizes so much endured by so many for so long. It does it, However, in one way that no other can: in the living flesh and blood of some who did endure it. These paradoxes hold answers to questions often asked: Why does the state of Oklahoma or the city of Tulsa owe anything to anybody? Why should any individual tolerate now spending one cent of one tax dollar over what happened so long ago? The answer is that these are not even the questions. This is not about individuals at all—not any more than the race riot or anything like it was about individuals. This is about Oklahoma—or, rather, it is about two Oklahomas. It must be about that because that is what the Tulsa race riot was all about, too. That riot proclaimed that there were two Oklahomas; that one claimed the right to push down, push out, and push under the other; and that it had the power to do that. That is what the Tulsa race riot has been all about for so long afterwards, why it has lingered not as a past event but lived as a present entity. It kept on saying that there remained two Oklahomas; that one claimed the right to be dismissive of, ignorant of, and oblivious to the other; and that it had the power to do that. That is why the Tulsa race riot can be about something else. It can be about making two Oklahomas one—but only if we understand that this is what reparation is all about. Because the riot is both symbolic and singular, reparations become both singular and symbolic, too. Compelled not legally by courts but extended freely by choice, they say that individual acts of reparation will stand as symbols that fully acknowledge and finally discharge a collective responsibility. Because we must face it: There is no way but by government to represent the collective, and there is no way but by reparations to make real the responsibility. Does this commission have specific recommendations about whether or not reparations can or should be made and the appropriate methods? Yes, it surely does. When commissioners went looking to do the right thing, that is what nearly all of them found and what they recommended in last year’s preliminary report. To be sure they had found the right thing, they have used this formal report to explore once more the distant terrain of the Tulsa race riot and the forbidding territory in which it lies. Now, they are certain. Reparations are the right thing to do. What else is there to do? What else is there to find? Source: Final Report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, http:// www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trrc/freport.htm (accessed July 18, 2010).

Bonus Army (1932) As hundreds of Washington, D.C., office workers gawked, General Douglas MacArthur ordered Major George Patton to advance on the enemy. Patton’s force included infantry with bayonets fixed, cavalry with drawn sabers, and six whippet tanks (seven-ton Renault tanks, vintage World War I). As the force moved out on the afternoon of July 28, 1932, a machine gun unit set up its gun. The foe was the Bonus Expeditionary Force, a group of middle-aged men, World War I veterans, in ragged and faded uniforms, standing in their Hooverville, a shanty town of tents and jerry-built, jerry-rigged structures. They stood in the streets, not believing that this army was moving on them. When they woke from their shock, some cursed and tossed bricks and bottles in the direction of the soldiers. Joined by D.C. police, the 600-man army advanced inexorably. Some camp inmates broke and ran while others stood their ground, preparing to defend with clubs and iron bars. Then the infantry halted, put on gas masks, and tossed gas grenades. As the advance resumed, the unarmed veterans fled. Spotty resistance persisted, and Patton’s men used the flat of their sword to dissuade the resisters. As cavalry chased the ragtag veterans, MacArthur rode up and down in his staff car, glorying in the destruction, in the discipline of his force that cleared the downtown area without firing a shot. Then his men set the camp afire, destroying what little the veterans possessed. The Great War took 3.5 million Americans from jobs that paid up to 10 times what they earned in the military. Over 116,000 died, and another 204,000 were wounded. The AEF veterans had insurance coverage, so there was no expectation that there would be any demand for additional compensation, particularly by those who had served without injury. For the returning disabled, there was a job-training program, but there was nothing for those suffering from shell shock or those who merely needed help readjusting. However, in the prosperous 1920s, surprises happened. Veterans wanted compensation for the wages lost while serving in the military. But racism, among other factors, defeated the bonus—many of the half million blacks who served demanded jobs in industries where they were barred before the war. White soldiers and sailors were among those who fought blacks, and had lynched some. In 1920, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce objected to the bonus

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because it feared the bonus would reward half a million southern blacks with $500 or $600 each and cause them to stop working until they had spent it all. In 1924, Congress passed, over veto by President Calvin Coolidge, a law that provided for compensation based on length of service, with extra pay for overseas service. In 1924, the economy was roaring and good jobs were abundant. Veterans willingly accepted the offer of a $1,000 bonus in 1945 instead of a present-year $400 based on $1 a day for stateside service, $1.25 for a day overseas. In 1929, the stock market collapsed, and the economy followed. By 1932, the Great Depression was at its worst, and many of the veterans had been unemployed for months if not years. Those who had something in 1924 had nothing in 1932 but the promise of a payment in 1945, the “Tombstone Bonus.” Both members of Congress and the public, particularly veterans, referred to early redemption at face value as a bonus. Veterans began organizing to push Congress to pay the bonus. Bonus opponents wanted to spend scarce money elsewhere in a depression that they were struggling to climb out of, and the money was not there. Veterans whose service entitled them to $50 or less, received cash. Those entitled to more than $50 received a bond that matured in 1945. Veterans whose rank was major or below with 60 days of service or more got $1 for each stateside day up to $500 and $1.25 for each overseas day up to $625. With compound interest over 21 years, the average bond payout in 1945 would be approximately $1,000. Initially, the veteran could borrow up to 22.5 percent of the face value, but Congress raised that to 50 percent in 1931 as a result of the Depression. By April 1932, outstanding loans totaled $1.248 billion on certificates with face values totaling $3.638 billion. The half-bonus loans authorized in 1931 over Hoover’s veto were insufficient during the worst times of the Great Depression. Bonuses averaged around $1,000, and immediate payment would mean $500 or so per veteran. Thus, Wright Patman (D-TX) introduced legislation to pay the balance immediately. The cost of the bonus was $2.39 billion. The administration was firm that the bonus would fuel inflation and break a federal budget already $2 billion in deficit. The government did not have the money, anyway. Congress established a trust fund for a 1945 payout. The plan was that each year for 20 years the trust fund received $112 million. That produced a 20-year total of $2.24 billion, enough with interest added to cover the burden. In 1932, it was far short, having received eight annual installments or $896 million. With interest, the fund held $991 million, less than half the 3.66 million outstanding certificates with a face value of $3.638 billion. The idea for the march came from Walter Waters of Portland, Oregon. Waters was without a job for 18 months before organizing the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF). The 34-year-old former sergeant’s movement began slowly but grew rapidly as the national press began publicizing it. The first marchers arrived in Washington, D.C.,

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in May 1932 and moved into parks and condemned buildings between the White House and the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once that area became overcrowded, they built the Anacostia Flats shantytown southeast of the Capitol. There they waited, their hardships eased somewhat by D.C.’s war-veteran superintendent of police, Pelham Glassford, who helped to arrange private medical and other aid. Organizers hoped for a million-man attendance but only 20,000 or so could come up with the bus or train fare, arrange the horse or mule drawn transport, or ride the rails. MacArthur’s enemy was those 20,000 veterans. The army consisted of black and white; foreign and native; white collar, blue collar, and no collar at all—truck drivers, coal miners, day labor of every American creed. Mostly they were white middle-aged men. Some brought their families. Many came to get away from their families’ despair—crying, hungry babies, rejection for job after job, the degrading handout from a censorious woman. The BEF camped in and around Washington, D.C., in the late spring and summer of 1932 while the Congress debated Patman’s latest bill. The first thing that Waters did as commander in chief of the BEF was to establish a military structure for the camps. The men organized into companies and regiments with a set chain of command. They had commissaries, roll call, and inspections. The army style kept the BEF focused on a single mission, enactment of the bonus. The discipline contrasted sharply with the New Era individualism. Waters banned begging, drinking, and radical agitation. His goal was to have the BEF stay where it was until Congress passed the bonus bill. Glassford moved the men into four empty buildings due for demolition in October to make way for new construction. The BEF overflowed the buildings and camped in the Mall and in two dozen other locations. Shelters were made of crates, tar paper, and tin cans, and whenever possible, flew an American flag. Glassford established a commissary and got donations from bakers, meat merchants, and so on. Medical and dental services were available at a 50-bed hospital. Policing was by a 300-man BEF force that also had the duty of keeping the 200 or so communists at bay. Still, despite the best efforts of Waters and Glassford, to outside observers, the BEF encampments looked like overgrown hobo jungles. Among the notable features of camp life were the Oliver twins. The seven-yearold boys boxed each other in the BEF boxing marathon and otherwise for nickels. Also, the Salvation Army established an outdoor library from tents in the mud. Evalyn McLean, owner of the Hope Diamond, was so upset by the hunger she saw that she stopped in a “greasy spoon” and ordered a thousand sandwiches and a thousand packs of cigarettes. Somehow, her order was completed. The BEF encampments were a must-see for tourists in Washington that summer, particularly the integrated living arrangements.

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The vigil at the Capitol occupied 12,000 BEF members for weeks. In June, the House passed Patman’s bill, but the Senate defeated it, 62–18, and prepared to adjourn. With worried onlookers fearing a riot or revolution, the BEF sang “America the Beautiful,” formed ranks, and marched back to their camps. Glassford’s goal was to have the BEF lose interest and leave, and many did; Hoover authorized $100,000 for tickets home but also provided that the ticket price would be deducted from the bonus when finally it was paid. About 6,000 BEF took the money—but many of them stayed anyway. A fourth of the veterans accepted government transportation home. Hoover tried to turn his attention to more pressing matters, the economic crisis and the November election. But a core of veterans, feeling sold out and having nowhere else to go, decided to stay. Waters declared that he and the BEF would stay until 1945 if necessary. He led daily demonstrations and marches in front of the Congress and White House. Through the summer, BEF frustrations grew and their mood soured. By July, Waters was claiming that 80,000 veterans had come to the capital. The police said 22,000. Locals provided them with coffee and sandwiches, even invited some of the women and children into their homes for the duration. But city commissioners were worried about riots and wanted the marchers out. They ordered Glassford to evict them on the pretense that they were preparing to demolish the buildings. Glassford had one building emptied without incident but declined to press the others. The commissioners told Hoover that Glassford had lost control, and Hoover sent in MacArthur. At this juncture, John Pace of Illinois brought in a contingent of communists to foment a riot, and the Washington powers, already oversensitive to communism, reacted with alarm. Hoover had reason to worry about communists. The communists led a hunger march on Washington in December 1931. Just weeks later in Pittsburgh, 12,000 jobless men marched behind a priest for unemployment legislation. A riot at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in March 1932 ended with four dead, over 50 wounded. The anticommunist mood was furthered by J. Edgar Hoover, already head of the FBI. He spread rumors about radical plots to blow up the White House. MacArthur had his own set of fears about the twin cancers of pacifism and communism. Others in government and the press referred to the needy veterans as the criminal fringe or beings of inferior blood. Some blamed demagogues and easily manipulated servile types. At least one congressman told veterans asking help to “go to Hell.” The climate was already tense when on July 28, Secretary of War Patrick Hurley ordered Glassford to empty the buildings of veterans so demolition could proceed. The veterans balked, and in the ensuing melee, Glassford and his assistant were injured, police opened fire, and two veterans died. Local government officials

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labeled the incident a serious riot and called on Hoover to bring in troops from Fort Myer. President Hoover sent in MacArthur to surround and clear the area, taking care not to harm women and children. MacArthur, reportedly against the advice of his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, entered the field at the head of his troops rather than staying back as an administrator should. After dispersing the BEF, MacArthur crossed the river and burned the shantytown at Anacostia. MacArthur was determined to rid the city of “communists,” and he disregarded two orders from Hoover, who now had second thoughts about the decision to rout the demonstrators, not to cross the river. When the battle ended, MacArthur held a press conference to state his case that the episode had been a communist-fomented riot and that he had acted to protect the president and the government. He also shunted responsibility onto the civilian officials, including the president. Having no alternative now that Anacostia Flats was aflame, Hoover backed MacArthur and labeled the BEF as radical. The total loss was two dead, 54 injured, and 135 arrested. The media and other critics rejected the administration’s explanation, and the mishandling of the BEF became an issue in the fall elections. Public opinion turned away from the official version, toward the critics’ position, and in the fall, the Republican president lost to the Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt. Liberals would have a propaganda tool for decades to come. After the battle, some of the veterans headed for Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where they had heard they would be welcome. After burial of the two dead in Arlington National Cemetery, the BEF remnants mostly drifted off. Some came back the next year and the year after, but the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, was no more inclined than Hoover to pay the bonus. He opposed special treatment for veterans, but, unlike Hoover who spurned the veterans, Roosevelt sent his wife to speak with the BEF in 1933. The Civilian Conservation Corps did take some of the anguish from unemployed veterans, and eventually in 1936, Congress overrode Roosevelt’s veto to pass a bonus. After the fact, a study of the Veterans Administration revealed that the BEF was 94 percent veterans, either army or navy. Hoover and MacArthur remained convinced through their lives that they had faced not a ragtag band of homeless, jobless veterans in need but an organized band of communist revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the U.S. government. MacArthur would over time attempt to downplay his role, to exaggerate his sympathy for the BEF. When next an American army came marching home millions strong, the U.S. government and the people were determined that there would be no repeat of the war on the Bonus Army. The next generation of veterans came home to the generous GI Bill, a law that enabled many to attend elite universities, many more to attend lesser colleges and trade schools, millions to buy homes in the suburbs,

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and millions to enter the middle class. That generation of veterans began their bonus march to middle-class status, ironically, in 1945. —John H. Barnhill See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike; World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading DePastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army. New York: Walker & Company, 2004. Hanlon, Michael E. “The Sad Tale of the Bonus Marchers.” The Great War Society. http:// www.worldwar1.com/dbc/bonusm.htm (accessed October 2008). Kingseed, Wyatt. “The Bonus Army: War in Washington.” American History Magazine, June 2004. http://www.historynet.com/the-bonus-army-war-in-washington.htm (accessed July 19, 2010). Ruder, Eric. The March of the Bonus Army. Socialistworker.org, August 17, 2007. http:// socialistworker.org/2007-2/640/640_08_BonusArmy.shtml (accessed July 19, 2010). WGBH. The Bonus March (May–July, 1932), The American Experience: MacArthur. People & Events. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pande AMEX89.html (accessed October 2008). Wheeler, Linda. “Routing a Ragtag Army: The Washington Century.” Washington Post, April 12, 1999. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/2000/bonus0412.htm (accessed July 19, 2010).

Battle of Anacostia Flats (1932) During the Great Depression, in the summer of 1932, World War I veterans by the tens of thousands encamped in Washington, D.C., and lobbied Congress to pass a bill authorizing immediate payment of an annuity, based on length of military service and number of months overseas, due them in 1945. President Herbert Hoover resisted early payment of the “bonus” because veterans’ benefits were already 25 percent of his 1932 budget. Nevertheless, he ordered that the 60,000 BEF members receive tents, cots, rations, and medical care while awaiting congressional action. When the Senate voted against Wright Patman’s bonus bill in July, most of the BEF took the federal offer of transportation and left Washington, D.C. Approximately 10,000 remained, including a few hundred communists, in various camps in the capital area. On July 21, Washington, D.C., police received orders to shut down BEF sites near the Capitol. On July 28, 40 BEF protesters tried to reoccupy an abandoned building due for demolition. Police chief Pellham Glassford fell after being hit by a brick. His assistant received a skull fracture. When the crowd pressed forward, two policemen fired, killing two marchers. Fearing loss of control, the district government requested federal troops. Reluctantly, Hoover ordered troops in but specified that they would be unarmed and would merely escort marchers to their camps near the Anacostia River. General Douglas MacArthur had a long history of difficulty in acknowledging that civilians had authority over the military. By 1930, MacArthur was army chief of staff, and he commanded the forces against the Bonus Marchers. MacArthur’s politics were extremely conservative, and he saw communists everywhere–including in Anacostia Flats. Although in June, his staff intelligence office reported that only three of the 26 BEF leaders had communist ties, MacArthur claimed that in attacking the BEF, he was stopping the vanguard of an incipient communist overthrow of the government. MacArthur sent infantry under Major George Patton against the men. Meanwhile, cavalry advanced with drawn sabers and drove the veterans from their shantytowns. Hoover’s army secretary ordered the army to halt and not cross the river to Anacostia Flats. MacArthur’s aide, Dwight Eisenhower, said later that MacArthur responded that he was too busy and did not need outsiders sending in orders. MacArthur gave tenants several hours to vacate the campsite before his men burned it to the ground, ending the battle. The Battle of Anacostia Flats lasted eight hours and injured hundreds, including two tear-gassed babies and a boy whose leg was run through by a bayonet. One of the tear-gassed was among the four who died. Although many backed MacArthur’s actions as necessary if unpalatable, the press was strongly condemnatory. When Drew Pearson of the Washington Post

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labeled MacArthur a potential dictator, MacArthur sued for $1 million but dropped the matter when threatened with disclosure that he had paid to stop publication of his letters to his Philippine mistress. Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, who considered MacArthur a man on horseback, one of the most dangerous men in the United States, reportedly told a friend that the raid had ensured his election. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army. New York: Walker & Company, 2004. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Gallery Seven: From Hero to Scapegoat: The Battle of Anacostia Flats. http://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/Hooverstory/ gallery07/gallery07.html (accessed August 2008). Sanders, Richard. “Bonus Army.” Press for Conversion! 53 (March 2004). http:// coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/bonus_army.html (accessed July 19, 2010). Sanders, Richard. “General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)” Press for Conversion! 53 (March 2004). http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/macarthur.html (accessed July 19, 2010).

Great Depression (1930s) As the world entered the Great Depression in the early 1930s, U.S. gross national product (output of goods and services) fell 30 percent between 1929 and 1933, and only in 1939 did GNP return to the 1929 level. Banks failed, businesses laid off employees, farmers and homeowners lost their properties to foreclosure, and unemployment rose. Unemployment between 1930 and 1939 averaged 18.2 percent. Response to the Depression redefined government as activist and made the Democrats the dominant party for decades to come. The stock market had been enjoying a speculative boom between 1927 and 1929. When the market fell 17 percent on Thursday, October 24, 1929 from the previous day’s high of 329.94, bankers intervened and the market recovered. When the next Monday and again on Tuesday the market dropped, the bankers’ effort was not enough. By November 13, the Dow hit 198.69 points. Initially, the 1929 break seemed merely an adjustment, perhaps a recession such as that after the war. The market rebounded to 248 by year’s end and continued rising in early 1930. But market recovery did not translate to economic recovery. Unemployment rose, but President Herbert Hoover rejected the dole as harmful and encouraged local government and private charity to aid the needy. By 1931, states were offering aid, but not enough. New York direct work relief by 1932 helped

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only a fourth of the needy families, and state funds per person averaged $1.67. In 1932, Cook County (Chicago) fired police, firemen, and teachers (whose pay was eight months in arrears.) Breadlines and Hoovervilles were a national sight. Farm prices dropped by half in the first four years, and world trade fell 65 percent in dollar volume, 25 percent in unit volume. Neighbors refused to bid on foreclosed farms or moved the furniture of evicted neighbors back into their homes. Suicide rates rose from 14 to 17 per 100,000. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in the spring of 1933, approximately a third of the non-farm workforce, 15 million people, was unemployed. Harlem in 1932 had a 50 percent unemployment rate and black ownership fell from 30 percent to 5 percent by 1935. Only Germany matched the U.S. unemployment rate. The gross national product in the spring of 1933 was at $55.7 billion, down from $103.8 billion. Forty percent of Mississippi farms were at auction on inauguration day. In the Midwest, drought exacerbated the economic downturn. Schools shortened both the school year and the school day. The Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency in 1929. In 1933, a Democrat was in the White House, and Democrats dominated Congress, 310–117 in the House and 60–35 in the Senate. Democratic dominance allowed the nascent welfare state, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and federal aid to families. The depression ended only when World War II mobilized the world’s armies and their industrial bases. The depression’s end required a major war with rationing, six million defense workers, six million soldiers, and huge deficits to fund the war machine. U.S. unemployment fell to 1.9 percent in 1943. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression. New York: Times Books, 1993. National Park Service. “The Great Depression (1929–1939),” Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/great-depression.htm (accessed August 2008). Samuelson, Robert J. “Great Depression,” Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. http:// www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/GreatDepression.html (accessed August 2008).

Hooverville A Hooverville was a Depression-era shantytown on the edge of a city or town, home to the poor and homeless. Hoovervilles were the final recourse of those who had no homes or more fortunate family members still able to take them into

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Shantytown outside of Portland, Oregon, in April 1936. When the failing economy did not respond to President Herbert Hoover's initiatives, the Great Depression worsened, and Hoover was blamed for the collapse. Hooverville was the name given to shantytowns that were occupied by those most severely hurt by the economic calamity. (Library of Congress)

their homes. The name arose because people blamed President Herbert Hoover for their plight and the failure of government to help them cope with economic collapse. Hoovervilles were characterized by shacks and jerry-built structures of whatever material was at hand. Would-be residents scavenged for tarpaper, lumber scraps, tin, cardboard, canvas and whatever else they could find. The lucky ones had carpentry skills and could build reasonably solid housing. Masons built 20foot-tall shanties of old bricks and stone. The less skilled combined packing boxes and other discarded material into primitive shelter. Empty water mains were the recourse of the most unfortunate. Central Park in New York City had one of the largest Hoovervilles. Other Hoovervilles were in Midwest and West Coast cities as well as points in between. In the Mississippi River Valley, drought brought crop failure and loss of farms and forced former farmers into Hoovervilles. As the Depression persisted in the 1930s, homelessness spread as increasing numbers lost their homes to delinquent taxes and foreclosed mortgages after they lost their jobs. The alternative was taking to the roads. Between 1929 and 1933, over 100,000 businesses failed, and Hoover left office in 1933 with 13 million unemployed, nearly a fourth of the total workforce.

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Attempts to eliminate Hoovervilles were normally unsuccessful, and governments proved unable to deal with the health issues that shantytowns without sanitation created. Cities generally took on New Deal programs only reluctantly and balked at most, particularly efforts to establish city housing authorities and public housing. Opponents argued that public housing would depress already-low property values and smacked of communism. Corrupt government officials often took what assistance was available before it could reach the needy sick, hungry, and homeless. When Seattle’s homeless established their Hooverville, the health department had it burned down. The men rebuilt, and again the city destroyed the shantytown. The third time the Hooverville was dug into the ground, and the city agreed to allow it to remain if the residents established adequate sanitation. Other cities sometimes evicted residents for trespass, but most ignored the Hoovervilles if they were quiet. In some of the larger Hoovervilles, the residents organized, chose a mayor, and established committees to deal with sanitation and other community matters. Commonly, the more fortunate came to the Hoovervilles to gawk. Usually they found a resident to serve as guide and point out the various sights. Donations went into a community chest shared by all Hooverville residents. Other residents resorted to begging. A University of Washington sociology student bought a shack in the King County Hooverville in 1934 for $15 and wrote a master’s thesis, “Hooverville, a Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle,” based on interviews with 650 residents. There were also Hoover blankets, newspapers serving as blankets; the Hoover flag, or empty pocket turned inside out; and Hoover leather, cardboard that lined shoes and covered holes in soles. A car pulled by horses because the owner could not afford gasoline was a Hoover wagon; in Canada, a Bennett buggy. With the beginning of World War II and the end of the Great Depression, shanty eradication programs destroyed Hoovervilles, which slowly faded from memory. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading “The Great Depression, the 1930s: Hoovervilles.” U-S-History.com. http://www.u-s-history .com/pages/h1642.html (accessed July 19, 2010). Lange, Greg. “Hooverville: Shantytown of Seattle’s Great Depression,” HistoryLink, January 18, 1999. http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file _id=741 (accessed July 19, 2010). Lometa. “Hooverville,” Everything2.com, April 19, 2000. http://everything2.com/e2node/ Hooverville (accessed July 19, 2010).

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MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964) Douglas MacArthur, son of General Arthur MacArthur, was born in 1880 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He had a distinguished military career characterized by rapid promotion due to competence and connections. He was bold to the point of insubordination. He was first in the 1903 class at West Point and received a commission in the Corps of Engineers. His first duty station was in the Philippines, where in 1904, he received the rank of first lieutenant. He served with his father and observed at Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese War until he became aide-de-camp to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. He observed at Vera Cruz, made major at the suggestion of General Leonard Wood, and was a division commander in World War I, receiving 13 decorations and seven citations for bravery. In 1918, he became brigadier and subsequently became the youngest division commander in France, youngest commandant of West Point, and, in 1922 in the Philippines, the youngest full general. He served as president of the American Olympic committee before becoming the youngest army chief of staff in 1930. MacArthur was noted through his career as a modernizer, a brave soldier, and a right-wing zealot. His behavior in 1932 in leading cavalry, infantry, and tanks against the Bonus Army encampments in Washington, D.C., was characteristic. In justifying his actions by claiming that he was forestalling a communist revolution, MacArthur was true to his strong belief that the Bonus March was actually a communist plot to overthrow the government, not just an effort to get money from the government. Not even general staff intelligence information that only three of the BEF leaders had communist ties was able to shake his conviction. He also disregarded reports that the rank and file were overwhelmingly anticommunist and really were just needy veterans trying to get their bonus early. When President Herbert Hoover ordered federal troops to cordon off the veterans who resisted Police Chief Pelham Glassford’s order to evacuate condemned buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, MacArthur sent in Major George Patton and tanks, infantry, and cavalry with weapons drawn. Gas, bayonets, clubs, and sabers inflicted hundreds of injuries. With the veterans in retreat, Hoover ordered MacArthur to halt. MacArthur disregarded the order and sent his troops across the Anacostia River, burning the camp. American public opinion was overwhelmingly favorable, but press treatment was not. When the dust settled, Hoover was a former president, Franklin Roosevelt, who regarded MacArthur as a major menace to U.S. democracy, was in the White House, and MacArthur was in the Philippines, safely out of the way. With MacArthur’s reputation in tatters, newspaper writers took on the general. Political gossip columnist Drew Pearson criticized MacArthur and reported that

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MacArthur had become major general due to the efforts of his father-in-law, Edward T. Stotesbury, MacArthur sued for $1.75 million. When Pearson’s source, MacArthur’s former wife, refused to testify in court, Pearson convinced MacArthur’s Philippine mistress to give him love letters from MacArthur. The general dropped his suit. In 1935 MacArthur returned to the Philippines to organize the defense of the island chain. Retired from the army in 1937, he became military advisor to the Philippines. Recalled to active duty as a major general in 1941, he attempted unsuccessfully to defend the Philippines and became a hero again in the Pacific theater. After World War II, he rebuilt Japan on the American model. He commanded in Korea (before being relieved by President Truman for insubordination in rejecting civilian oversight of military. MacArthur was an icon of the right wing in American politics even after his death in 1964. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading History Learning Site. “Douglas MacArthur.” http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/ douglas_macarthur.htm (accessed September 2008). Lisio, Donald J. The President and Protest. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1994. Manchester, William. American Caesar. New York: Dell, 1983. “MacArthur.” Spartacus.schoolnet. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmacarthur .htm (accessed September 2008). Public Broadcasting Service. The American Experience; People & Events. “The Bonus March (May–July 1932).” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/ pandeAMEX89.html (accessed September 2008).

Veterans’ Rights Veterans through history have enjoyed political clout and the ability to menace the incumbent government. Caesar appeased his veterans. When in 1783, 400 Pennsylvania veterans marched on the state house and demanded Congress provide their back pay, Congress bailed out, the army removed the veterans, and the United States established a capital protected from its citizens, Washington, D.C. After World War I about four million veterans returned to find that replacement workers were not willing to step aside and give them their jobs back. To compensate for their wartime pay of a dollar a day, Congress authorized them to receive bonuses for their wartime and overseas duty. But Wilson and Coolidge

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consistently vetoed bonus bills. In 1924, Congress finally overrode the veto and authorized a bonus of approximately $1000 per veteran—payable in 1945. In effect, veterans had an insurance policy that matured in two decades, what many of them referred to as their “tombstone bonus” because they expected to be dead by 1945. When the Depression struck, veterans were homeless and jobless in large numbers, and agitation grew for immediate payment. To Washington, D.C., marched 45,000 World War I veterans in 1932. They established their integrated shantytowns and vowed to stay until 1945 if necessary. The Bonus Army attempted to press Congress to act, and in 1932 the House passed a bill by Wright Patman authorizing $2.4 billion for veterans cashing in their 1945 certificates. The Senate defeated the bill, and the BEF, despite fears it would attack Congress, merely sang “America,” and left. Fearing a revolution, Hoover sent in the troops and evicted the first Bonus Army. The BEF disbanded, but a second formed in 1933 and a third in 1934. President Roosevelt, as had the previous four presidents, refused to support the bonus. Roosevelt had a consistent history of opposing extra privileges for veterans. Instead he sent the veterans to “veterans’ rehabilitation camps” where they made a dollar a day. When the most severe hurricane on record hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935, killing over 250 veterans, a shocked Congress overrode Roosevelt’s veto in 1936 and passed a Patman bill that authorized immediate payment of the war bonus. In 1936 the post office delivered $1.9 billion to 3.5 million veterans. In a fireside chat of 1943 on the 11th anniversary of the battle of Anacostia Flats, Roosevelt promised that never again would the United States mistreat its veterans. With the liberation of Europe on the horizon in 1944, veterans’ organizations and Congress began exploring ways of preventing a repeat of the BEF abuse. The result was the GI Bill of Rights. Some politicians protested a law that would give black veterans money, and elitist educators worried that veterans with educational rights would dilute the quality of their universities. Even so, Roosevelt overcame his bias against veteran privilege and signed the bill into law. In 1945, less than 5 percent of Americans had college degrees, and less than 40 percent of soldiers were high school graduates. By 1956 the GI Bill had added 450,000 engineers, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, and over a million other college educated members of the workforce. Veterans Administration loans built 11 million of the 13 million houses built in the 1950s. The strong middle class that arose after World War II was the legacy of the thousands of homeless, jobless World War I veterans who protested and encamped and demanded veterans’ benefits. —John H. Barnhill

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Further Reading Branch, Taylor. “Justice for Warriors.” New York Review of Books 54, no. 6 (April 12, 2007). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20058 (accessed July 19, 2010). Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army. New York: Walker & Company, 2004. . “Vets Owe Debt to WWI’s ‘Bonus Army.’ ” Veterans Day 2004. http://www.military .com/NewContent/0,13190,111104_BonusArmy,00.html (accessed July 19, 2010). “March of the Bonus Army.” DAV Magazine, May–June 2006. http://findarticles.com/p/ articles/mi_m0LFT/is_3_48/ai_n16419268 (accessed July 19, 2010).

Waters, Walter W. (1898–1959) The leader of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, Waters was a 34-year-old former army sergeant with a history of mental illness, possibly war-related, and chronic unemployment. Walters was “uninspiring” according to the Nation’s Mauritz A. Hallgren, but to others, he was charismatic and able to inspire the veterans who backed him as their leader. On March 5, 1932, in the depths of the Depression, Waters stood up at a veterans’ meeting in Portland, Oregon, and suggested that everybody should hop a freight and head for Washington to lobby for the bonus. Nobody took him up. On May 11, with a new Patman bill buried in committee, Walters revived his suggestion for a march on Washington, and 250 men signed on. The BEF was born. The next day, 300 men with combined assets of $30 boarded freight cars still redolent of cow manure. The Oregon group arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 29. There, they joined earlier arrivals in Anacostia and 26 smaller sites. Waters anticipated the BEF would grow to 20,000 members. Waters organized his hobo band into an army and established checkpoints to block entry into the camp by anyone without a legitimate bonus certificate and an honorable discharge. The police checked the names daily, and the Secret Service was on watch. Waters arranged sanitation, food, and relations with local officials, especially police chief Pelham Glassford. He established rules: “No panhandling, no liquor, no radical talk.” Glassford anointed Waters on condition that the leader eliminate the Illinois communists under John T. Pace. The BEF consisted of farm workers, factory workers, and other semiskilled workers as well as mechanics, professionals, and white-collar workers. The leaders were generally middle-class patriots. Many belonged to the American Legion. Waters’s military police used such force that Glassford ordered Waters to back off,

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provoking Waters to say “To hell with Glassford!” and block distribution of food to the communists (a move overruled by Glassford). The communists refused to leave. Again, when Waters attempted to prevent Pace from holding a meeting at a ball park by the Anacostia camp, claiming that the loyal veterans would tear Pace to pieces, Glassford overruled him. When the House passed the Patman bill, the BEF was upbeat. On June 17, the Senate voted it down, and Waters quelled a potential riot by having the veterans sing “America.” The mood broken, they dispersed to their camps. After that, many BEF members headed home, but Walters vowed to stay and fight to 1945 if necessary. When Glassford wanted the marchers to relocate, Waters responded that all veterans with homes were headed to them. The remainder had only the shanties for homes. He was working on an effort to relocate them to Florida. In the meantime he was trying to get them productive work and temporary shelter at Camp Bartlett on the outskirts of the District. He asked only for time to find new shelter for 250 women and children. Shortly before the Battle of Anacostia Flats, Waters organized the Khaki Shirts, to some a fascist organization. He later worked in a government job before forming the National Soldiers’ Bonus League of America. In World War II, he served in the navy. He died in 1959 in Walla Walla, Washington. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading DePastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army. New York: Walker & Company, 2004. Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. “Marching on History.” Smithsonian, February 2003. http://www.thebonusarmy.com/smithsonian.pdf (accessed September 2008). Marchand, Roland. “The Bonus Army in Washington: A Documentary Problem.” A History. Teacher’s Bag of Tricks. http://marchand.ucdavis.edu/lessons/bonusarmy/bonus_army .html (accessed September 2008).

Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia: Excerpts of President Herbert Hoover’s Letter to the District Commissioner and from His Press Conference (1932) In response to pressure from World War I veterans groups, Congress enacted a measure in 1924 that gave veterans a certificate entitling them to a bonus payment of $500 in 1945. The hardships of the Great Depression led many veterans to call for immediate payment of the bonus. In 1932, some 20,000 veterans formed the “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” which marched on Washington demanding that Congress immediately honor the certificates. When Congress refused to authorize the bonus payment, but did supply travel funds for the bonus

Bonus Army (1932) marchers, many returned home. However, a large number still remained in makeshift camps near the Capitol, where they clashed with District police. Fearing a communist-led insurrection, President Hoover ordered federal troops to remove the remaining bonus marchers. In late July, Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur ordered an attack on the marchers, which was led by Majors Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton. The attack dispersed the marchers but left two veterans and two police officers dead. Reproduced here are excerpts from President Hoover’s letter to District Commissioner Reichelderfer and from the president’s press conference outlining his firm intention of maintaining law and order in Washington, even against the bonus veterans. Note the president’s contention that most of the disorder is not the work of the veterans, but of non-veteran agitators. White House, Washington July 29, 1932 Honorable Luther H. Reichelderfer Commissioner, District of Columbia My Dear Mr. Commissioner: In response to your information that the police of the District were overwhelmed by an organized attack by several thousand men and were unable to maintain law and order, I complied with your request for aid from the Army to the police. It is a matter of satisfaction that, after the arrival of this assistance, the mobs which were defying the municipal government were dissolved without the firing of a shot or the loss of life. I wish to call attention of the District Commissioners to the fact that martial law has not been declared; that responsibility for order still rests upon your commission and the police. The civil government of Washington must function uninterrupted. The Commissioners, through their own powers, should now deal with this question decisively. It is the duty of the authorities of the District to at once find the instigators of this attack on the police and bring them to justice. It is obvious that, after the departure of the majority of the veterans, subversive influences obtained control of the men remaining in the District, a large part of whom were not veterans, . . . and inaugurated and organized this attack. They were undoubtedly led to believe that the civil authorities could be intimidated with impunity because of attempts to conciliate by lax enforcement of city ordinances and laws in many directions. I shall expect the police to strictly enforce every ordinance of the District in every part of the city. I wish every violator of the law to be instantly arrested and prosecuted under due process of law. I have requested the law enforcement agencies of the Federal Government to cooperate with the District authorities to this end. There is no group, no matter what its origins, that can be allowed either to violate the laws of this city or to intimidate the Government. Yours faithfully, Herbert Hoover

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Bonus Army (1932) President Hoover’s Press Conference (July 20, 1932) The President said: A Challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly. After months of patient indulgence, the Government met overt lawlessness as it always must be met if the cherished processes of self-government are to be preserved. We cannot tolerate the abuse of Constitutional rights by those who would destroy all government, no matter who they may be. Government cannot be coerced by mob rule. The Department of Justice is pressing its investigation into the violence which forced the call for Army detachments, and it is my sincere hope that those agitators who inspired yesterday’s attack upon the Federal authority may be brought speedily to trial in the civil courts. There can be no safe harbor in the United States of America for violence. . . . The first obligation of my office is to uphold and defend the Constitution . . . and the law. This I propose always to do. Source: W. Myles, ed., The State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), 244–245.

Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934) The Toledo Auto-Lite Strike was conducted by a federal labor union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor against the Electric Auto-Lite Company of Toledo, Ohio, from April 12 to June 3, 1934. The strike is considered one of the three most important labor actions of 1934 that helped ignite the resurgent union movement during the New Deal. The others included the West Coast Waterfront Strike at San Francisco and the Minneapolis General Strike. The Auto-Lite strike also included the violent clash named the “Battle of Toledo” that pitted striking workers and their supporters against local police and Ohio National Guardsmen. Henry Ford represented the auto industry’s adherence to the open shop policy through his famous “Five-Dollar-Day” profit-sharing and labor program that relied on deskilled work and technology. Additionally, the only strong national labor grouping, the American Federation of Labor, had its basis in craft unionism, with little sympathy for unskilled industrial workers. The enormous growth of the auto industry during the 1920s, the prestige of Ford and other manufacturers, and the continued use of federal court–backed labor injunctions against striking workers all contributed to the limited scope of organizing. The abortive 1926 campaign of the communist-backed Auto Workers Union drew the wrath not only of companies and courts, but also the AFL’s rejection of militancy. The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the pro-union provisions of Section 7a offered a new opportunity to the AFL and other labor organizers. The AFL had traditionally used federal labor unions (FLUs) to organize workers not affiliated with one of the craft-based internationals of the federation. Once the workers were organized, the FLU would then be disbanded, as members were reaffiliated with one of the craft unions. Despite the conflict over craft and industrial unionism, the AFL’s leadership recognized that it had to act or surrender ground to more militant, communist-backed labor organizers. Beginning in September 1933, the AFL established a number of FLUs, most notably at General Motors Buick division in Flint, Michigan, two in the Fisher Body division in Detroit, and one at Hudson Motor Car Company in Detroit. Unlike the FLUs’ setup at the major companies, local organizers created others at the smaller companies and parts suppliers such as Electric Auto-Lite and its subsidiaries in Toledo, Ohio.

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During March 1934, the four major FLUs voted to strike unless recognition, wage, and hiring demands were met. Unsure of the strength of the federal unions to withstand a strike and the AFL’s own ambivalent stance toward industrial unions, AFL president William Green urged them to rescind the strike notice. Deeply concerned that a strike would stir both additional labor strife and derail economic recovery efforts, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the National Labor Board to hear the workers’ grievances, and the FLUs postponed the strike. On March 25, the board offered a solution, and though hostile to company unions (permitted under Section 7a), the AFL’s leadership endorsed the settlement. This action, however, sapped the confidence of FLU members resulting in a decline from around 32,000 workers to just over 18,000 by the end of the spring of 1934. Moreover, it offered the opportunity for more radical, left-leaning organizers to take a greater role in union organizing. Toledo, also known as the “Glass City,” had that industry as its basis, but it also had the Willys-Overland Motor Company, one of the smaller producers of cars and trucks, and a number of parts suppliers. FLU Local 18384 was established by local organizers and did not have the level of control imposed on it as did the other AFL-affiliated unions. It also did not have one firm as its focus as did the Buick and Hudson Motor FLUs. Instead, it had a base in the independently owned Electric Auto-Lite and three of its local subsidiary companies, giving the union a basis for financial stability. This encouraged militancy among the FLU’s members, and on February 23, 1934, the Auto-Lite members began a recognition strike backed by nearly all workers and, after five days, won some concessions. The settlement agreed to by the AFL in the four largest FLUs at the same time, however, undercut these efforts and significantly eroded worker support. Auto-Lite president Clem Miniger’s refusal to continue negotiations prompted Local 18384 to vote for a second strike to begin on April 12. The AFL-backed Central Labor Council (CLC) formed a subcommittee of the largest area unions to support the strike, but as only a quarter of Auto-Lite workers joined the picket lines, the strike effort faltered. At this point, FLU 18384 began to work with the far-left American Workers Party (AWP) led by A. J. Muste, a minister in the Reformed Church of America, with its executive secretary Louis Budenz as the local liaison. The Lucas County Unemployed League (LCUL) had already been operating prior to the strike as the local AWP entity focused on organizing the unemployed to prevent their participation as strikebreakers. Once picketing began, Auto-Lite sought court injunctions to stop picketing in front of the plant gates and received one limiting the overall number to 25 at any one time. In defiance, the AWP and FLU 18384 placed between 30 and 60 picketers outside the plant each day with dozens arrested and brought before the court on charges of contempt. The courts, filled with cheering, singing supporters, released

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picketers after handing down brief sentences and fines. Local media and public relations efforts helped build public support for the strikers. As the strike dragged on and the courts proved ineffective, the Auto-Lite company purchased tear gas, hired additional private security personnel, and contacted the Lucas County sheriff’s department for special deputies. Company officials requested deputies, as they feared that local police, already unhappy with layoffs and cuts to wages, had started to openly sympathize with the strikers and proved reluctant to act against them. Company officials also hired 1,500 replacement workers as strikebreakers and brought many into the plant by May 20. Upon learning of this, the AWP then engaged in mass picketing, with Budenz speaking before an estimated crowd of a thousand strikers and supporters. During the next three days, the number of picketers rose to around 6,000 by May 23. A clash that day between Lucas County sheriff’s deputies and the crowds of picketers ended with tear gas and at least 20 injuries, including gunshot wounds. Early on the morning of May 24, 900 Ohio National Guardsmen arrived at the plant. Tensions continued to build throughout the day, and by late that evening, the Guardsmen clashed again with the assembled throng, producing further tear-gassing and ending with Guardsmen firing into the crowd. The shots resulted in the deaths of two members of the crowd. By May 26, rioting died down, and on May 31, the bulk of the Guardsmen ordered withdrawn. President Roosevelt’s special mediator, Charles Taft, arrived and facilitated two weeks of negotiations that resulted on June 5 with a compromise agreement that gave the union recognition and many of its key negotiation demands. The Auto-Lite strike helped to move the labor movement away from the AFL’s traditional reluctance for militancy. The formation of the United Auto Workers under the umbrella of the Congress of Industrial Organizations would provide stronger leadership for future efforts. In 1935, Toledo autoworkers would successfully strike Chevrolet, leading to the de facto recognition of the union by General Motors and paving the way for the even more successful Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937. —Matthew Daley See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

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Further Reading Bernstein, Irving. The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1970. Borden, Timothy. “Toledo Is a Good Town for Working People: The Labor Question in 20th-Century America.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999. Fine, Sidney. The Automobile under the Blue Eagle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Hall, Roger H. “Sam Pollock and the National Unemployed League in Toledo, 1932– 1936.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 65, no.3 (Summer 1993): 103–25. Korth, Philip A., and Margaret R. Beegle, eds. I Remember Like Today: The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988. Messer-Kruse, Timothy. Banksters, Bosses, and Smart Money: A Social History of the Great Toledo Bank Crash of 1931. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Miller, Gregory M. “A Social History of Automobile Workers in Toledo, 1907–1935.” MA thesis, University of Toledo, 2000. Muste, A. J. “The Battle of Toledo.” Nation, June 6, 1934. Robinson, JoAnn. Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. “Two Slain, Score Injured, As National Guard Fires on Toledo Strike Rioters.” New York Times, May 25, 1934. “U.S. Seeks Truce as Strikers, Deputies Mass at Auto-Lite.” Toledo News-Bee, May 23, 1934.

American Federation of Labor (AFL) The American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew out of dissatisfied members of the Knights of Labor during the 1880s. This new union grouping would remain the largest such organization even after the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. The AFL limited membership to groups and organizations made up of workers and emphasizing the autonomy of each trade union. To that end, the AFL took on three functions for its affiliates. It first organized nonunionized workers, spread information and brought potential leaders together, and gave financial support to newly organized unions. Further, despite the socialist leanings of Samuel Gompers and other founding members, the AFL adopted a more conservative “pure and simple” union stance that eschewed politics for worker-related issues. These included concern with working conditions and pay and control over jobs. This form of “business unionism” emphasized worker and union contribution to business profits and national economic growth, rather than challenging the structural tenets of capitalism. Initially, the AFL conducted an open membership policy that drew radical and socialist workers, semiskilled and unskilled, women, and African Americans as members. As the only national labor organization after the 1880s, it also permitted the membership of industrial unions including the United Mine Workers. As an umbrella organization, the AFL used its position to mediate conflicts among members. The AFL also encouraged affiliates at the local level to form central labor councils in major urban areas to further organizing efforts. The economic and social upheavals of the 1890s, however, pushed the AFL to focus more on skilled workers in craft unions partly made up of white men. All those who did not fit that category were now viewed as competition and a direct threat to any worker advances. Employers began to use labor injunctions, as in the Pullman Strike of 1894, to utilize the power of the courts against strikers. This and other legislation effectively criminalized labor-organizing efforts. While reluctant to engage in the legislative and political process, the AFL took an active role in the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. The Supreme Court, however, limited its provisions by a series of narrow interpretations. New Deal labor policies directly benefitted the AFL as it embarked on a series of organizing efforts. Though it expelled the Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Organizations for their sanctioning of worker militancy in industrial unions, the AFL’s drive to remain larger than the CIO made it condone just such practices. Despite the gains made by both union organizations, the AFL could not block the antiwar Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 nor halt the most damaging impact of McCarthyism on left-oriented affiliates. As with the CIO, the expulsion of leftist

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members ended whatever radicalism existed in the AFL and moved the entity toward the more consumerist-oriented policies of postwar liberals. These pressures, the weakened position of the CIO, and the desire for a unified front prompted the merger that formed the AFL-CIO. The greater size and financial resources of the AFL made the merger not one of equals and left the AFL’s leadership intact. —Matthew Daley

Further Reading Galenson, Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McCartin, Joseph A. Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Battle of Toledo (1934) The Battle of Toledo refers to a series of protests and violent confrontations between local police, Ohio National Guardsmen, and strikers outside the main Electric Auto-Lite Company automobile parts supplier in Toledo, Ohio, from May 21 to 26, 1934. These clashes took place during the strike against the AutoLite company that had initially started on April 12 after the collapse of negotiations between the American Federation of Labor backed Federal Labor Union Local 18384, a multiemployer union that drew its members from the Electric Auto-Lite Company, two of its subsidiaries, and the larger Spicer Manufacturing Company. The decentralized nature of the local permitted a strike against one division while others worked, thereby preserving the financial stability of the union unlike those focused on a unified corporation. Additionally, since Auto-Lite had independent, local ownership, it could not withstand strikes, as could General Motors making it an ideal if unplanned target. Throughout the spring of 1934, the union rejected the settlement and attempted to gain both recognition and better wages for members at Electric Auto-Lite. By April, negotiations had deadlocked, but the union had gained further public support and also that of the Marxist American Workers Party (AWP) and its affiliate the Lucas County Unemployed League (LCUL). The inclusion of these groups

Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934)

provided the leadership and organizing savvy that the AFL withheld from more militant locals, giving it the edge it needed during the strike. Picketing and arrests began in May, but little violence resulted. Upon the threat of 1,500 strikebreakers, the number of picketers grew to an estimated 6,000 by May 23. A clash that day between Lucas County sheriff’s deputies and the crowds of picketers ended with tear gas and at least 20 injuries including gunshot wounds. Early on the morning of May 24, 900 Ohio National Guardsmen arrived at the Auto-Lite plant and escorted strikebreaking workers and local deputies out of the plant. But the atmosphere became increasingly charged, and late that evening, Guardsmen and the assembled throng clashed. This resulted in further teargassing and guardsmen firing into the crowd ending in the deaths of two men, Frank Hubay and Steve Cygon. Neither man was an Auto-Lite worker but had come to show their support for the striking workers. The rioting had subsided by May 26, rioting died down and on May 31 the bulk of the guardsmen ordered withdrawn. The strike ended on June 5 with a compromise agreement that gave the union recognition and the labor movement the impetus to move away from the AFL’s traditional hostility to worker militancy. Though it would face opposition and setbacks, the hard-edged working-class solidarity forged during the Depression would also begin to push union leadership to respond more effectively to the issues facing workers. Mobilized workers in Toledo struck again during 1935 at the Chevrolet transmission plant, winning significant concessions, avoiding the violence of the Auto-Lite Strike, and setting the stage for the formation of the United Auto Workers union and its 1937 triumph in the Flint Sit-Down Strike. —Matthew Daley

Further Reading Borden, Timothy. “Toledo Is a Good Town for Working People: The Labor Question in 20th-Century America.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999. Fine, Sidney. The Automobile under the Blue Eagle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Korth, Philip A., and Margaret R. Beegle, eds. I Remember Like Today: The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988. Miller, Gregory M. “A Social History of Automobile Workers in Toledo, 1907–1935.” MA thesis, University of Toledo, 2000. Muste, A. J. “The Battle of Toledo.” The Nation, June 6, 1934. “Two Slain, Score Injured, As National Guard Fires on Toledo Strike Rioters.” New York Times, May 25, 1934. “U.S. Seeks Truce as Strikers, Deputies Mass at Auto-Lite.” Toledo News-Bee, May 23, 1934.

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National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), P.L. 73-67, 48 Stat. 195, passed on June 16, 1933, was one of the most important and far-reaching programs of the New Deal. The NIRA allowed industries in conjunction with the federal government to create a series of agreements, or codes, that would help regulate prices, wages, and competition. The NIRA established the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to implement these policies. It had as its foundation the concept that the unrestricted competition and poor credit policies of the 1920s had produced the crisis of the Great Depression. The central elements of the policy included first, spreading the available work among large numbers of employers, and secondly, increasing the purchasing power of the public as a whole. To promote the first part, the government in conjunction with larger employers would limit the number of hours the already employed could work and encourage the hiring of new workers from the unemployed. To increase consumption, the NIRA would establish minimum wage rates and a public works program to directly inject federal funds into the economy. The legislation of the NIRA stated that codes of fair competition should be developed through public hearings, and gave the federal government the power to set up voluntary agreements with industries. An additional part of the NIRA, Section 7a, provided the right to collective bargaining and that employers could not require workers to join company unions as a requirement for employment. The American Federation of Labor moved cautiously to organize and to have a greater role in the formation of industry codes. The AFL, and later the CIO, would embark on more assertive policies but had only limited interest in restructuring capitalism. Despite being hostile to both labor organizing and government codes, corporate leaders recognized during the years of the NIRA that negotiating individually with unions offered a less intrusive way to manage labor costs than codes. This unintended consequence of the NIRA contributed significantly to the eventual decline in labor conflict by the end of the 1930s. The National Recovery Administration, established to oversee the implementation of these policies, relied on cooperation and voluntary compliance to gain industry participation. General Hugh S. Johnson, the first NRA administrator, feared that a strictly enforced implementation of these policies would prompt the courts to find the act unconstitutional. To build public support, the NRA utilized the blue eagle symbol to slow compliance. The controversial nature of the codes and the growing hostility of small and medium-sized businesses contributed to the removal of Johnson as the head of NRA.

Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934)

In May 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the act’s provision in A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp v. United States, declaring that the enforcement of the codes was unconstitutional. In its place, Congress ended the efforts of large-scale planning and replaced the NIRA with smaller, more focused statutes. These placed regulations and enforcement power within government agencies and continued some parts of the NIRA’s original provisions. These statues included the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act that extended labor organizing rights and employment policies, respectively. —Matthew Daley

Further Reading Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hawley, Ellis. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Ohl, John Kennedy. Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1985. Polenberg, Richard. The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933–1945: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

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West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934) On May 9, 1934, the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, as it is commonly called, began after workers in the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) voted to strike against the largest shipping companies on the West Coast. The strike lasted for 83 days and was rife with violence and recriminations against all parties involved. Though workers did not initially win all of their demands, the strike is generally seen as a victory for the ranks of labor for having helped establish the fundamental right of workers to organize themselves into unions. Longshoremen, or stevedores, worked in one of the most physically demanding and low-paying jobs in the United States. Workers often experienced shifts for a long as 24 or 48 hours, only to go without work at other times without any consideration of seniority or family need. Facing what was called the “shape up” every day, workers would gather at the docks hoping to be picked for duty, and they often expected to pay a “kick back” to the foreman if they were chosen to work. Cronyism and racial injustice exacerbated these horrible conditions. Called “wharf rats,” these low-paid (85 cents per hour in 1934) longshoremen had tried to organize into unions in the years before and after World War I. Workers in San Francisco had tried to organize against the big shipping companies in the 1920s, only to be met with resistance from court injunctions, arrests, and thug tactics from the various employers and their supporters. In the antilabor climate of the 1920s, even a pro-union town like San Francisco had an open shop, where workers were not required to join a labor union to work in an industry. Indeed, the shipping companies implemented a company-controlled union in the 1920s. Called “blue book” unions by the workers, the company unions controlled hiring halls that favored workers who were not affiliated with radicals and labor organizers. In the 1920s, various labor groups tried to organize dock workers, from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). These efforts met with much resistance and little success, but it did spawn a core of militant leaders including Australian Harry Bridges, who would become the principal ILA leader during and after the 1934 strike. Bridges and associates were known as the “Albion Hall” group, and they published a newspaper called The Waterfront Worker.

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The ILA national leadership was far more conservative than the San Francisco/ Oakland chapters, and the national president of the ILA, Joseph Ryan, favored negotiation and signed a tentative agreement with the employers that failed to take into account key ILA demands, which included the following: • Recognition of the union • A closed shop with a union-run hiring hall • A contract covering all West Coast workers • A 30-hour week at the rate of $1 per hour, and $1.50 per hour overtime When Ryan negotiated a “sweetheart” deal that failed to incorporate these demands, the rank and file of the union voted to strike. As workers walked off the job on May 9, 1934, several sailors associations and other unions would soon join the longshoremen. Up and down the West Coast, pickets battled company-hired replacement workers, or “scabs,” who were engaged in an attempt to reopen the ports. The Industrial Association of San Francisco recruited conservative young businessmen and desperately poor workers and students to help break the strike. Though other unions offered support and even joined the strike, the Teamsters Union initially threatened to start unloading the docks as the strike lingered into the summer. On July 3, 1934, the Industrial Association decided to make a show of force by opening the docks with the support of the San Francisco Police Department. Though there was some sporadic violence that day, more severe violence came two days later, on Thursday, July 5, 1934, know henceforth as “Bloody Thursday.” Along the San Francisco Embarcadero, near Pier 38, workers and police battled with rocks, bricks, clubs, and guns. Two strike supporters, Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordoise (occasionally spelled Bordois), were killed by police bullets, and hundreds of strikers, police, and spectators were wounded. Antiunion vigilantes joined in the fray, attacking workers and raiding and sacking various union offices, including the ILA headquarters. The violence of Bloody Thursday created a pro-union backlash across the city and the nation. Average citizens with no immediate stake in the struggle began to favor the union, and the ILA was able to generate enough sympathy that on July 8, 1934, both of the labor councils in San Francisco and Oakland voted to authorize a general strike in the city of San Francisco. On July 9, over 10,000 workers and their supporters lined Market Street in San Francisco for a funeral procession for the slain Sperry and Bordoise. On July 16, most of the unions in San Francisco went out on a four-day-long general strike in support of the ILA. California governor Frank Merriam called out the California National Guard, and on July 17, 1934, the guardsmen were ordered into the area where violence had been the worst. With the cover of the soldiers, vigilantes continued to harass strikers and

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vandalize union offices. The San Francisco General Strike Committee then took over negotiations, and Bridges was forced out of the negotiation process. Though many of the workers’ demands were not immediately met, the workers did vote to accept arbitration and to end the strike. They won several concessions, including recognition of their union, higher pay, and a union-dominated hiring hall. Over the next months and years, ILA members would continue to authorize “quickie strikes” and “slowdowns” to win more demands from their employers. The West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike in 1934, along with previous strike actions in Toledo, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, that same year, helped to usher in a decade of major union activity in the United States in the 1930s. The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 made the job of organizing workers slightly easier by providing federal protection to union organizational campaigns, among other provisions that were pro-union. After the strike ended, the ILA began to organize warehouse workers in its “March Inland” campaign, and it also began to organize workers in Hawaii. Harry Bridges and the West Coast ILA left the national union in 1937 to help found the more inclusive International Longshoreman and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU). Bridges also became the West Coast director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and had a long career negotiating on behalf of the union. Eventually, the dockworkers union became one of the most powerful in the United States. Union members were among the highest-paid members of the American industrial workforce, and the longshoremen had an impact on several matters of international politics, including their refusal to ship scrap metal to Japan in the years prior to World War II. —Randal Beeman See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre (1914); Boston Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Kimeldorf, Howard. Red and Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Larrowe, Charles. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1977. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Preis, Art. Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO. New York: Pathfinder, 1964. Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

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Bloody Thursday (1934) On July 5, 1934, workers and police battled on the docks of San Francisco during the heated West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike that lasted for 81 days in 1934 and involved over 12,000 workers. Two strike supporters were killed in the melee, and scores of others were injured. In response to the perceived overreaction by the authorities, unions throughout the city declared a general strike in support of the dock workers that helped lead to a favorable conclusion of the strike for the striking workers. For years, longshoremen in American ports were low-paid “wharf rats” who faced long hours and enjoyed few benefits. Attempts to organize the dock workers had failed in previous decades, but with the advent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, workers felt entitled to once again organize an independent union. Previous attempts to strike against the major shipping lines had resulted in crushing defeats for the longshoremen, whose leaders were frequently “blackballed” from future employment on the docks. Ship owners also were backed by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the powerful San Francisco Industrial Association. On May 9, 1934, the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) began a strike against the major shipping companies on the West Coast. Workers rejected two contract proposals that had been negotiated by their leaders, and the strike was then taken over by the militant Australian leader Harry Bridges. When ship owners began using the San Francisco Police Department to help remove cargo from the docks, workers became agitated leading to riots along the piers beginning on Tuesday, July 3, 1934. After a lull in the confrontation on July 4, the ship owners began to move freight the following day—Bloody Thursday. Police entered the picket lines wielding clubs, while striking workers fought back, wielding boards and throwing bricks at the police. Workers fought with police and “scabs” crossing their picket lines, while police retaliated with tear and nausea gas and eventually gunfire. Approximately 5,000 strikers battled with 1,000 San Francisco police officers near Pier 38 on the Embarcadero waterfront area. Strikers overturned trucks, blocked street cars, and tossed rocks and bricks at the police lines. Police on motorcycles escorted trucks from piers that had been secured from the rioting mob. The ensuing violence left 31 people shot and caused the deaths of union supporters Nicholas Bordoise and Howard Sperry. San Francisco mayor Angelo Rossi appealed for calm, yet against Rossi’s wishes, California governor Frank Merriam ordered the California National Guard into the city to establish order. Over 10,000 union supporters attended the funeral of those killed on Bloody Thursday. The resulting protest over the manner in which the confrontation was handled by the police led to a general strike in San Francisco

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that lasted from July 16 to July 19. The ILA won recognition for their union, the right to a union-run hiring hall, and increased wages. —Randal Beeman

Further Reading Larrowe, Charles. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1977. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Bridges, Harry (1901–1990) Alfred Renton “Harry” Bridges was an Australian-born American labor leader who was successful in organizing longshoremen into an effective maritime union in the 1930s. A controversial figure, Bridges was the subject of several deportation efforts by the national government. Rising to prominence in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike in 1934, Bridges led the union into a prominent position through a series of difficult and frequently dangerous episodes of labor strife. Born into a middle-class environment in Australia, Bridges became a merchant seaman at the age of 16 and spent the next several years sailing the world on a variety of merchant ships. After growing tired of the vagabond life of a sailor, Bridges settled in San Francisco in 1921 and started working on the docks. As the famous 1951 movie On the Waterfront dramatically displayed, the life of a dockworker was hard, dangerous, and low paying. Workers would come to the pier each day looking for a day’s wage in what was known as the “shape up.” Often, workers would have to pay a kickback to a foreman for the right to work, and there were no provisions for seniority when jobs were distributed or any other basic benefits. Having broken a strike by San Francisco members of the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) in 1919, Bay Area ship owners created a company controlled “blue book” union in the 1920s that distributed work according to the whims of the ship owners. Bridges was blacklisted for his support of the ILA until he reluctantly joined the “blue book” union in 1927. Bridges was a highly skilled winch operator, but, along with other workers, he would often work shifts lasting for over 24 hours. Bridges allied himself with fellow workers who sought to change conditions on the docks, and he rejoined the ILA in 1933 as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal promised to help workers organize into the unions of their choice. Bridges and

West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934)

others began to organize locals up and down the West Coast, and won their first successful strike in 1933 against the Matson Navigation Company. Bridges rose to prominence in the fabled West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike of 1934. After union leaders negotiated what workers saw as “sweetheart” contracts with shipping owners, Bridges led a rank-and-file revolt against local and national ILA leaders. On July 5, 1934 (“Bloody Thursday”), violence erupted when San Francisco police attempted to help “scab” workers unload cargoes through the union picket lines. Police opened fire on the workers and two union supporters were killed. Eventually the authorities declared martial law in San Francisco, and the unions of the city joined in a general strike to show support for the longshoremen. Rejecting Bridges’s concerns, the workers voted to accept arbitration and end the strike, but they did win recognition of their union, wage increases, and the right to run a hiring hall wherein the union would decide who got to work. Bridges’s flamboyance and his association with the Communist movement led to problems with the U.S. government, which unsuccessfully attempted to deport Bridges four times for lying about his communist affiliations. Bridges was offered bribes to leave the United States, and he angered the government again in 1937 when dockworkers refused to load scrap iron onto Japanese-bound vessels. As the leader of (in his words) a “left wing” union, Bridges called for rank-and-file democracy and the easy dismissal of union officers, and for paying organizers no more than what the highest workers made in salary; he also insisted on racial equality at a time when many unions rejected black workers. Bridges left the ILA in 1937 to create what became the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). Bridges would also serve as the West Coast director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He helped build one of America’s most powerful unions, and longshoremen became some of the most highly paid union members in the United States. Eventually, conservative ship owners came to accept Bridges for his honesty and consistency, especially in later years as he led the union to accept mechanization (and fewer union jobs) in exchange for raises, job training, and better working conditions. San Francisco honored Bridges’s efforts by naming a major plaza in his honor. —Randal Beeman

Further Reading Larrowe, Charles. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1977. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

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Communism Among the main charges hurled at the West Coast Longshoremen during their 1934 strike was that their actions were spurred by communist sentiments and the activities of communist labor organizers in their midst. For their part, the largest of the longshoremen’s unions, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), refuted such accusations, while still acknowledging that a portion of the striking workers were actively involved in communist organizations, while noting that “a great majority of the striking longshoremen are adherents of conservative political parties” (Selvin 1996, 108). In fact, at a number of the rallies held by the ILA, the presence of communist-leaning members of the small but vocal Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was widely decried as playing into the hands of those who would paint the entire strike as communist in origin, such as San Francisco lawyer John Francis Neylan, who was said to be working in cooperation with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Working under Neylan’s direction, San Francisco newspapers presented a united front in decrying the longshoremen’s cause as “radical and Communist” (Selvin 1996, 131–132). Of course, the employers of the longshoremen were only too happy to have the entire movement painted with one large red brush. In the aftermath of the violence that took place in San Francisco on “Bloody Thursday,” July 5, 1934, numerous arrests were made, and a number of those targeted were those with communist ties, such as ILA leader Harry Jackson. The trials that followed in many ways presaged the McCarthy era hearings some 20 years later, with verdicts being delivered that were not based on any legal evidence, but rather on the defendants’ political beliefs. Some reacted to the accusations by seeking to purge the unions of any communist leaders or members. A series of raids staged by both vigilantes and National Guard troops during mid-July rounded up suspected communists, especially targeting the MWIU hall on the waterfront. For their part, members of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, especially Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, were skeptical of the characterization of the Longshoremen’s Strike as being communist in nature. The strikers themselves certainly saw the issue as being fair treatment by their employers rather than the fomenting of any type of communist movement. One MWIU striker put it this way: “Up to this very minute, no one has crammed a communist license down my throat nor have I been forced to change my religion or politics. The main issue is the strike; the main point is solidarity and a continuous picket line” (Nelson 1988, 146). —Steven L. Danver

West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934)

Further Reading Kimeldorf, Howard. Red and Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) One of the two major labor unions representing the longshoremen of San Francisco who went on strike in 1934, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) was less radical than the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU). ILA leaders, meeting on May 9, 1934, first called a general strike of all dock workers on the West Coast to demand that only union employees be hired, that they be paid on a wage scale, and that union personnel administer the hiring of new employees. This brought the West Coast branch of the ILA, led by its new firebrand organizer Harry Bridges, into conflict with the more conservative East Coast branch, led by union president Joseph Ryan. Their conflict would continue through the strike and lead to a split shortly after. Many ILA leaders and workers had been encouraged by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the pro-union attitudes seen through pieces of New Deal legislation, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act. Between Roosevelt’s election and the beginning of the strike, ILA leaders had engaged in heavy organizing efforts up and down the Pacific coast, so that by the time of the strike, ILA leaders in San Francisco knew that they would be able to slow down or shut down docks from California to Washington. However, the Waterfront Employers Union (WEU), a coalition of ship owners that employed many dock workers, refused to meet with the ILA. It was not until the Roosevelt administration stepped in that any talks at all were held. During April and early May, ILA and WEU negotiators met, but were not able to come to any agreement on the ILA’s demands. Once the strike was on, ILA leader Harry Bridges coordinated its efforts with a number of other unions in associated trades, such as the Teamsters Union, to shut the docks down as thoroughly as possible. Sporadic violence between ILA picketers and representatives of the employers began to break out during June, culminating in the “Bloody Thursday” incident of July 5, when confrontations between the two sides left two strikers dead and 109 injured.

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West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934) Emblem of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) in 1901. Aggressive unionization of dock workers began after the Civil War. The ILA emerged from the National Longshoremen's Association during the 1890s, changing its name when Canadian workers joined the union. The ILA remains the principal union for longshoremen. (Library of Congress)

The strike carried on throughout July, ending with the ILA gaining effective control over the hiring of workers on all docks on the West Coast. By 1937, Bridges and the West Coast ILA officially split from the national union, forming the International longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Kimeldorf, Howard. Red and Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

San Francisco That the 1934 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike was centered in San Francisco should not come as a surprise, considering the long history of the city’s association with both radical labor and the importance of its waterfront. The strike was the culmination of nearly 15 years of effort to improve the quality of life for the city’s dockworkers. The city’s major ship owners, which employed the vast majority of dockworkers, had founded the Industrial Association in 1921 in an effort to head

West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934)

off the spread of unionism on the docks. Most workers countered only with small craft unions, which did not exert much influence when contracts were negotiated. Workers paid the price, enduring seasonal employment and low wages. The city’s first brush with labor unrest along the waterfront came in 1919, when a wave of strikes swept the nation. The Seattle General Strike was the largest work stoppage, and San Francisco dockworkers were willing to throw their hat in with their colleagues, despite the Seattle strikers’ open affection for communist rhetoric and the Bolshevik Revolution occurring in Russia. San Francisco workers struck that year to get greater control over the loading and unloading of ships, chafing against their employers’ constant expectations of speedy work at the expense of safety. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) led another strike in 1921 to try to ensure that only union labor would be employed by the ship owners. Both strikes failed, and the only union that the Industrial Association would permit was its own Longshoremen’s Association of San Francisco and the Bay District (or “Blue Book” union). By 1929, the American Federation of Labor recognized only the ownersponsored “Blue Book” union and not the ILA, leading to the radicalization of San Francisco’s longshoremen, as they increasingly formed alliances with extreme groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party. Communists became more influential in the city, and by 1934, Harry Bridges, who had been at least influenced by the Communist Party if not a member, became president of a resurgent ILA, and the die was cast for the strike. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Kimeldorf, Howard. Red and Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

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Zoot Suit Riots (1942) This racial outbreak occurred in Los Angeles in June 1943. Thousands of white soldiers, sailors, and marines attacked male Mexican American teenagers. The disorders grew out of wartime tensions between servicemen and young Hispanics and African Americans, particularly those youths who wore “zoot suits”—a highly stylized form of dress that embodied an identity at odds with social, racial, and gender norms. These riots had roots in long-standing racial prejudices held by whites in Southern California and the American Southwest toward Mexican immigrants, as well as African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. During the first half of the 20th century, tensions between whites and Mexican immigrants intensified as Mexicans poured over the border in search of economic opportunity and to escape political turmoil in their own country growing out of the 1910–1920 revolution. Racial tension was further exacerbated first by the Great Depression and, later, by the rapid economic, social, and demographic changes brought on by the United States’ entry into World War II and the ensuing war effort. After 1900, many settled in Los Angeles, which, by the end of the 1920s, was home to the largest Mexican immigrant community in the United States. Established whites viewed the new arrivals as a mixed blessing. Businesses and produce growers welcomed the cheap labor. On the other hand, the growing Mexican presence presented a “problem” in that they came from a different culture and represented a potential threat to the established social and racial order and to prevailing cultural and political norms. Mexicans were frequently stereotyped as “lazy,” prone to criminality, and open to blandishments from “subversive” elements such as labor unions and other left-wing political organizations. Whites were divided on how to respond. The majority of white business and political leaders favored “Americanization” programs. Many nativists, however, wanted to restrict or end Mexican immigration and waged a prolonged and frequently strident campaign against unrestricted immigration—a campaign that gained momentum during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Whatever their views on Mexican immigration, most whites agreed on the need to maintain the established racial and socioeconomic order. Mexican Americans faced discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. They lived in poverty and were forced into neighborhoods where there was only substandard housing and schools.

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Mexican Americans line up outside a Los Angeles jail en route to court after the Zoot Suit Riots, June 9, 1943. (Library of Congress)

Moreover, they were subject to hostility from law enforcement. Both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Police viewed Mexican Americans with suspicion. Both senior police leaders and rank and file officers saw Mexicans as a threat to the established order and more prone to criminality. The emergence of the “Zoot” culture among young Mexican Americans further inflamed police hostility as police (along with the wider white community) saw the zoot suit as a symbol of gang associations and juvenile delinquency. In the midst of this hostile society, Mexican immigrants sought to construct their own identity. Their struggle was influenced by the experience of the 1930s. The Depression forced many to rethink remaining in the United States. The contraction in the job market was the main consideration, but the intense deportation and repatriation launched by white authorities unsettled many immigrants. Between 1928 and 1940, nearly a third of Los Angeles’s Mexican population returned to Mexico. Those who remained faced a fragile socioeconomic position. Immigrant children who reached adolescence and maturity in the late 1930s and early 1940s faced discrimination, police harassment, and racist agitation in the mainstream

Zoot Suit Riots (1942)

media. Many became active in labor unions and civil rights organizations. Many teenagers grew increasingly estranged from wider society. Referring to themselves as Pachucos, they adopted the zoot suits—broad-brimmed hats, knee-length jackets with broad shoulders, brightly colored shirts, and pleated pants with balloon-like legs—as a gesture of defiance and a means to assert their own masculinity. Zoot suiters embraced a hipster culture that involved jazz clubs and a language that set them apart from the wider culture. Racial tensions in Southern California and Los Angeles were further augmented by wartime economic and demographic change. Particularly significant was the influx of servicemen as Southern California became a major staging area for operations in the Pacific War. In addition, thousands of migrating workers poured into the area seeking jobs in the burgeoning aircraft and ship manufacturing sectors. The large numbers of military bases in the Los Angeles area meant that, at any given time, thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines were in Los Angeles either on duty or leave. Tensions between white members of the armed forces and young Mexican Americans and African Americans were the central cause of the Zoot Suit Riots. The conflict between servicemen and zoot suiters had cultural, racial, and gendered roots. The millions of military men arriving in Southern California were, in many cases, from small towns in the South, Midwest, and West, where prevailing conservative views on race and culture predisposed them to hostility toward the Zoot culture. Adding to their hostility toward the zoot suiters was the pent-up frustration of young men training to fight a racial enemy (the Japanese) in the Pacific, yet were stationed in a city where a visible group of minority youths were identified as alien and subversive. Cultural tensions between servicemen and zoot suiters, although aggravated by wartime conditions, predated the war years. In the middle and late 1930s, when the Zoot culture was emerging, brawls and shouting matches occurred frequently. As wartime changes took hold, these clashes escalated in both frequency and violence. Already predisposed to hostility toward Hispanics and blacks, white servicemen viewed zoot suiters as a threat to the established order and to traditional white conceptions of masculinity. Geographic and gender issues inflamed tensions even further. The proximity of a number of military installations in Los Angeles to Mexican American neighborhoods maximized the chances for confrontation. The Naval Reserve Armory in Chavez Ravine, the site of a large school for naval radiomen, the army base at Fort MacArthur, and the port facility at Terminal Island were all located near minority areas. The main thoroughfares of Figueroa Boulevard, Main Street, Temple Street, and Alpine Street all passed near the large Hispanic neighborhood in Boyle Heights and were all used by sailors stationed at the Naval Reserve Armory to

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go to downtown Los Angeles on liberty. They were meeting grounds between young civilians and members of the armed forces. With the high level of animosity between the two groups, violence was inevitable. Competition for female companionship was a flash point. Servicemen viewed nonconforming Hispanics and blacks as a threat to white women. They measured their own masculinity by their ability to protect their women and viewed any advances by zoot suiters as a challenge that had to be met with violence. The weeks before the riots saw a rising number of complaints from white sailors to the naval authorities and police concerning insults and threats by Hispanic teenagers toward white women. Similarly, zoot suiters, along with many adult Mexican Americans, resented servicemen seeking the company of young Hispanic women, seeing these advances as challenges to their own masculinity. The two groups virtually mirrored each other. Each incited violence against the other to assert their own racial and gender identities to the disadvantage of the other. Racial feelings among white Angelinos, servicemen, and Mexican Americans further escalated with the August 1942 murder of a young Mexican American, Jose Diaz, by the suspected “38th Street Gang” near Sleepy Lagoon. Amid hysterical newspaper commentaries about the threat of juvenile delinquency and subversion, police rounded up 600, mostly Mexican American teenagers. Eventually, 17 reputed gang members were tried and convicted of the murder amid rumors in the Hispanic communities about police brutality, evidence tampering, and prosecutorial misconduct. The Sleepy Lagoon trial polarized the white and Mexican American communities to the point where a confrontation was unavoidable. In the highly charged atmosphere that prevailed by June 1943, the presence of any large group of young men in zoot suits near a military installation or near a group of servicemen was all the evidence members of the military (as well as police and civilian whites) needed to confirm that the zoot suiters were looking for trouble. The riot began during the evening of Thursday, June 3, with a series of confrontations in East Los Angeles near the Chavez Ravine barracks. A group of 11 white sailors walking along Main Street were jumped (they later claimed) by a gang of at least 35 zoot suiters. At the same time, a group of 16 sailors exiting a bus on Figueroa Avenue were approached by young men in zoot suits who hurled insults (including foul language and Nazi salutes) and threatened the sailors with bodily harm. Police called to the scene on Main Street arrested a number of zoot suiters but reported no serious injuries on either side. Nevertheless, the violence quickly intensified. Rumors reaching the Naval Reserve Armory barracks that several of their comrades had been seriously injured galvanized the sailors to react. About two hours after the original confrontations, a group of 50 sailors, carrying baseball bats and other makeshift weapons they could smuggle past the gate guards and the Shore Patrol, burst out of the armory and

Zoot Suit Riots (1942)

started toward downtown Los Angeles looking to chances to retaliate against any young Mexican American they could find. The mob, which grew as it moved up toward Alpine Street, searched the bars and restaurants for zoot suiters. They broke into the Carmen Theater and roamed the aisles where they found their first victims, most of them 12- and 13-year-old boys who happened to be wearing the wrong clothes at the wrong time. Ignoring protests from other civilians, the sailors beat the boys, stripping them of their clothes and burning the suits in a pile outside. The sailors roamed the streets around Figueroa for most of the night but had no further success finding zoot suiters. Fortunately, a large number of Mexican American youths had been in a meeting with police community relations representatives, discussing ways to prevent or reduce juvenile delinquency. The violence escalated as more sailors, returning from liberty in downtown Los Angeles and incited by rumors that zoot suiters were attacking sailors, joined the rioters. They cordoned off city blocks around Figueroa and Main streets, raiding places of business, dance halls, and bars looking for Mexican American youths wearing the wrong clothes. Through all of the initial violence, neither the Los Angeles Police nor the military authorities did anything to halt the mobs. Indeed, many white civilians (including off-duty police officers in civilian clothes) were helping the rioting sailors. Both the city and military leadership seriously underestimated the significance of the June 3 disturbances and took no action to keep the violence from spreading. As a result, the servicemen continued their rampage on the following night, June 4, but with a new focus. Instead of continuing to terrorize the area between the armory and downtown Los Angeles, they piled into every taxi they could hire and carried their depredations into areas deep into East Los Angeles where few, if any confrontations had occurred before the rioting began. As before, they concentrated on known zoot-suiter hangouts. When they found young Mexican Americans, they beat them, tearing off and burning their clothing. On Saturday, the navy took the first feeble steps toward trying to contain the riots when the commanding officer of the Naval Training School, Commander Martin Dickinson, called the men to quarters and warned them that the navy did not condone attacks on civilians. Dickinson announced that he would post a night patrol along the streets leading to the armory to protect sailors returning from liberty. He did not cancel liberty for the base as a whole nor did he initiate any action against suspected instigators of the disorders. His inaction virtually guaranteed that the violence would continue. Rumors about zoot-suited gangs attacking sailors continued to circulate among armory personnel and throughout military installations in Los Angeles and the Southern California area. Despite the lack of actual attacks from civilian youths, servicemen continued their rampage throughout Los Angeles for a third night,

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Saturday, June 5, attacking anyone who even remotely resembled the imagined zoot-suited gangster. Scores of servicemen marched down the streets of downtown Los Angeles confronting everyone they saw in a zoot suit. Los Angeles police were out in full force but, typically, they arrested only Mexican American teenagers, purportedly for their own protection or to prevent reprisal attacks on servicemen. Sunday, June 6, was a day of relative quiet, raising hopes among the authorities that the rioting would halt of its own accord, but those hopes proved to be unfounded. The hostility and fear generated by three days of violence had spilled over into the wider military and civilian communities, even those not directly involved in the original disorders. That following Monday night, June 7, proved to be the worst night of riots. Thousands of white soldiers, sailors, and marines converged on Los Angeles from bases in San Diego, El Toro, and Long Beach. They concentrated near Chavez Ravine on First Street between Main and Central. They were joined by white civilians eager to rid Los Angeles of the zoot suiters. The mob split into two groups: one moved southward along Central Avenue toward the predominately African American area of Watts; the other plunged into the mainly Mexican American neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. While police watched, the mob stopped streetcars on East First Street and tore through bars, shops, penny arcades, and other known teenage hangouts looking for zoot suiters. The mob did not break up until 11:30. For all intents and purposes, the rioting ended on June 8. Senior military officials, concerning about negative publicity, placed Los Angeles off limits to all military personnel. Military authorities sent shore patrol and military police into downtown Los Angeles with orders to arrest any disorderly servicemen. The LAPD called in all off-duty officers and auxiliaries for riot detail. Occasional flare-ups persisted for another week, but this belated joint action by military and civil authorities quelled the worst of the violence. In the end, reports estimated that 94 civilians and 18 servicemen had sustained serious injuries. There had been no deaths. Property damage was minimal. The LAPD arrested 94 civilians and only 2 servicemen. That the riots spread as far and lasted as long as they did reflected badly on the indifference and apathy of both the military and civilian leadership. Their failure to act quickly to stop the violence on the first night led to unnecessary violence and suffering. The small number of casualties reflects both the nature of the riot and of the parties involved. For a week, military men targeted civilian youths wearing the hated zoot suit, in many instances humiliating their adversaries and stripping them of their clothes and identities. In proportion to the large numbers of servicemen involved, however, the number of civilian injuries were small. The young Mexican American civilians proved difficult to catch. They knew the streets and alleys

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in East Los Angeles far better than armed forces members who were only temporarily stationed in the city or who had come in to support their comrades. The actions by white servicemen suggest that they were more interested in humiliating their Pachuco adversaries than in injuring them. The riots reflected their feelings that they were defending their own values and masculinity against threats and insults from an alien and subversive culture. The ultimate cause was the clash of gender, racial, and racial identities in a highly charged wartime setting. The deeper significance of the Zoot Suit Riots lies in the nature of wartime society and of the wider American social and cultural order. The Zoot Suit Riots, along with a rash of other racial outbreaks in the United States in 1943, were a clear manifestation of the hostility of established society to any attempt by minorities to assert their own identities. The outcome led to wider mobilization of Mexican Americans and African Americans to protect and widen their civil rights and to a movement in wider society for self-examination. Americans were beginning to understand the inconsistency between fighting for democracy overseas while still denying it to many minorities at home. —Walter F. Bell See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Bear Flag Revolt (1846); Plan de San Diego (1915–1916); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Escobar, Edward J. Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: MexicanAmericans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot 1943.” Social Science History 24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 223–56. Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L. A. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Mexican Americans Hispanics are defined as people living in the United States who either immigrated or have ancestors who emigrated from Spanish-speaking countries—mainly from Latin America. The overwhelming majority of Hispanic immigrants in the first half of the 20th century came from Mexico—although smaller numbers came from Central America and the Caribbean. During the first half of the 20th century, Mexican immigration surged because of political turmoil in their homeland and the lure of jobs across the border. Most of the newcomers settled in Southern California and the American Southwest. By the end of the 1920s, Los Angeles was home to the largest Mexican immigrant community in the United States. These immigrants and their immediate descendents were subject to racial, economic, and political discrimination from established whites (or Anglos) as extensive as that experienced by African Americans. The growth of the Mexican American community in Los Angeles created challenges for both the new arrivals and the white political and economic establishment. The newcomers had to make sense of their new environment in a country that was itself undergoing rapid social and economic transformation. For the “Anglo” establishment, the growing numbers of Mexican immigrants presented a “problem” in that this group, coming as they did from a different culture, embodied a perceived threat to the established social structure and to accepted cultural and political values. Mexicans were frequently stereotyped as “lazy” and also as more prone to blandishments from “subversive” elements such as labor unions. White Americans were divided on how to respond. The majority of the white business and political leadership favored “Americanization” programs, aimed particularly at children and adolescents, which emphasized the teaching of English and the virtues of hard work, patriotism, free-market capitalism, and mainstream democratic values. Nativists, on the other hand, wanted to restrict or end Mexican immigration. They waged a prolonged and frequently strident campaign against unrestricted Mexican immigration. In the face of this hostile society, Mexican immigrants had to find a way to construct their own identity. This struggle was influenced by the conditions they faced in the 1930s. The Great Depression forced many immigrants to rethink remaining in the United States. The contraction in the job market was the main consideration, but the deportation and repatriation campaigns launched against Mexicans unsettled the cultural foundations of many Mexican immigrant communities. Nearly a third of Mexicans living in Los Angeles at the end of the 1920s returned to Mexico.

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Those who remained had to deal with the fragility of their socioeconomic position. Children of immigrants reaching adulthood in the 1930s and early 1940s faced discrimination, police harassment, and racist agitation in the mainstream media. Many became active in labor union organizing drives and in legal and political agitation for civil rights. These struggles created the context for a new cultural identity. Many younger Mexican Americans grew increasingly estranged from a society that was unwilling or unable to provide them with adequate jobs or education. The visible symbol of this estrangement was the zoot suit—a highly stylized form of male dress consisting of a broad-brimmed hat, knee-length jacket, and draped trousers tapered at the ankle. Thousands of young Hispanic and black males adopted this style of dress as a gesture of defiance against wider society and as a means to assert their own identity and masculinity. These new cultural identities were forged in a hostile racist setting that sought to deny Mexicans their identity as Americans. The Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 were the clearest manifestation of this racism. In response, Mexican Americans formulated a divided Americanism characterized by adaptability and a cultural duality that enabled them to synthesize the best characteristics of the two cultures that defined them. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Police Brutality Police brutality is a term used to describe extralegal physical and psychological abuse carried out by law enforcement officers against individuals for the purposes of intimidation or gaining information. It targets not only criminal suspects, but also racial and ethnic minorities and groups that exist outside the bounds of conventional society—such as homosexuals and prostitutes. Police brutality in the United States was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to intimidate African Americans and other minorities and reinforce the racial hierarchy. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s, court rulings expanding the rights of suspects, more media attention, and better training for police officers have resulted in a decline of the practice, but incidents still occur.

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In the early 20th century, police often used extralegal beatings to keep members of minorities in a subordinate place in society’s racial hierarchy. In Los Angeles and other areas in Southern California and the western states, violence by law enforcement officers was directed at Mexican Americans as well as blacks. Brutality was a source of tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Mexican American and African American communities. These tensions grew out of the inherently conservative function of the police to keep order and the perception by the predominately white officers (and wider white society) that racial minorities were a threat because they were more prone to commit crimes and were open to appeals from political radicals. Despite a reputation as one of the most corrupt police departments in the country, the LAPD had the support of local merchants, manufacturers, and the city’s political establishment, all of whom believed that they had a “Mexican problem.” When incidents of police misconduct against minorities occurred, law enforcement generally received the benefit of the doubt. This reality would influence police response to the Zoot Suit Riot of June 1943. Economic and social dislocations brought on by the war effort further heightened racial tensions in Los Angeles. Whites feared that African Americans and Mexican Americans were taking openings in war industries from white workers and eroding social stability. The rise of the “zoot suit” culture among young blacks and Hispanics and worries about increased crime and juvenile delinquency fed these fears. Both senior and rank-and-file police viewed zoot suiters as a threat to law and order. Conflicts between police and the Mexican community intensified with the 1942 “Sleepy Lagoon” case in which 17 young Hispanic men were arrested, tried, and convicted of a gang-related murder of another Mexican American teenager. Rumors of beatings and evidence tampering by police and prosecutors further polarized relations between minorities and the authorities. In the months following the Sleepy Lagoon trial, violence by the LAPD against blacks and Hispanics intensified. Between March and the end of May 1943, there were at least three incidents in which police fired on minority youth and numerous complaints of police beatings. Moreover, police made little effort to stop white youths from attacking zoot suiters or contain clashes between members of the armed forces and Hispanics. A late May 1943 incident in the Venice area served as a portent for police behavior in the Zoot Suit Riots. The LAPD made virtually no effort to stop a mob of 500 individuals, mostly sailors, from attacking zoot suiters on the Venice boardwalk. Even though white servicemen and civilians initiated the violence, police blamed the zoot suiters and arrested 11 Hispanic boys. Police brutality against minorities and its acceptance by whites reflected the prevailing view in wider society that extralegal violence by law enforcement was acceptable to maintain order. When servicemen rioted against zoot suiters in

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June 1943 and indiscriminately attacked minority youth, police did little to stop the attacks. The law enforcement officers were in sympathy with the sailors and marines involved. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Escobar, Edward J. Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: MexicanAmericans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Servicemen The term “servicemen” refers to members of the armed forces. The United States’ entry into World War II and the ensuing war effort brought a massive influx of soldiers, sailors, and marines into Southern California, which became a major staging area for operations in the Pacific War as well as a manufacturing center. The large number of military bases in the Los Angeles area meant that there were large numbers of servicemen in Los Angeles. Tensions between white members of the armed forces and Mexican American and African American youths were central to the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943. The conflict between servicemen and the “zoot suiters” had cultural, racial, and gendered roots. The millions of soldiers, sailors, and marines who poured into Southern California were, in many cases, from small towns in the South, Midwest, and West, where conservative views on race and culture prevailed, and which predisposed them to hostility toward the Zoot culture popular among minority youths in Los Angeles. The inherent hostility of white servicemen toward zoot suiters was also a product of pent-up frustrations of young men who were training to fight a racial enemy (the Japanese) in the Pacific, yet were stationed or on leave in a city where a visible group of minority youths were identified as alien and subversive. These cultural tensions between servicemen and zoot suiters, although aggravated by wartime conditions, predated the war years. In the middle and late 1930s, when the Zoot culture was emerging, brawls and shouting matches between white servicemen and zoot suiters occurred frequently. As U.S involvement in the war deepened, these clashes escalated both in frequency and violence. Already predisposed to hostility toward Hispanic and black youths, white servicemen viewed zoot suiters as a threat to the established order. They also viewed zoot

Zoot Suit Riots (1942)

suiters, with their flashy clothes, brashness, and flouting of patriotic values, as challenging traditional white conceptions of masculinity. Competition for female companionship was a flashpoint. White servicemen viewed nonconforming Hispanics and blacks as a threat to white women. They measured their own masculinity by their ability to protect their women and were viewed any advances by blacks or Hispanics as a challenge that had to be met with violence. The weeks before the Zoot Suit Riots saw a rising number of complaints from white sailors concerning insults and threats by Hispanic teenagers toward white women. Similarly, zoot suiters resented servicemen seeking the company of Hispanic women seeing these advances as challenges to their own dignity and masculinity. The two groups virtually mirrored each other. Each incited violence against the other to assert themselves. Each valued their own racial and gender identities to the disadvantage of the other. Tensions were also fueled by geographic proximity. Many of the military bases in the Los Angeles area—particularly the naval training facilities at Chavez Ravine, the army base at Fort MacArthur, and the port at Terminal Island—were located near minority areas. Main thoroughfares, such as Figueroa Boulevard, leading directly from military bases to downtown Los Angeles, passed through Hispanic neighborhoods. The Mexican and black areas surrounding downtown were a meeting ground between young civilians and members of the armed forces. With the high level of animosity between the two groups, violence was inevitable. The Zoot Suit Riots of June 3 to 10, 1943, reflected the animosity servicemen felt toward the zoot suiters. For a week, packs of soldiers, sailors, and marines targeted every Mexican American area in Los Angeles hunting young Hispanics. Zoot suiters were beaten, stripped of their clothes, and humiliated in front of crowds of onlookers. White servicemen were less interested in killing or injuring their adversaries (there were no deaths and very little property damage) than humiliating them. The actions by white servicemen reflected their feelings that they were defending their own masculinity and patriotic values against threats and insults from an alien and subversive culture. Regardless of who was to blame for initiating the violence, the ultimate cause was the clash of gender, racial, and cultural identities in a highly charged wartime setting. —Walter F. Bell

Further Reading Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot 1943.” Social Science History 24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 223–256.

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Battle of Athens (1946) Athens, Tennessee, is the county seat of McMinn County in the eastern part of the state. It lies between the larger metropolitan areas of Knoxville and Chattanooga. In the 1940s, Athens, nicknamed “the Friendly City,” had a population of approximately 11,000. The Battle of Athens, also known as the McMinn County War, was an armed uprising against the political machine that controlled McMinn County in August 1946. Returning veterans from World War II were instrumental in leading the uprising against the machine of state senator Paul Cantrell and McMinn County sheriff Pat Mansfield. Paul Cantrell was from a wealthy family in Etowah, another small town in McMinn County. He had begun his political career in 1936 when he was elected as sheriff in McMinn County. With the help of E. H. “Boss” Crump, the former mayor of Memphis who controlled a statewide political machine, Cantrell began developing a Democratic Party machine to control politics in McMinn County. During the decade that Cantrell was in power, there were repeated charges that elections were rigged, ballots were destroyed, and ballot boxes were stuffed or completely replaced with those containing the “proper” votes. In addition, sheriff’s deputies regularly arrested people for little apparent reason, just so the sheriff’s office could collect the fees that state law allowed for each person incarcerated. Cantrell was reelected to the sheriff’s post in 1938 and 1940. In 1942, he was elected to the state senate, and his chief deputy, Pat Mansfield, became sheriff of McMinn County. Complaints had been filed with the federal Department of Justice about political corruption in McMinn County, and while investigations had been conducted, no corrective action was ever taken. In the election in August 1946, Mansfield and Cantrell sought to switch jobs. Cantrell wanted to return to the county sheriff’s position, and with his backing, Mansfield was running to replace him in the state senate. Many returning veterans, however, were impatient with the lack of any serious efforts to address the issue of corruption in the county government. About 3,000 residents of McMinn County had served in the military during the war. Trouble had begun during the war between soldiers and the local political machine, when servicemen home on leave alleged they were being harassed by the sheriff’s department. In the 1946 election, the veterans formed an independent group to run a slate of candidates on what they called the GI Nonpartisan Ticket. Five candidates, including two Republicans, were

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running for various offices, but most attention was focused on one race—Knox Henry versus Cantrell for the county sheriff’s position. Henry was a 34-year-old Army Air Corps veteran who was a local schoolteacher. Backers of the GI Nonpartisan Ticket promised to ensure that a fair election and a fair count of the votes would take place. On the day of the county general election, Mansfield had flooded the county with scores of specially commissioned deputies, most hired from outside the county and some from out of state. Poll watchers from the GI Nonpartisan Ticket were harassed by county deputies, some were beaten, and others were arrested. When a black farmer who was also a World War II veteran attempted to vote in one of the county’s precincts, a deputy argued with him, told him he could not vote, and finally shot the man. When news of such tactics spread among the people in the community, mobs began to attack some of the deputies and by the middle of the afternoon, several deputies had been beaten and forced to leave town. The polls closed at 4:00 p.m., and the votes were to be counted at the offices of the Athens Water Company. Inside the offices, sheriff’s deputies were trying to restrain some of the GI Nonpartisan Ticket poll watchers and basically sought to hold these men as hostages, to prevent them from reporting how the vote was being tabulated. Two of these men finally dove through a plate glass window to escape and tell others what was happening with the ballot boxes. Soon, violence erupted outside the water company offices. Sheriff Mansfield and two carloads of deputies arrived and took the ballot boxes to the county jail, claiming that this would provide the security for a safe and careful count of the vote. Many of the opponents of the machine, however, believed this was simply a pretext that would allow the machine operatives to manipulate the vote count as they had done in many previous elections. Mansfield, Cantrell, and state representative George Woods, who were all members of the county electoral commission, were present at the jail so they could certify the election results when the counting was completed. By nightfall, a large mob of veterans and other county residents had gathered outside the jail. Many had brought hunting rifles and shotguns from home, and some weapons were also taken from the local state militia armory. They threatened to fire on the deputies inside the jail if the ballot boxes were not returned. When someone inside the jail fired a shot, a volley of fire erupted from the crowd outside. There was a considerable amount of gunfire from both sides in a standoff that lasted for about six hours. A few people were wounded, but there were no fatalities. At one point, an ambulance pulled up to the jail; the mob, believing it was there to evacuate wounded people, did not interfere. When the ambulance left, however, it carried Cantrell and Mansfield to safety. About dawn of the next morning, some of the mob blew off the front entrance of the jail with dynamite, and the deputies inside agreed to surrender, coming out with their hands in the air. Fearing

Battle of Athens (1946)

that the deputies might be physically harmed by the mobs outside, leaders of the uprising locked the deputies in the jail cells, for their own protection. When the ballot boxes were retrieved and the votes counted, it was announced that the entire slate of the GI Nonpartisan Party’s candidates had been elected. Sheriff Mansfield and State Senator Cantrell had gone into hiding. Since the official governmental structure of the county had virtually disintegrated, a mass meeting was held the following day at which a local minister and two area businessmen were chosen to serve as an interim county government until the regularly elected officials took office. The slate of officials elected in McMinn County promised reforms, and in 1947, the county adopted a county commission form of government, where commissioners are elected who in turn hire a professional manager to run the day-to-day operations of the county. Mansfield gave up politics and returned to Georgia, his native state. Cantrell eventually returned to private business ventures in Etowah. The Battle of Athens gained nationwide notoriety, with many observers decrying the violence and the resort to “vigilante” tactics. Some commentators, however, did note that the county residents had exhausted virtually all legal avenues of dealing with the corrupt machine. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, referred to the uprising in her “My Day” column twice in the next few weeks. The Battle of Athens has become a cause ce´le`bre among supporters of the right to bear arms, who often cite it as evidence of why the citizens’ right to own firearms must be protected—because it might be necessary for the people to take up arms against a corrupt government. —Mark S. Joy See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Boston Tea Party (1773); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Byrum, C. Stephen. The Battle of Athens. Chattanooga, TN: Paidia Productions, 1987. Gunther, John. Inside U.S.A. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947. Perry, Jennings. “Rebellion in Tennessee.” Nation 163, no. 5 (August 10, 1946): 147. Seiber, Lones. “The Battle of Athens.” American Heritage 36, no. 2 (February– March 1985): 72–79. “Tennessee: Battle of the Ballots.” Time, August 12, 1946.

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Mansfield, Pat (dates unknown) The sheriff of McMinn County who was ousted by the Battle of Athens was Pat Mansfield, a part of State Senator Paul Cantrell’s Democratic county political machine. Mansfield, who was described as a large, burly man, had previously been a locomotive engineer on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. He was not from the McMinn County area and spent most of his life in Georgia. Paul Cantrell began his political career by becoming sheriff of McMinn County in 1936. Mansfield worked for him as a deputy sheriff, eventually becoming the chief deputy. After Cantrell was elected to the state senate in 1942, Mansfield was elected county sheriff in his place. With the support of Cantrell’s political machine, and more indirect support from the machine of E. H. Crump that had some influence throughout Tennessee, Mansfield ruled McMinn County with ruthless efficiency. There were charges of widespread voter fraud, and Mansfield and his deputies profited from Tennessee laws that allowed the sheriff to collect a fee for every person arrested and incarcerated. There were repeated charges that local citizens and tourists were routinely arrested for speeding, drunken driving, or public drunkenness, with no regard to their guilt or innocence, so that Mansfield and his deputies could collect the fees involved. Sometimes, more than 100 people were arrested in one weekend. It was also alleged that Mansfield received kickbacks or protection money from makers of illegal liquor, and those who ran bars, road houses, and houses of prostitution. One estimate suggested that Mansfield reaped more than $100,000 from these illicit sources during the four years he held the sheriff’s office. In 1946, Mansfield and Cantrell sought to switch positions—Cantrell wanted to return to the county’s sheriff’s post, and Mansfield was running to take Cantrell’s seat in the state senate. When the GI Nonpartisan Ticket promised to watch the polls carefully to make sure the vote was honestly counted, Mansfield hired scores of extra deputies from outside the county and from outside the state to intimidate both voters and poll watchers. Mansfield charged that the veterans were fomenting trouble, and warned that he would have several hundred deputies patrolling the county on Election Day. When the veterans and others concerned with the voting irregularities besieged the county jail, Mansfield and Cantrell both fled the county, and their political machine was largely destroyed. Mansfield returned briefly to McMinn County to resign his position as a member of the county electoral commission, his last official connection to the county’s politics. He also telegraphed Tennessee governor Jim Nance McCord with his resignation as sheriff, and suggested that Knox Henry, who had been elected to succeed him, be appointed to fill out the last few weeks of his term. Mansfield went to live for a time with relatives

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in north Georgia. He told a newspaper reporter shortly after the violence in Athens that he had been slightly wounded in one leg by buckshot fired during the standoff at the jail. He also said he was “through with politics,” and planned to return to railroad work. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading “Defeated Sheriff Out of Politics.” St. Petersburg Times, August 12, 1946, 2. McMinn County, Tennessee and Its People, 1819–1997. Waynesville, NC: McMinn County Heritage Book Committee, 1997.

Political Corruption The citizens involved in the Battle of Athens were revolting against the control of McMinn County by the political machine controlled by state senator Paul Cantrell and county sheriff Pat Mansfield. A political machine is an informal organization designed to keep a particular party, or party faction, in power. While many would associate political machines with the large urban machines such as Tammany Hall in 19th-century New York, or the Daley machine in 20th-century Chicago, rural county machines were not uncommon, and were often tied in some fashion to a statewide machine or the machine that dominated a nearby city. Machines gained and exercised their power in a variety of ways. Money was often raised through demanding kickbacks from employees or those who did business with the city, state, or county government involved. In many cases, the “bosses” of these machines became wealthy, but often much of the money brought in by the machine was in turn used to provide services and do favors for voters, so that their support could be counted upon at election time. In Tennessee, the existence of the poll tax made it easier for machines to control the vote. Many eligible voters never voted because of the poll tax, so the machine did not have to overcome so many legitimate votes. After the Civil War, the Republican Party controlled McMinn County political offices until the 1930s. Because of the widespread popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1936 election, a McMinn County Democrat, Paul Cantrell, was elected sheriff, riding into office on Roosevelt’s coattails. Cantrell was from a wealthy family in Etowah, another small town in McMinn County. With the support of E. H. Crump, a political boss who controlled a statewide political machine, Cantrell began building a Democratic political machine in McMinn County. Cantrell was reelected to the sheriff’s office in 1938 and 1940. In 1942, he ran

Battle of Athens (1946)

for the Tennessee State Senate and won, while his deputy, Pat Mansfield, was elected sheriff in McMinn County. There had been widespread charges of voter fraud in McMinn County for several years. Responding to complaints from local voters, the U.S. Department of Justice had conducted investigations of electoral irregularities in 1940, 1942, and 1944. None of these investigations led to any corrective action, however. It appears that the machine in McMinn County functioned more through the exercise of sheer force and intimidation rather than by providing favors or services for voters as some machines did. Rather than curry the voters’ favor so that they would vote for the machine’s candidates, the machine simply manipulated the vote and used various types of voter fraud to insure the election of their slate of candidates. The machine raised cash through the fees paid to the sheriff for each arrest made, and through kickbacks from people involved in illegal activities such as moon shining and prostitution. After the Battle of Athens destroyed the Cantrell-Mansfield machine, McMinn County adopted a commission-county manager form of government, where an elected commission operates the county government and hires a professional manager to be the executive leader. —Mark S. Joy

Further Reading Brownell, Blaine A., and Warren E. Sickle, eds. Bosses and Reformers: Urban Politics in America, 1880–1920. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1973. Snider, Clyde F., and Neil F. Garvey. “Rural Local Government: County and Township Government in 1946.” American Political Science Review 41, no. 6 (December 1947): 1130–1141.

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) Some trace the civil rights movement to Massachusetts’s banning of slavery in 1783 or the outlawing of the slave trade in 1808. Perhaps the establishment of Sierra Leone in 1820 and Nat Turner’s 1831 rising are early civil rights efforts. Maybe the Compromise of 1850 or the 1857 Dred Scott decision or the Civil War is a better starting point. Reconstruction saw three constitutional amendments and the anti-Klan laws; that seems a strong civil rights effort. But all this faded by 1883’s overturning of the 1875 Civil Rights Act and the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal was valid law. If the civil rights movement began at any of these times, it ended in 1896. Blacks entered the era Rayford Logan called the nadir, with race riots and lynching, and by the 1920s, the return of the Klan. The laws permitted—mandated—racial segregation, disfranchisement, discrimination in economic opportunity, and mass violence. In combination, the 19th-century discrimination was called Jim Crow. Resistance did not end, of course. This was also the time that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began working, the time when returned black veterans sparked the New Negro demand for respect, a rejection of the subordinate status of the Booker Washington accommodation years. The civil rights movement was a counter to the 19th-century enactment through the South of racially discriminatory laws and the rise of race violence, the nadir of black rights. Through the Jim Crow era, however, civil rights groups, especially the NAACP, lobbied and sued to ameliorate the hardship of discriminated against blacks. The Great Migration from the South to northern cities brought racial conflict to the fore as blacks competed with ethnic whites and other lower-class whites in cities dominated by white elites. In the South, Jim Crow remained intact into the 1950s. In the North, segregation and discrimination were more a matter of custom than of law, and the plight of blacks was less severe, but blacks were treated as second class in all respects in the North as well as in the South. The reemergence of the civil rights movement came in the 1930s, when the NAACP and other groups won occasional legal victories, but the modern civil rights movement is better birthed by World War II, when A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive “March on Washington” and convinced President Franklin

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Despite the potential for arrest or even violence, many women participated in the civil rights movement. This woman was arrested during a protest concerning unfair hiring practices at a Birmingham, Alabama, department store in 1963. (Bob Adelman/Corbis)

Roosevelt to issue an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee and banning discrimination in war contracts. Blacks in Harlem and Detroit were revitalized enough to riot in 1943 against white discrimination. After World War II, blacks rejected second-class citizenship. Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. President Harry Truman, the strongest president on civil rights to his time and stronger than most who came after, issued executive orders banning segregation in the civil service and military on July 26, 1948. Executive Order 9981 desegregated the military. And, almost by accident, the 1952 immigration reform law eliminated racial and ethnic disqualifications for citizenship. The civil rights movement of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s is also known as the Second Reconstruction because it finished the business left undone after the failure of the first Reconstruction (1865–1876). Blacks attempted civil disobedience, marches, protests, nonviolent resistance, boycotts, and freedom rides. Newspaper, radio, and television increasingly covered the movement. Simultaneously, the NAACP continued its pressure to overturn segregation through the courts.

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Activists in civil rights organizations prefer the “Southern Freedom Movement” because that label better expresses the goals of freedom, respect, dignity, and equality than the civil rights label that restricts the movement to legal goals.

Brown v. Board of Education The turning point for the movement came in 1954. The NAACP and the separate NAACP legal defense fund began working on Briggs v. Elliot, a school desegregation case from Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1940s. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1952, and the Court agreed to hear it and other cases from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Kansas under the collective title of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The NAACP team arguing the case included Thurgood Marshall. The court heard sociological evidence, including a report about the “doll test” of Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark. The husband and wife social psychologists gave children a white doll and a black one, asking which they preferred. Usually black children preferred the white doll because they saw it as having more positive characteristics. The unanimous Brown decision specifically cited the doll test in ruling that separate was inherently unequal. The Warren Court announced the Brown decision on May 17, 1954. Plessy was history. Now each school system was vulnerable to challenge and federal court order to desegregate. Or so the story went, for historians and lay people alike. Technically Plessy did not apply to schools but to transportation. The case Brown actually overturned was Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education, which in 1899 applied separate but equal to schools. Brown culminated the legislative campaign, at least on the part of the activists. While government fought for and against new laws, the civil rights movement emphasized mass action such as the freedom rides and sit-ins from 1955 through 1966. A subsequent implementation ruling on Brown in 1955 allowed desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” and the delay allowed opposition to form, then firm.

Opposition and Growth Southerners who refused to accept Brown organized to resist. In Indianola, Mississippi, 14 whites gathered on July 11, 1954, under the leadership of Robert “Tut” Patterson, plantation manager and former “Ole Miss” football player. The councils formed in part in reaction to the grassroots Regional Council of Negro Leadership, formed in all-black Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1951 by Dr. T. R. M. Howard. In Mississippi first, then quickly through the South, White Citizens Councils (WCCs) used economic pressure and propaganda about alleged horrors resulting from desegregation. Business, religious, and civil leaders led the WCCs, which

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was, unlike the secretive Klan, open about its business and lacking in stigma. The WCCs eschewed violence for economic pressure. Louisiana citizens council leaders included William Rainach, state senator and future gubernatorial candidate. Also members were future U.S. representative Joe D. Waggonner Jr. and Judge Leander Perez, political boss of two parishes south of New Orleans. There was overlap in membership. The WCCs sometimes set up “council schools” for white children only. Some segregation academies remain in existence, albeit under other sponsorship and integrated. The councils, often known as the Uptown KKK, faded in the 1960s as desegregation accelerated, and by the 1970s, they were largely gone. As blacks gained power and whites came to accept desegregation, business leaders chose to sever ties with overtly racist organizations because failing to do so would mean lost business. Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia originated massive resistance to obfuscate and delay and thereby defeat implementation of Brown. Byrd was governor from 1926 to 1930 and head of Virginia’s “Byrd Machine,” the most powerful of Virginia’s political organizations. Virginia’s governor’s calls for a wait-and-see attitude was overwhelmed by Byrd’s call for massive resistance. In keeping with Byrd’s call, the state studied the problem and, in 1955, called for modification of school attendance laws , tuition grants for private schools, and assignment by school boards of students to particular schools. The governor rejected local control, and a Virginia constitutional modification incorporated massive resistance. Anti-Brown forces also revived interposition, which claimed a state right as a sovereign entity to interpose itself between an unconstitutional federal requirement and the local authority. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower used troops in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Virginia governor obtained authority to close any school under control by federal troops and refused state funding to any school that chose to integrate. Even after the Supreme Court ruled massive resistance unconstitutional, the governor blustered noncompliance before eventually complying. In 1956, most southern congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto calling for massive resistance to the desegregation rulings. A galvanizing episode was the death of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan. While visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, Till “flirted” with the wife of Roy Bryant, owner of Money’s country store, and on August 27, Till disappeared. When his body was finally found, it was attached to a factory fan on the bottom of the river. Till had been beaten and shot in the head. Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, were tried for murder, acquitted by an all-white jury, and sold their story of the murder to Look magazine for $4,000. The murder and trial were the first of what would be many sensational and violent incidents to receive national media coverage and arouse common citizens to support the movement.

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In 1955, the civil rights movement would shift from the courts to the streets—or more precisely, the buses, as Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, as a city ordinance required. When Rosa Parks refused to give a white person her seat, she gave the local civil rights leadership the test case they had been seeking. The local civil rights community called a boycott of the system. The leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the bus boycott and asked Reverend Martin Luther King of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to head the MIA. The yearlong effort led to the November 13, 1956, Supreme Court ruling decreeing that segregated buses violated the U.S. Constitution. After a lengthy boycott by Montgomery’s black community, the ordinance was overturned. More importantly, Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference emerged as the head of the movement. That same year, the Interstate Commerce Commission outlawed segregation of interstate buses and trains. Another successful bus boycott occurred in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956–1957. Overt resistance occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 after the school board sought to begin integration in compliance with Brown. When the nine students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” arrived at school, an angry white crowd awaited them. Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state’s National Guard to prevent the nine black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. After a court order for desegregation, President Dwight Eisenhower became the first president since Reconstruction to send troops into the South, sending in troops of the 101st Airborne and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard. Little Rock’s schools shut down. In Little Rock, Daisy Bates owned and edited a newspaper and served as president of the state NAACP. Bates remained supportive of the children and was with them through the ordeal. With them, she was recipient of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1958. The precedent of sending federal forces when a governor refused to ensure peaceful integration would apply in Alabama and Mississippi. Another milestone occurred in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four freshman students at the city’s black college, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, staged the first successful sit-ins at a segregated lunch counter. The first day, they sat until closing time at the F. W. Woolworth counter and were not served. The next day, they brought 25 additional students to sit with them. Within weeks, other cities were experiencing sit-ins, and within a year over a hundred southern and northern cities experienced sit-ins. By the end of 1960, the sit-ins had occurred in all southern and border states as well as Nevada, Ohio, and Illinois. Beyond lunch counters, demonstrations targeted theaters, museums, beaches, libraries, and other public venues. Students pledged no bail and forced their jailers to bear the financial burden.

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Although Greensboro was first, Nashville was probably the fastest in getting results, and it was best organized and most highly disciplined. Students at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Stores began to desegregate, even in advance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The sit-in was not new; it copied a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) tactic in the 1940s protests against segregation in the Midwest. At that time, it failed to garner national press. The same year, Congress passed a weak voting rights act over a southern filibuster. The first Citizenship Schools began in the Sea Islands of South Carolina in the 1950s. Septima Clarke, Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Robinson had the assistance of the Highlander Folk School in teaching literacy to blacks. They tripled the black voters on St. John Island. In the 1960s, the SCLC took the program to other parts of the South. It would be important in voter registration efforts after enactment of voting rights legislation. And in 1961, CORE revived another old tactic to test the ICC desegregation rulings. In May, Freedom Riders, including black and white, female and male, SNCC members, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., determined to travel through the Deep South to New Orleans and celebrate Brown’s seventh anniversary there. Along the way, they would use white waiting rooms and dining areas. To get there, they had to ride through South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. They were beaten in an Alabama bus terminal, and one of their buses was firebombed. Three hundred and six went to jail in Jackson, Mississippi, while nine were arrested and released in Anniston, Alabama. Among the riders was John Siegenthaler, a representative of the Justice Department sent by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In September 1962, James Meredith, a 28-year-old air force veteran, brought a court order when he sought to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The university, the city, and the governor, Ross Barnett, united in defiance. Barnett said never to integration. On the day Meredith first attempted to enroll, President John Kennedy addressed the nation via television. As he spoke, the campus erupted in violence. Kennedy sent in federal troops and marshals to end the rioting that ensued. Federal troops calmed the riots only after two people were dead and over 300 injured. Federal marshals remained on site to guarantee Meredith enrolled and had safe movement on the campus. He graduated in August of the next year thanks to previously earned credits. His time on campus was uneventful. Two years before, Clyde Kennard tried to enter the University of Southern Mississippi. Tried in state court, he received seven years for being a racial agitator, serving three before being released. The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that segregation was illegal in all forms of transportation facilities, terminals, stations, and the like, and the Department of Defense desegregated its reserves but exempted the National Guard because it

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was under state control. In June 1963, Vivian Malone and James Hood attempted to attend class at the University of Alabama. Governor George Wallace had won election on the slogan “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He had no intention of letting the students attend the university. He blocked the door to the administration building. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and had 100 Guardsmen serve as escort for the students. The guard commander, General Henry Graham, ordered Wallace to step aside, allowing the students to enroll. That evening Kennedy, announced on national television that he wanted strong civil rights legislation, breaking with his earlier casual commitment to civil rights. The legislation would pass only in 1964. The next day, in Jackson, Mississippi, the field secretary for the NAACP, Medgar Evers, led a protest against the city’s segregation system. That evening, in his driveway, he was shot in the back. Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was arrested, tried, and acquitted by an all-white jury. In 1994, an assistant district attorney reopened the case and the retrial resulted in conviction. In 1963, Cambridge, Maryland, became a center of civil rights activity, with protests and demonstrations and riots that led to martial law and eventually an agreement to desegregate if the voters chose to amend the charter. Although King wanted the charter to pass, black voters stayed home, and the charter failed after activist Gloria Richardson argued that voting on rights is an immoral abuse of power. In August 1963 the March on Washington took place, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. A. Philip Randolph headed the March on Washington organization. Bayard Rustin handled travel, staff, finances, publicity, accommodations, and logistics. Rustin had been a key player in nonviolent protest since the 1940s. The march organizers hoped for 100,000 attendees. What they got was over 250,000. Black and white, female and male, they called on Kennedy and Congress to give them access to education employment, housing, and public facilities equal to those enjoyed by whites. The civil rights movement included performers and athletes. Mahalia Jackson was a gospel singer who began in storefronts but soon had national and then international fame. She became an activist at the urging of King, and she sang at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial on the third anniversary of Brown as well as at the March on Washington just before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Other activist performers included Olatunji, Abbey Lincoln, and Coleman Hawkins, who came together to record Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite in 1960. Roy Campanella and Willie Mays were veterans of the Negro Baseball Leagues who became major leaguers after Jackie Robinson broke the color line. In 1963, the SCLC initiated “Project C” in Birmingham, Alabama. The “C” was for confrontation, nonviolent direct action including boycotts, appeals, rallies, and

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demonstrations. The goal was to goad police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor to suppress the demonstrations, probably violently. The SCLC wanted national attention and sympathy. Connor used dogs and fire hoses. King went to jail on April 12, Good Friday. When Birmingham’s white ministers asked King to end the demonstrations and boycotts, King issued his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The SCLC was in danger of being bypassed by more radical and aggressive organizations in 1961, so it committed major resources to the Albany, Georgia, desegregation campaign. King, criticized for his long-distance leadership and derisively called “De Lawd,” involved himself closely in Albany. The effort failed because the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett, did not take the bait, but rather arranged to house demonstrators in all the prisons and jails within 60 miles and to keep King from sitting in jail and becoming a martyr. There was no adverse publicity because there was no dramatic confrontation. Albany was an education for the SCLC, and in Birmingham there would be dramatic confrontation in abundance. On September 15, 1963, the bomb explosion at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist church killed four young girls and wounded 20 other people. Four Klansmen were identified as suspects, but FBI head J. Edgar Hoover refused to prosecute, claiming that the bombing was the work of civil rights advocates wanting sympathy. The FBI closed the case in 1968, but local officials reopened the case and got one conviction in 1977. Another Klansman died in 1994 as the case against him was being prepared. A third was convicted by a Birmingham jury in 2001, and the fourth in 2002. Both received life terms, and Birmingham rehabilitated itself.

Politics, Legislation, and Recognition In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the regular Democrats, chosen at an all-white convention, at the national convention. The MFDP, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, was an embarrassment at the convention, intended as a love feast for Lyndon Johnson. Not wanting a fight over racism to aid Barry Goldwater’s inroads in the formerly solid South (George Wallace had picked up a lot of northern support in the primaries, too), Johnson attempted to downplay the MFDP and deny it press coverage. His effort failed, as did his weak compromise offer of two seats. The convention was disillusioning for many in the MFDP and the movement itself. The MFDF and many others radicalized after the convention. King won his Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. Black players boycotted the 1965 American Football League all-star game in New Orleans after many were refused service in hotels, businesses, and cabs during the 1964 season. Black and white players alike forced the league to move the game to Houston. This was the first boycott of a city by a professional sports event. Spurring the boycott was passage of the Civil Rights Act, which Congress

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passed in 1964, that outlawed race-based discrimination. A 75-day filibuster preceded enactment. That year, three civil rights workers in Mississippi disappeared after being stopped for speeding. Their bodies were found after six weeks. The same year, riots occurred in Philadelphia and Harlem. After two civil rights workers were murdered in Selma, Alabama, civil rights advocates marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand enforcement of the voting rights laws. Watts, California, rioted. Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was murdered. Congress then enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law barred state use of literacy tests, interpretation of the Constitution, and other tactics that historically had blocked would-be black voters. Before 1965, about 23 percent of blacks nationally were registered to vote. By 1969, 61 percent were registered. In Mississippi, registration rose from 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent in the same time. Increased registration resulted in election of blacks to state, local, and national offices. Before the Voting Rights Act, about 100 blacks had held elective office in the United States. By 1989, there were over 7,200, including 4,800 in the South.

Changes in the Movement Meredith reappeared in 1966 when he launched his 220-mile March against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. His goal of showing how the racial climate had improved was foiled when someone shot him. Civil rights leaders picked up the march from the point at which Meredith was wounded. In 1966, Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, became the first black U.S. senator in 85 years. By that year, the civil rights movement had peaked, having won its legislative victories. Blacks were shifting toward the black power movement, which dominated from 1966 through 1975, because it sought goals beyond civil rights. Blacks demanded dignity, self-sufficiency both economically and politically, and freedom from white influence. Newark rioted in 1967, as did Detroit. Thurgood Marshall became the first black Supreme Court justice. Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, choose the first black mayors of major U.S. cities. Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, enacted in 1968, required fairness in housing. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray received 99 years in prison for the crime. Riots ensued. The Poor People’s March on Washington, a King idea, went on despite his death. The movement was technically still alive, but attention was turned to the Vietnam War and student demonstrations well before 1973, when Maynard Jackson became mayor of Atlanta, the first major southern city to elect a black as mayor. In 1975, Congress renewed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1978 a more conservative Supreme Court ruled in the Bakke case that race-based set-asides for medical school admission were unconstitutional. Violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979 resulted in five anti-Klan protesters dead and 12 Klansmen indicted for murder.

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The Martin Luther King federal holiday became law in 1983. In 1988, over President Ronald Reagan’s veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act. In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first black elected governor, and Colin Powell became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. President George H. W. Bush vetoed a civil rights bill in 1990 because he regarded it as establishing employment quotas; a weaker bill passed in 1991, the year that the Civil Rights Museum opened at the motel in Memphis where King was assassinated. Three years later, in 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 Evers murder. In 1996, the Supreme Court restricted affirmative action by requiring that federal programs must show a “compelling government interest,” and the Court banned congressional districts formed using race as a factor. The anthem of the movement, “We Shall Overcome,” was first sung by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1945. It became the movement’s anthem in the 1960s. Authorship includes Silphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School and others. Horton learned the song from the tobacco workers. Pete Seeger, another coauthor, helped to popularize the song. Seeger modified the original title, “We Will Overcome.” When calling for enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson closed a speech with “and we shall overcome.” Many of his listeners were taken aback.

Conclusion The NAACP effort culminated in the 1954 Brown decision. The movement moved from the courts to the media, and televised nonviolent confrontation pressed Congress to act. The 1964 and 1965 laws ended outlawed second-class status. The movement won equal access to public accommodations, equal employment, equal justice, equal housing, and equal education. Blacks were allowed access to higher education and the arts. The civil rights movement was the inspiration for similar efforts by Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and women. American blacks also supported liberation struggles in Africa. . The major failure of the movement was its inability to achieve significant economic justice for minorities. That required affirmative action, and by 1996, affirmative action was at risk. When the Voting Rights Act came due for renewal in 2006, it passed, and the president signed it almost as a matter of course. On the darker side, resegregation was ongoing in the final quarter of the century. —John H. Barnhill See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); Women’s Movement (1870s); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917);

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Belknap, Michal R. Federal Law and Southern Order. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. “The Civil Rights Era, Part 1.” African American Odyssey. http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html (accessed December 2008). “The Civil Rights Movement.” CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1997/mlk/ links.html (accessed December 2008). Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword. New York: Routledge, 2005. Logan, Rayford. The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. New York: Dial Press, 1954. Simon, Dennis M. “The Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1963.” August 2002. http:// faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Civ%20Rts.html (accessed August 2010). “Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Demonstrations.” African American Odyssey. http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9b.html (accessed December 2008). “The State Responds: Massive Resistance.” Brown v. Board of Education: Virginia Responds, an exhibition at the Library of Virginia. http://www.lva.lib.va.us/ whoweare/exhibits/brown/resistance.htm (accessed July 21, 2010). Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

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Carmichael, Stokely/Kwame Ture (1941–1998) Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, was a leading student activist in the 1960s and Black Power spokesman. Born in Trinidad in 1941, he moved with his family to New York City in 1952. In February 1960, four African American students attending the North Carolina A&T College began a sit-in at the segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro. This action sparked student action all over the South, and 3,600 similar student sit-ins were started. This increased student activism led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a philosophy student attending Howard University, Carmichael joined the campus affiliate of the SNCC. As a student activist, Carmichael participated in the Freedom Rides on segregated southern buses started by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1964, he also acted as a SNCC field organizer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer and later helped organize a black electoral registration drive in Lownes County, Alabama. It was in Lownes County in 1966 that Carmichael first used the Black Panther as a political symbol. By the time of his election as chairman of the SNCC in 1966, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the principle of nonviolence and cooperation with white liberals to achieve black civil rights. Just weeks after his election as the SNCC chairman, James Meredith was shot on the second day of his March against Fear, a lone march from Jackson, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee. With other civil rights leaders, Carmichael went to see Meredith in a Memphis hospital, and together with King, Carmichael planned to continue the march. Following a confrontation with the police in Greenwood, Tennessee, Carmichael was arrested. Upon his release, he used for the first time the raised clenched-fist salute and used the term Black Power. Carmichael would later elaborate on this concept to mean that black Americans alone should struggle for the liberation and own selfconsciousness as African Americans. The continuing war in Vietnam and the draft at home made Carmichael a more militant voice in the United States, and in 1966, he publicly stated that he found the notion of white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend land stolen from red people as ridiculous. In New York City in April 1967, he, together with King, led a massive anti–Vietnam War demonstration, an event that attracted over 200,000 participants. His increasingly militant public profile eventually led to his break with the SNCC in 1967, the year he coauthored Black Power with Charles V. Hamilton. The assassination of King in

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Memphis in April 1968 shocked Carmichael, who proclaimed that white America had finally declared war on black America. Increasingly disillusioned with the idea of progress in the United States as well as the Black Panther Party itself, Carmichael left for Guinea, Africa, in 1969. An aide to the prime minister, Sekou Ture, Carmichael would change his name and continue to be a spokesman for left-wing organizations, and the cause of PanAfricanism. In 1971, he published Stokely Speaks: Black Power to PanAfricanism as a record of his views. His radicalism and continued prominence led the CIA to continually monitor his movements before his untimely death from cancer in 1998. —Rory T. Cornish

Further Reading Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism. New York: Random House, 1971. Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening in the 1960’s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. VanDeburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1979. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1929–1968) Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American theologian, orator, and civil rights leader during the 1950s and 1960s. Born on January 15, 1929, King grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended Morehouse College. Following his graduation from the academic institution, King continued his studies by earning a doctoral degree in philosophy from Boston University in 1953. As pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King preached a policy of passive resistance and nonviolence. Following the arrest of Rosa Parks, who had violated an Alabama bus segregation law, King endorsed a boycott of Montgomery’s transportation system. By November 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott represented a successful victory in the civil rights movement because the Supreme Court ruled that the city ordinance was unconstitutional. Campaigning against racial discrimination and inequality, King and other African American ministers established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January 1957. The new organization was responsible for coordinating demonstrations against segregation and disenfranchisement.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interrracial Justice, during the CIvil Rights March on Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. (National Archives)

During the 1960s, King continued to fight racial prejudices when he led civil rights demonstrators on a protest march in Birmingham, Alabama, which was viewed as the nation’s most segregated city. In the spring of 1963, nearly 1,000 protesters assembled at Birmingham’s City Hall, where they advocated equal employment opportunities and the integration of public facilities. On April 12, 1963, King and 50 individuals were arrested because their actions violated a state court injunction. Local police officers caused the remaining crowd members in the downtown area to disperse when they used attack dogs, electric cattle prods, high-pressure water hoses, and clubs. As news reporters covered the demonstration, the event’s brutality caused federal leaders to urge city officials to end the violence. With segregation and disenfranchisement still existing within American society, civil rights leaders organized a peaceful demonstration in the nation’s capital. On August 28, 1963, King, along with Whitney Young of the National Urban League and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Roy Wilkins, led individuals from across the nation on a march on Washington, D.C. Known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event represented one of the largest demonstrations in American history, as nearly 250,000 individuals assembled in the nation’s capital. During the mass demonstration, King delivered his noted “I Have a Dream” speech. King’s remarks as well as the March on Washington appealed to the American public’s conscience for economic justice and racial equality.

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By the late 1960s, King also criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson for escalating the Vietnam War. He maintained that the conflict’s increasing financial costs reduced resources and funds, which were utilized for federal welfare programs. Additionally, King viewed the war as unjust because the federal government had drafted African Americans to fight for freedoms and civil rights in Southeast Asia while these same liberties did not exist in America. Aside from King’s antiwar views, he also argued that the nation’s racial problems were linked with poverty and living conditions. Therefore, he urged the federal government to fund antipoverty programs, which would improve African Americans’ economic conditions. By the late 1960s, King initiated plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, which would emphasize the issue of economic inequality and injustice among African Americans. In March 1968, King supported a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Prior to King’s participation in the garbage workers’ walkout, James Earl Ray, who was an escaped convict, shot and killed King at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. Following King’s assassination, he became a martyr for the civil rights movement. The news of King’s death caused racial violence and unrest to erupt across the nation. For example, riots broke out in nearly 110 cities, including Baltimore, Louisville, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. National leaders called upon local police officers and armed guards to restore order throughout the country. Civic officials reported that the riots’ death tolls totaled 46 individuals. During the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. played a vital role in the civil rights movement. King’s efforts led to the establishment of several federal laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Right Act of 1968. These achievements were recognized on November 2, 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that established a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The holiday was first observed on January 20, 1986. —Kevin M. Brady

Further Reading Frady, Marshall. Martin Luther King Jr. New York: Penguin Group, 2002. Hansen, Drew D. The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003. Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Malcolm X (1925–1965) Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925 and also known as Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X was one of the most outspoken African American leaders of the 1950s and the early 1960s. A convert of the Nation of Islam, known as the Black Muslims, he changed his name to Malcolm X in 1952, rejecting his surname of Little as his non-African slave name. His father, Earl Little, had also been a political radical and member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s. His death, possibly murder by white extremists in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, helped destabilize the family life of Malcolm, who dropped out of school, moved to Boston, and followed a number of menial jobs. His involvement in criminal activities led to his arrest and conviction in February 1946. While in the Massachusetts correctional system, he became an avid reader and began to formulate his new radical viewpoints before his parole in 1952. A visit to Elijah Muhammad convinced him to join the small Nation of Islam, which Malcolm, who became one of its most eloquent and forceful speakers, helped to transform. Attracting many new recruits in the early 1950s, he was appointed the minister to Temple No. 7 in Harlem, New York City. When city policemen beat and jailed Hinton Johnson, a fellow Black Muslim preacher, Malcolm lead a protest march, and his growing reputation led to a local 1959 television documentary The Hate that Hate Produced, which only tended to increase his notoriety amongst the white population. Malcolm tended to justify white fears during the 1950s and early 1960s civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Rejecting King’s nonviolent, civil disobedience approach, Malcolm called for the freedom of 22 million African Americans by any means necessary. Calling Christianity a hypocritical white religion, he urged African Americans to embrace the black nationalism of the Nation of Islam, reject integration with white devils, recommended that African Americans defend themselves against white violence, rejected the 1963 March on Washington as a farce, and was publicly unsympathetic about the assassination of President John Kennedy. After centuries of slavery and segregation in the United States, he saw only an American nightmare, not an American Dream, and he called on the United Nations to create in the United States separate black states solely for African Americans. Increasingly alienated from the leadership of Elijah

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Muhammad, whom he saw as corrupt, he broke with the Nation of Islam in March 1964, founding what would become a more mainstream Islamic movement, Muslin Mosque, Inc. Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca on April 20, 1964, would change his life. Traveling through Africa, he was welcomed as a delegate at the Organization of African Unity in Cairo, July 1964. He visited Europe and took part in the Oxford Union Debate of December 1964, an event that was televised in Britain by the BBC. Increasingly, Malcolm came to see African American civil rights issues in the larger context of human rights, in a global perspective of the liberation of emerging third-world nations. Increasing an advocate of pan-Africanism, upon his return to the United States, he reached out to black students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Increasingly viewed by the Nation of Islam as a traitor, the FBI saw him as a dangerous subversive. In early 1965, numerous death threats had been made on his life, and on February 14, 1965, his New York home was firebombed. While addressing a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Manhattan Audubon Ballroom, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by a Black Muslim, Talmadge Hager, though the truth about who was really behind his murder remains a controversial topic. After his death, his Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he had been writing with Alex Haley, was published. A best seller, Malcolm in death became a decisive influence on the mid-1960s Black Power movement, an influence continued today by Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) and the emerging hip-hop culture of black America. —Rory T. Cornish

Further Reading Breitman, George, ed. By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. Friedly, Michael. The Assassination of Malcolm X. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992. Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Assisted by Alex Haley. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

March on Washington (1963) During the 20th century, segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial discrimination still existed within American society. In the summer of 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed these issues by urging Congress to pass civil rights legislation, which would outlaw discrimination in public facilities, improve

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African Americans’ economic status, allow the U.S. government to withhold funds from segregated federal facilities and programs, authorize the attorney general to enforce desegregation in regards to public schools, and establish a Community Relations Service. Civil rights leaders, labor officials, and religious groups supported the president’s recommendations by organizing a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., which occurred on August 28, 1963. The demonstration’s origins began in December 1962, when civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, who was the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin planned a march on the nation’s capital. Initially, the organizers wanted the mass demonstration to focus on economic issues such as increasing minimum wage and passing fair-employment laws. While members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) supported the mass demonstration, representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and National Urban League (NUL) opposed the march because they feared that it might cause a riot in the nation’s capital. Despite this lack of support, the organizers expanded the demonstration’s scope by focusing on other concerns including civil rights. These additional issues gained the cooperation of NAACP and NUL members. On August 28, 1963, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who served as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Whitney Young of the National Urban League; and NAACP president Roy Wilkins led individuals from across the nation on a march on Washington D.C., where they protested segregation and discrimination. Known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the rally assembled at the Washington Monument and moved to the Lincoln Memorial. With nearly 250,000 individuals in attendance, the event represented one of the largest demonstrations in American history. During the mass demonstration, King delivered one of the most emotional public addresses in the 20th century. As the crowd roared in approval, King declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (InfoUSA Web site). Thus, King’s speech as well as the March on Washington appealed to the American public’s conscience for economic justice and racial equality. The peaceful demonstration represented a significant step forward in the civil rights movement because it influenced federal officials to pass civil rights legislation. On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in public accommodations as well as employment; empowered the U.S. government to withhold funds from segregated federal programs and facilities; and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The president also authorized the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which

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eliminated literacy tests and other voting qualifications based upon race. The act also stipulated that the federal government would promote voter registration. Additionally, Johnson approved the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which outlawed discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. —Kevin M. Brady

Further Reading Hansen, Drew D. The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003. InfoUSA, Bureau of International Programs, U.S. Department of State. “Martin Luther King Jr.” http://usinfo.state.gov/infousa/government/overview/38.html (accessed September 29, 2008). Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Founded in 1957 at the conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was led by Martin Luther King Jr. Other founders included Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Fred Shuttlesworth, and other black ministers. The SCLC sought through nonviolent protest to appeal to the moral conscience of white Americans and end discrimination against blacks. SCLC efforts included the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama; the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama; and many sit-ins and voter registration drives. Originally the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, renaming itself the Southern Christian Leadership Conference helped emphasize its moral and spiritual nature. Eliminating “Negro” from the name made it harder for whites to stand on the sidelines. Rustin and others believed that the southern communities had sufficient local leadership, so rather than a grassroots organization, the SCLC was a coordinator of locally led activism. King led the Montgomery Improvement Association as pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when Rosa Parks launched the bus boycott in 1955. After the initial successes in the 1950s, the SCLC led the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage that brought 25,000 people to Washington, D.C., and a 1957 youth march on

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Washington that brought 40,000. But it was somewhat disorganized, and campaigns for voter registration fell short. In the early 1960s, it brought in new leadership, including Andrew J. Young and Wyatt T. Walker, and increased full-time staff from 5 to 60. In Albany, Georgia, in 1961, SCLC demonstrations failed to provoke outbursts by city authorities, and the campaign failed to draw national media coverage. In Birmingham in 1963, the SCLC pushed until police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor used dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against demonstrators, children included, in front of television cameras. A national audience was shocked, as was President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The March on Washington brought 250,000 supporters to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The 1965 march and voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama, led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The campaign in Selma split the civil rights movement when the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee accused SCLC of making a deal with Alabama’s governor. In 1967, the SCLC shifted its focus to northern black poverty, the presumed cause of inner-city violence and the rise of the Black Panther movement. The Poor People’s Campaign, led by Abernathy after King’s assassination in 1968, ended in failure. The move north brought in young talent including Jesse Jackson. The SCLC operated citizenship schools, organized voter registration campaigns, and most of all preached nonviolence to show that civil rights was a moral as much as a political issue. In the early 1970s, the older leadership departed. Joseph Lowery became president in 1977. The SCLC remains active against police brutality, hate crimes, drug abuse, and discrimination, but without King, it is no longer a major force. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading “Civil Rights; Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” History Learning Site. http:// www.historylearningsite.co.uk/southern_christian_leadership_co.htm. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. McElrath, Jessica. “Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” About.com. http:// afroamhistory.about.com/od/sclc/a/sclc.htm (accessed November 2008). Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-Eighties. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. “Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Jrank.org. http://law.jrank.org/pages/10382/ Southern-Christian-Leadership-Conference.html (accessed November 2008).

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Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Four freshmen from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked a national movement on February 1, 1960, when they sat down at a segregated local Woolworth’s lunch counter, asked to be served, and when denied, refused to leave. This act of bravery initiated a sit-in movement that would involve thousands of students across the nation. The result would be the desegregation of hundreds of lunch counters and other facilities in the country and the formation of one of the foremost provocative civil rights organization in the 1960s. The momentum of the youth movement led to students meeting on April 16, 1960, at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC declined offers of the major civil rights organizations to co-opt their movement into one of the established entities. Advised by Ella Baker, executive director of SCLC, SNCC accepted donations from civil rights organizations, but maintained full autonomy as a student-led organization. The Raleigh conference attracted over 120 black students across the South and North in addition to white student participants. SCLC, CORE, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the National Student Association (NSA), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the National Student Christian Federation were the organizations in attendance. Notable leaders within SNCC included Diane Nash, Bob Moses, Marion Barry, and John Lewis. Soon after their formation, SNCC members were referred to as the “shock troops of the movement.” By 1961, over 400 SNCC volunteers traveled into the Deep South, participating in Freedom Rides along with numerous CORE volunteers. SNCC also played a significant role in the 1963 March on Washington in addition to the Voter Education Project, where they waged a massive voter registration drive throughout the Deep South in the face of police harassment, arrests, shootings, bombings, KKK violence, assassinations, and the threat of economic reprisal. Other initiatives originated by SNCC include the Mississippi Summer Project, Freedom Schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an integrated party organized to win seats for disenfranchised blacks at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. SNCC was among the major organizations that pressured President Lyndon Johnson into passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The lack of tangible change for African Americans after the passage of these pieces of landmark legislation combined with unfair treatment of African Americans at the 1964 Democratic Convention led to disillusionment amongst many SNCC members.

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Disillusionment led to division within SNCC. One faction favored the traditional nonviolent civil rights ideology; while the newer faction, dissatisfied with the rate of change via the perceived gradual, integrated civil rights approach, emphasized the ideology of “Black Power.” The newer group emphasized that blacks needed to form institutions and organizations on their own and also advocated self-defense, by weaponry if necessary. In May 1966, the new leader of the militant segment, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), was voted to replace John Lewis as chairman of SNCC. As SNCC ultimately moved to expel white members, mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations distanced themselves from SNCC. Directional and ideological rifts along with potential bankruptcy witnessed the dissipation of SNCC beginning in 1967. —Kelton Edmonds

Further Reading Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword. New York: Routledge, 2005. Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

President John F. Kennedy’s Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi (1962) In 1962, state authorities and officials in Mississippi directly challenged the authority of the federal government by refusing to enforce the desegregation orders of the federal courts. To meet this challenge, President John F. Kennedy, at the end of September, issued the following proclamation and executive or commanding those officials to cease such opposition to federal authority and authorizing the secretary of defense to employ the National Guard to enforce compliance to the court orders. Presidential Proclamation No. 3497 Whereas the governor of the State of Mississippi and certain law enforcement officers and other officials of that State, and other persons, individually and in unlawful assemblies, combinations and conspiracies, have been and are willfully opposing and obstructing the enforcement of orders entered by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; and Whereas such unlawful assemblies, combinations and conspiracies oppose and obstruct the execution of laws of the United States, impede the course of justice under those laws and make it impracticable to enforce those laws in the State of Mississippi by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings; and

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) Whereas I have expressly called the attention of the Governor of Mississippi to the perilous situation that exists and to his duties in the premises, and have requested that the orders of the courts of the United States will be obeyed and that the law and order will be maintained; Now, therefore, I, John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, under and by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do command all persons engaged in such obstructions of justice to cease and desist therefrom and to disperse and retire peacefully forthwith. In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington this 30th day of September in the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Two, and of the independence of the United States of America the One Hundred and Eighty-Seven. John F. Kennedy By the President: Secretary of State Source: Proc. No. 3497, 27 Fed. Reg. 9681 (1962). Executive Order No. 11053 Providing Assistance for the Removal of Unlawful Obstructions of Justice in the State of Mississippi Whereas on September 30, 1962, I issued proclamation No. 3497 reading in part as follows [see above] and Whereas the commands contained in that proclamation have not been obeyed and obstruction of enforcement of those court orders still exists and threatens to continue: Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. The Secretary of Defense is authorized and directed to take all appropriate steps to enforce all orders of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and to remove all obstructions of justice in the State of Mississippi. Section 2. In furtherance of the enforcement of the aforesaid orders of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to use such of the armed forces of the United States as he may deem necessary. Section 3. I hereby authorize the Secretary of Defense to call into the active military service of the United States, as he may deem appropriate to carry out the purposes of this order, any and all of the units of the Army National Guard and of the Air National Guard of the State of Mississippi to serve in the active military

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) service of the United States for an indefinite period and until relieved by appropriate orders. In carrying out the provisions of Section 1, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to use the units, and members thereof, ordered into active military service of the United States pursuant to this section. Section 4. The Secretary of Defense is authorized to delegate to the Secretary of the Army or the Secretary of the Air Force, or both, any of the authority conferred upon him by this order. John F. Kennedy The White House September 30, 1962 Source: 27 Fed. Reg. 9693 (1962).

Excerpts from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 President John F. Kennedy introduced a civil rights bill into Congress in June 1963, but by Kennedy’s assassination the following November, the measure had made little headway against the opposition of conservative southern congressmen. Taken up by President Lyndon Johnson, an experienced legislator who made full use of sympathy for his predecessor and the powers of the president, the bill was enacted on July 2, 1964. Meant initially to improve the position of African Americans, the bill was eventually amended to also protect the rights of women of all colors. Reproduced here are the first four sections of the act. Title I prohibited the unequal application of voter registration qualifications; Title II barred racial discrimination in such public facilities as restaurants, motels, hotels, and theaters; Title III prohibited municipal and state governments from refusing access to public facilities on the basis of race, religion, gender, or ethnicity; and Title IV supported the desegregation of public schools and empowered the attorney general to file suit to enforce the act. Document Number: PL 88-352 88th Congress, H. R. 7152 An Act To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the “Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) TITLE I—VOTING RIGHTS SEC. 101. Section 2004 of the Revised Statutes (42 U.S.C. 1971), as amended by section 131 of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (71 Stat. 637), and as further amended by section 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (74 Stat. 90), is further amended as follows: (a) Insert “1” after “(a)” in subsection (a) and add at the end of subsection (a) the following new paragraphs: (2) No person acting under color of law shall— (A) in determining whether any individual is qualified under State law or laws to vote in any Federal election, apply any standard, practice, or procedure different from the standards, practices, or procedures applied under such law or laws to other individuals within the same county, parish, or similar political subdivision who have been found by State officials to be qualified to vote; (B) deny the right of any individual to vote in any Federal election because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election; or (C) employ any literacy test as a qualification for voting in any Federal election unless (i) such test is administered to each individual and is conducted wholly in writing, and (ii) a certified copy of the test and of the answers given by the individual is furnished to him within twenty-five days of the submission of his request made within the period of time during which records and papers are required to be retained and preserved pursuant to title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (42 U.S.C. 1974—74e; 74 Stat. 88): Provided, however, That the Attorney General may enter into agreements with appropriate State or local authorities that preparation, conduct, and maintenance of such tests in accordance with the provisions of applicable State or local law, including such special provisions as are necessary in the preparation, conduct, and maintenance of such tests for persons who are blind or otherwise physically handicapped, meet the purposes of this subparagraph and constitute compliance therewith. (3) For purposes of this subsection— (A) the term “vote” shall have the same meaning as in subsection (e) of this section; (B) the phrase “literacy test” includes any test of the ability to read, write, understand, or interpret any matter. (b) Insert immediately following the period at the end of the first sentence of subsection (c) the following new sentence: “If in any such proceeding literacy is a relevant fact there shall be a rebuttable presumption that any person who has not been adjudged an incompetent and who has completed the sixth grade in a public school in, or a private school accredited by, any State or territory, the District of Columbia, or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico where instruction is carried on predominantly in the English language, possesses sufficient literacy, comprehension, and intelligence to vote in any Federal election.” (c) Add the following subsection “(f)” and designate the present subsection “(f)” as subsection “(g)”:

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) (f) When used in subsection (a) or (c) of this section, the words “Federal election” shall mean any general, special, or primary election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing or selecting any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, presidential elector, Member of the Senate, or Member of the House of Representatives. (d) Add the following subsection “(h).” (h) In any proceeding instituted by the United States in any district court of the United States under this section in which the Attorney General requests a finding of a pattern or practice of discrimination pursuant to subsection (e) of this section the Attorney General, at the time he files the complaint, or any defendant in the proceeding, within twenty days after service upon him of the complaint, may file with the clerk of such court a request that a court of three judges be convened to hear and determine the entire case. A copy of the request for a three-judge court shall be immediately furnished by such clerk to the chief judge of the circuit (or in his absence, the presiding circuit judge of the circuit) in which the case is pending. Upon receipt of the copy of such request it shall be the duty of the chief justice of the circuit or the presiding circuit judge, as the case may be, to designate immediately three judges in such circuit, of whom at least one shall be a circuit judge and another of whom shall be a district judge of the court in which the proceeding was instituted, to hear and determine such case, and it shall be the duty of the judges so designated to assign the case for hearing at the earliest practicable date, to participate in the hearing and determination thereof, and to cause the case to be in every way expedited. An appeal from the final judgment of such court will lie to the Supreme Court. “In any proceeding brought under subsection (c) of this section to enforce subsection (b) of this section, or in the event neither the Attorney General nor any defendant files a request for a three-judge court in any proceeding authorized by this subsection, it shall be the duty of the chief judge of the district (or in his absence, the acting chief judge) in which the case is pending immediately to designate a judge in such district to hear and determine the case. In the event that no judge in the district is available to hear and determine the case, the chief judge of the district, or the acting chief judge, as the case may be, shall certify this fact to the chief judge of the circuit (or, in his absence, the acting chief judge) who shall then designate a district or circuit judge of the circuit to hear and determine the case. “It shall be the duty of the judge designated pursuant to this section to assign the case for hearing at the earliest practicable date and to cause the case to be in every way expedited.” TITLE II—INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AGAINST DISCRIMINATION IN PLACES OF PUBLIC ACCOMMODATION SEC. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) (b) Each of the following establishments which serves the public is a place of public accommodation within the meaning of this title if its operations affect commerce, or if discrimination or segregation by it is supported by State action: (1) any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other than an establishment located within a building which contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as his residence; (2) any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises, including, but not limited to, any such facility located on the premises of any retail establishment; or any gasoline station; (3) any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment; and (4) any establishment (A)(i) which is physically located within the premises of any establishment otherwise covered by this subsection, or (ii) within the premises of which is physically located any such covered establishment, and (B) which holds itself out as serving patrons of such covered establishment. (c) The operations of an establishment affect commerce within the meaning of this title if (1) it is one of the establishments described in paragraph (1) of subsection (b); (2) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (2) of subsection (b), it serves or offers to serve interstate travelers or a substantial portion of the food which it serves, or gasoline or other products which it sells, has moved in commerce; (3) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (3) of subsection (b), it customarily presents films, performances, athletic teams, exhibitions, or other sources of entertainment which move in commerce; and (4) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (4) of subsection (b), it is physically located within the premises of, or there is physically located within its premises, an establishment the operations of which affect commerce within the meaning of this subsection. For purposes of this section, “commerce” means travel, trade, traffic, commerce, transportation, or communication among the several States, or between the District of Columbia and any State, or between any foreign country or any territory or possession and any State or the District of Columbia, or between points in the same State but through any other State or the District of Columbia or a foreign country. (d) Discrimination or segregation by an establishment is supported by State action within the meaning of this title if such discrimination or segregation (1) is carried on under color of any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation; or (2) is carried on under color of any custom or usage required or enforced by officials of the State or political subdivision thereof; or (3) is required by action of the State or political subdivision thereof. (e) The provisions of this title shall not apply to a private club or other establishment not in fact open to the public, except to the extent that the facilities of such establishment are made available to the customers or patrons of an establishment within the scope of subsection (b).

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) SEC. 202. All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin, if such discrimination or segregation is or purports to be required by any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, rule, or order of a State or any agency or political subdivision thereof. SEC. 203. No person shall (a) withhold, deny, or attempt to withhold or deny, or deprive or attempt to deprive, any person of any right or privilege secured by section 201 or 202, or (b) intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person with the purpose of interfering with any right or privilege secured by section 201 or 202, or (c) punish or attempt to punish any person for exercising or attempting to exercise any right or privilege secured by section 201 or 202. SEC. 204. (a) Whenever any person has engaged or there are reasonable grounds to believe that any person is about to engage in any act or practice prohibited by section 203, a civil action for preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order, or other order, may be instituted by the person aggrieved and, upon timely application, the court may, in its discretion, permit the Attorney General to intervene in such civil action if he certifies that the case is of general public importance. Upon application by the complainant and in such circumstances as the court may deem just, the court may appoint an attorney for such complainant and may authorize the commencement of the civil action without the payment of fees, costs, or security. (b) In any action commenced pursuant to this title, the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party, other than the United States, a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs, and the United States shall be liable for costs the same as a private person. (c) In the case of an alleged act or practice prohibited by this title which occurs in a State, or political subdivision of a State, which has a State or local law prohibiting such act or practice and establishing or authorizing a State or local authority to grant or seek relief from such practice or to institute criminal proceedings with respect thereto upon receiving notice thereof, no civil action may be brought under subsection (a) before the expiration of thirty days after written notice of such alleged act or practice has been given to the appropriate State or local authority by registered mail or in person, provided that the court may stay proceedings in such civil action pending the termination of State or local enforcement proceedings. (d) In the case of an alleged act or practice prohibited by this title which occurs in a State, or political subdivision of a State, which has no State or local law prohibiting such act or practice, a civil action may be brought under subsection (a): Provided, That the court may refer the matter to the Community Relations Service established by title X of this Act for as long as the court believes there is a reasonable possibility of obtaining voluntary compliance, but for not more than sixty days: Provided further, That upon expiration of such sixty-day period, the court may extend such period for an additional period, not to exceed a cumulative total of one hundred and twenty days, if it believes there then exists a reasonable possibility of securing voluntary compliance.

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) SEC. 205. The Service is authorized to make a full investigation of any complaint referred to it by the court under section 204(d) and may hold such hearings with respect thereto as may be necessary. The Service shall conduct any hearings with respect to any such complaint in executive session, and shall not release any testimony given therein except by agreement of all parties involved in the complaint with the permission of the court, and the Service shall endeavor to bring about a voluntary settlement between the parties. SEC. 206. (a) Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that any person or group of persons is engaged in a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of any of the rights secured by this title, and that the pattern or practice is of such a nature and is intended to deny the full exercise of the rights herein described, the Attorney General may bring a civil action in the appropriate district court of the United States by filing with it a complaint (1) signed by him (or in his absence the Acting Attorney General), (2) setting forth facts pertaining to such pattern or practice, and (3) requesting such preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order or other order against the person or persons responsible for such pattern or practice, as he deems necessary to insure the full enjoyment of the rights herein described. (b) In any such proceeding the Attorney General may file with the clerk of such court a request that a court of three judges be convened to hear and determine the case. Such request by the Attorney General shall be accompanied by a certificate that, in his opinion, the case is of general public importance. A copy of the certificate and request for a three-judge court shall be immediately furnished by such clerk to the chief judge of the circuit (or in his absence, the presiding circuit judge of the circuit) in which the case is pending. Upon receipt of the copy of such request it shall be the duty of the chief judge of the circuit or the presiding circuit judge, as the case may be, to designate immediately three judges in such circuit, of whom at least one shall be a circuit judge and another of whom shall be a district judge of the court in which the proceeding was instituted, to hear and determine such case, and it shall be the duty of the judges so designated to assign the case for hearing at the earliest practicable date, to participate in the hearing and determination thereof, and to cause the case to be in every way expedited. An appeal from the final judgment of such court will lie to the Supreme Court. In the event the Attorney General fails to file such a request in any such proceeding, it shall be the duty of the chief judge of the district (or in his absence, the acting chief judge) in which the case is pending immediately to designate a judge in such district to hear and determine the case. In the event that no judge in the district is available to hear and determine the case, the chief judge of the district, or the acting chief judge, as the case may be, shall certify this fact to the chief judge of the circuit (or in his absence, the acting chief judge) who shall then designate a district or circuit judge of the circuit to hear and determine the case. It shall be the duty of the judge designated pursuant to this section to assign the case for hearing at the earliest practicable date and to cause the case to be in every way expedited.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) SEC. 207. (a) The district courts of the United States shall have jurisdiction of proceedings instituted pursuant to this title and shall exercise the same without regard to whether the aggrieved party shall have exhausted any administrative or other remedies that may be provided by law. (b) The remedies provided in this title shall be the exclusive means of enforcing the rights based on this title, but nothing in this title shall preclude any individual or any State or local agency from asserting any right based on any other Federal or State law not inconsistent with this title, including any statute or ordinance requiring nondiscrimination in public establishments or accommodations, or from pursuing any remedy, civil or criminal, which may be available for the vindication or enforcement of such right. TITLE III—DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC FACILITIES SEC. 301. (a) Whenever the Attorney General receives a complaint in writing signed by an individual to the effect that he is being deprived of or threatened with the loss of his right to the equal protection of the laws, on account of his race, color, religion, or national origin, by being denied equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof, other than a public school or public college as defined in section 401 of title IV hereof, and the Attorney General believes the complaint is meritorious and certifies that the signer or signers of such complaint are unable, in his judgment, to initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings for relief and that the institution of an action will materially further the orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities, the Attorney General is authorized to institute for or in the name of the United States a civil action in any appropriate district court of the United States against such parties and for such relief as may be appropriate, and such court shall have and shall exercise jurisdiction of proceedings instituted pursuant to this section. The Attorney General may implead as defendants such additional parties as are or become necessary to the grant of effective relief hereunder. (b) The Attorney General may deem a person or persons unable to initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings within the meaning of subsection (a) of this section when such person or persons are unable, either directly or through other interested persons or organizations, to bear the expense of the litigation or to obtain effective legal representation; or whenever he is satisfied that the institution of such litigation would jeopardize the personal safety, employment, or economic standing of such person or persons, their families, or their property. SEC. 302. In any action or proceeding under this title the United States shall be liable for costs, including a reasonable attorney’s fee, the same as a private person. SEC. 303. Nothing in this title shall affect adversely the right of any person to sue for or obtain relief in any court against discrimination in any facility covered by this title. SEC. 304. A complaint as used in this title is a writing or document within the meaning of section 1001, title 18, United States Code.

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) TITLE IV—DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION DEFINITIONS SEC. 401. As used in this title— (a) “Commissioner” means the Commissioner of Education. (b) “Desegregation” means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but “desegregation” shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance. (c) “Public school” means any elementary or secondary educational institution, and “public college” means any institution of higher education or any technical or vocational school above the secondary school level, provided that such public school or public college is operated by a State, subdivision of a State, or governmental agency within a State, or operated wholly or predominantly from or through the use of governmental funds or property, or funds or property derived from a governmental source. (d) “School board” means any agency or agencies which administer a system of one or more public schools and any other agency which is responsible for the assignment of students to or within such system. SURVEY AND REPORT OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES SEC. 402. The Commissioner shall conduct a survey and make a report to the President and the Congress, within two years of the enactment of this title, concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions at all levels in the United States, its territories and possessions, and the District of Columbia. TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE SEC. 403. The Commissioner is authorized, upon the application of any school board, State, municipality, school district, or other governmental unit legally responsible for operating a public school or schools, to render technical assistance to such applicant in the preparation, adoption, and implementation of plans for the desegregation of public schools. Such technical assistance may, among other activities, include making available to such agencies information regarding effective methods of coping with special educational problems occasioned by desegregation, and making available to such agencies personnel of the Office of Education or other persons specially equipped to advise and assist them in coping with such problems. TRAINING INSTITUTES SEC. 404. The Commissioner is authorized to arrange, through grants or contracts, with institutions of higher education for the operation of short-term or regular session institutes for special training designed to improve the ability of teachers, supervisors, counselors, and other elementary or secondary school personnel to deal effectively with special educational problems occasioned by desegregation. Individuals who attend such an institute on a full-time basis may be paid stipends for the period of their attendance

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) at such institute in amounts specified by the Commissioner in regulations, including allowances for travel to attend such institute. GRANTS SEC. 405. (a) The Commissioner is authorized, upon application of a school board, to make grants to such board to pay, in whole or in part, the cost of— (1) giving to teachers and other school personnel inservice training in dealing with problems incident to desegregation, and (2) employing specialists to advise in problems incident to desegregation. (b) In determining whether to make a grant, and in fixing the amount thereof and the terms and conditions on which it will be made, the Commissioner shall take into consideration the amount available for grants under this section and the other applications which are pending before him; the financial condition of the applicant and the other resources available to it; the nature, extent, and gravity of its problems incident to desegregation; and such other factors as he finds relevant. PAYMENTS SEC. 406. Payments pursuant to a grant or contract under this title may be made (after necessary adjustments on account of previously made overpayments or underpayments) in advance or by way of reimbursement, and in such installments, as the Commissioner may determine. SUITS BY THE ATTORNEY GENERAL SEC. 407. (a) Whenever the Attorney General receives a complaint inwriting— (1) signed by a parent or group of parents to the effect that his or their minor children, as members of a class of persons similarly situated, are being deprived by a school board of the equal protection of the laws, or (2) signed by an individual, or his parent, to the effect that he has been denied admission to or not permitted to continue in attendance at a public college by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin,and the Attorney General believes the complaint is meritorious and certifies that the signer or signers of such complaint are unable, in his judgment, to initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings for relief and that the institution of an action will materially further the orderly achievement of desegregation in public education, the Attorney General is authorized, after giving notice of such complaint to the appropriate school board or college authority and after certifying that he is satisfied that such board or authority has had a reasonable time to adjust the conditions alleged in such complaint, to institute for or in the name of the United States a civil action in any appropriate district court of the United States against such parties and for such relief as may be appropriate, and such court shall have and shall exercise jurisdiction of proceedings instituted pursuant to this section, provided that nothing herein shall empower any official or court of the United States to issue any order seeking to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another

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Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) or one school district to another in order to achieve such racial balance, or otherwise enlarge the existing power of the court to insure compliance with constitutional standards. The Attorney General may implead as defendants such additional parties as are or become necessary to the grant of effective relief hereunder. (b) The Attorney General may deem a person or persons unable to initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings within the meaning of subsection (a) of this section when such person or persons are unable, either directly or through other interested persons or organizations, to bear the expense of the litigation or to obtain effective legal representation; or whenever he is satisfied that the institution of such litigation would jeopardize the personal safety, employment, or economic standing of such person or persons, their families, or their property. (c) The term “parent” as used in this section includes any person standing in loco parentis. A “complaint” as used in this section is a writing or document within the meaning of section 1001, title 18, United States Code. SEC. 408. In any action or proceeding under this title the United States shall be liable for costs the same as a private person. SEC. 409. Nothing in this title shall affect adversely the right of any person to sue for or obtain relief in any court against discrimination in public education. SEC. 410. Nothing in this title shall prohibit classification and assignment for reasons other than race, color, religion, or national origin. Source: http://www.dotcr.ost.dot.gov/Documents%5CYCR%5CCIVILR64.HTM (accessed July 21, 2010).

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Since the establishment of an organized peace movement in America, dating back to the conclusion of the War of 1812, the United States has witnessed a number of large-scale antiwar protests and demonstrations during certain military conflicts. The most notable demonstrations against war occurred during the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. Each antiwar protest movement has been characterized by its own ideological constituency and organizing tendencies. The antiwar movement can be considered part of the larger organized Peace Movement in American history, although its actions are focused on the particular war at hand. The first major protests against war in U.S. history occurred during the War of 1812. Previously, the French and Indian War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783) witnessed no major protests. Religious sects such as the Society of Friends, the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren expressed their opposition through refusal to pay taxes and not bearing arms. Their actions were individual matters of conscience, not collective outbursts. During the War of 1812, however, antiwar protests were as vitriolic as any movement in the young nation’s short history. The primary center of war opposition was in New England. There, antiwar Federalists convened the Hartford Convention in the state of Connecticut. Delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island met from December 15, 1814, to January 5, 1815, in the city of Hartford, Connecticut, and proposed several constitutional amendments to limit the war-making power of the federal government. The convention heard proposals for seizing customs houses, impounding federal revenues, declaring neutrality, nullifying conscription, prohibiting new western states from outvoting charter members of the Union, and stopping Jeffersonian-type embargoes. There was even talk of open secession should the conflict continue. What prompted such spirited opposition were fears that western expansion would weaken the political influence of the eastern seaboard. They believed the war would invite the British Navy to destroy their maritime commerce and invade their coastal towns. New England governors refused to call out the state militia.

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Massachusetts was the most virulent in terms of antiwar sentiment. There, the legislature called for establishing a peace party. In July 1812, delegates from 53 towns attended a convention in Northampton. They signed a petition declaring the war to be “neither just, necessary, nor expedient,” and urged President James Madison to reach a quick settlement. In November 1814, Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong even sponsored a secret mission to make peace with the British. He dispatched Thomas Adams to Halifax to meet with General Sir John S. Sherbrooke to ascertain the British government’s position should a conflict occur between Governor Strong and President Madison. The city of Baltimore, Maryland, was also the scene of riots as early as June and July 1812 that resulted in one death and considerable destruction. Alexander Hanson, the 26-year-old editor and co-owner of the Federal Republican, a paper serving the mercantile interests, denounced the war declaration and stated his publication’s intention of continuing its criticisms. In response, a mob led by a French apothecary demolished the newspaper’s offices and then marched to the wharves, where it torched some ships and damaged adjacent property owned by Federalist merchants. After the offices were reopened, an Anti-Federalist mob began throwing stones. When the mob forced open the front door, General Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, a defender of the press, and his men opened fire, wounding several mob leaders and killing another. City magistrates promptly called out two companies of militia under Brigadier General John Stricker and ordered him to restore order. The next day, Stricker reached a truce with the defenders, some of whom were seriously injured. The authorities guaranteed the Federalists safe conduct to the county jail, where all would answer to charges of murder. While on the milelong march to the jail, the newspaper’s defenders were pelted with cobblestones before the frenzied mob returned to destroy, once more, Hanson’s offices. That night, the mob gathered outside the jail and began intimidating the guard at the gate. The scared prisoners elected to try their luck with flight but were waylaid and beaten. Nothing, however, came close to matching the opposition movement promoted by John Lowell and the Essex Junto. The junto consisted of members from prominent families in Essex County, Massachusetts, including political leaders like Lowell, Harrison Gray Otis, Judge Isaac Parker, and Senator Timothy Parker. Lowell’s proposal called for the original thirteen states to draft a new federal constitution to protect New England’s maritime and commercial interests. Lowell actually was sponsoring a secessionist plan aimed at kicking the West out of the Union. As preposterous as the idea appeared, it gained support from the likes of Senator Pickering, Gouverneur Morris of New York, and Charles Carroll of Maryland. The most respected of Boston’s Federalist newspapers endorsed the idea and called for New England states to meet in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss it. From opposition like this efforts to annex Canada were abandoned.

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Like the War of 1812, the center of opposition to the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) was primarily in New England. Noted intellectuals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, spoke out against militarism in general and the war, in particular. In addition, New England Whigs in Congress, led by former president John Quincy Adams, denounced the war as nothing more than a move to expand slavery. This protest by the “Conscience Whigs” was part of the vigorous New England abolitionist movement. Antiwar sentiment reached its peak in late 1847. Mounting public impatience with the war created a political climate that frustrated President James K. Polk’s attempt to conquer all of Mexico and forced him to settle for less territory. The American Peace Society had a direct effect on federal enlistments in New England; its journal, Advocate of Peace, edited by George Beckwith, published numerous articles criticizing the Polk administration, as did the Pennsylvania Freeman edited by abolitionist and peace activist Mary Grew. The efforts of antiwar critics and pacifists were instrumental in forcing a peace settlement with Mexico. The war finally ended in 1848, but the controversy lingered over matters involving slavery and territorial expansion. While peace crusaders helped contain the violence and prevented further bloodshed, domestic political passions and sectional animosity were on the rise as antiwar abolitionists persuaded many northerners that the southern slave states were disrupting the national mission of freedom for all. Although protests against the Mexican-American War eventually caused Polk and the expansionists to curb their ambitions, the Civil War (1861–1865) had its share of dramatic protests and rebellions. One of the more notable antiwar critics was Ohio representative Clement L. Vallandingham. As head of the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, so designated by Union sympathizers who named them after the poisonous snake, Vallandingham, working in conjunction with secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, plotted against what he considered a war for the fattening of “Eastern capitalists.” Generally described as seditious in both North and South, the Copperheads advocated a union restored by negotiation rather than war. They denounced military arrests, conscription, and even emancipation, along with other war measures. Other leaders of this group included Alexander Long of Cincinnati, Fernando Wood of New York, L. B. Milligan of Indiana, and B. G. Harris of Maryland. In the North, moreover, antiwar Democrats severely criticized the Lincoln administration’s handling of the war and called for a negotiated settlement. Part of the political opposition was openly racist, charging that the enslaved blacks had caused the conflict. When the Union introduced a draft in 1863, antidraft riots broke out in many places. The most serious were in New York City, where

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rioters fought federal troops for three days. There, mobs of whites burned an orphan asylum for black children, and demolished shops and houses of white abolitionists along with those of African Americans. Rioters destroyed many buildings, and estimates of deaths ranged as high as 1,000 or more. After the Civil War, the onrush of late-19th-century industrialization resulted in a more aggressive overseas foreign policy. The opportunity for new markets and additional territories took place in April 1898, when the U.S. government declared war on Spain and launched effective military attacks on Spanish holdings in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Initially, many Americans supported the call for Cuban independence along with all the other territories under Spanish rule. Sentiment quickly changed when it became apparent that the conflict would entail conquest rather than liberation. Within 10 weeks, the United States had captured Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and facilitated the annexation of Hawaii. Later that year, Spanish and American negotiators worked out a settlement in Paris in which the United States compensated Spain monetarily in return for American occupation of Cuba (to be granted independence in 1902) and the cession to the United States of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In response to these events, a powerful anti-imperialist movement appeared. The argument that imperialism was subversive of the free-trade basis of competitive capitalism led to the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League in Faneuil Hall, Boston, on June 15, 1898. League membership included Gamaliel Bradford (the 67-year-old descendant of the Bay Colony’s first governor), pacifists Edward Atkinson and judge Ernest Crosby, reformer and feminist Jane Addams, urban reformer Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, African American activist Booker T. Washington, and educator David Starr Jordan. With such political allies as the venerable U.S. senator George F. Hoar, William Jennings Bryan, and influential supporters like philosopher William James, Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, Carl Schurz, William Graham Sumner, and General Nelson A. Miles, the AntiImperialist League fomented much of the latent opposition to American expansionism. The acquisition of the Philippines aroused the League’s greatest ire. Two weeks prior to the February 6, 1899, Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war with Spain, the Filipino-American War broke out. The war would last almost three and a half years; it cost the United States $170 million and caused 7,000 American deaths. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed. The brutality of the Filipino-American War and tales of atrocity quickly transformed the Anti-Imperialist League into a national movement with a mass constituency. Working with other anti-imperialist elements, League membership soared to over 30,000 in a growth spurt that made it the largest antiwar organization per capita in American history.

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Through the League’s periodical, the Anti-Imperialist, the organization exposed repulsive and ghastly brutalities despite official investigations that tried to hide the actions of American military personnel. League efforts also resulted in much criticism leveled at the increased power in the executive department and the development of bureaucracy, which further demonstrated how imperialism was contrary to U.S. Constitutional traditions. Although the anti-imperialists failed to curb America’s “outward thrust,” it did set in motion the need to weigh carefully the nation’s appetite for new markets and overseas territories. The next major antiwar demonstrations took place during World War I (1914– 1918). Opposition to the war took the form of both individual and organized resistance. World War I prisoners of conscience included civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, who helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, jailed twice for war opposition and in prison during the election of 1920. Anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who formed a No-Conscription League in 1917, were two of the more radical war opponents sentenced to two years in jail and later deported. The heart and soul of the antiwar movement were conscientious objectors— those who opposed war based on certain principles or beliefs. Apart from the 4,000 classified as conscientious objectors, approximately 20,873 were granted noncombatant classification by their local draft boards. Among them were various types of opponents of war. There were religious objectors, who opposed all wars and human killing; humanitarian or liberal objectors, who believed that all men were brothers and that fraternal blood should not be shed; and political objectors such as socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and other radicals who promoted an international revolution of the working class but who objected to participating in a “capitalist” war. In addition to individual resistance were organized efforts of radical labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Naturally, the Wilson administration did not take kindly to their antiwar demonstrations. On September 5, 1917, federal agents raided IWW headquarters in 33 different cities between Chicago and Los Angeles, and following a dramatic trial in the summer of 1918, 96 IWW menbers were tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Among those convicted was “Big Bill” Haywood, a legendary figure of the IWW. Poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, moreover, protested forced conscription in August 1917 in Oklahoma. Known as the Green Corn Rebellion, some 450 protesters were held temporarily at the state prison at McAlester, Oklahoma. The name Green Corn originated from the fact that the marchers intended to eat green corn on their way to stage a protest in Washington, D.C.

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One of the most active antiwar organizations was the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace. Support came from trade unions, pacifists, suffragists, and the Socialist Party’s left wing. Throughout late 1917 and early 1918, the People’s Council enlisted the support of thousands of antiwar supporters and distributed leaflets and other forms of literature calling for an immediate end to the war. It also sponsored a number of antiwar demonstrations, mainly in New York City. However, by the spring of 1918, government suppression of dissenting groups by state and federal court action—as in the case of the IWW and Socialist Party—checked the council’s union support. Nearly one-third of the party’s leadership was sentenced to federal prison. With Wilson’s approval, moreover, Postmaster General Albert Burleson barred from the mails all socialist antiwar publications—thereby choking off the intellectual lifeline of organized socialism in the United States, the largest single source of wartime dissent. Although an effective postwar peace movement emerged in the aftermath of the most destructive war in history up to that time, both World War II (1939–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953) generated little opposition. The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor solidified public support to rid the world of fascist aggression, while the haunting specter of McCarthyism and communism kept peace forces at bay during the Korean conflict. However, during the 1950s, Cold War hostilities and fears of nuclear war gave rise to a more radical form of civil disobedience, which found expression during the Vietnam War (1965–1973). The anti–Vietnam War movement witnessed the most dramatic acts of war protest in American history and assumed three distinct parts as the war dragged on. First, there were the anti-imperialists who believed that the real enemy was America’s corporate ruling class; for these protesters, the war represented a revolutionary struggle for Vietnamese liberation against American imperialism. This faction of the movement condoned physical acts of destruction against the establishment. Second, there were the radical pacifists who saw the war as the real enemy, and advocated nonviolent means to encourage immediate withdrawal of American troops. Last, there were the mainline peace liberals who emphasized the traditional means of political pressure to compel U.S. policymakers to negotiate an end to the war by providing for American withdrawal and a governmental role for the National Liberation Front in Saigon. Despite differences in substance and style, the most significant characteristic of the antiwar protests were their ability to coalesce and form new coalitions, which enabled the much larger movement to sustain its momentum. Between early 1965 and late 1967, a flurry of antiwar activity took place on a number of fronts. Many of the antiwar demonstrations were organized by tenuous coalitions composed of radical groups like Students for a Democratic Society and traditional peace organizations such as the Fellowship for Reconciliation,

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Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, War Resisters League, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Committee for Non Violent Action. For instance, these groups organized the first major peace demonstration, the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, which occurred on November 27, 1965. Nearly 35,000 protesters showed up at the nation’s capital calling for an immediate end to American military involvement. This peace protest would be one of many held throughout the war years. The Fifth Avenue Peace Parade, led by veteran peace activist A. J. Muste, and massive demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in 1967 and 1968, along with other protests in major U.S. cities such as Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were held. Even in local communities, antiwar parades were conducted with protesters holding placards reading “Bring the Troops Home” or “Immediate Withdrawal” during Memorial Day and Fourth of July festivities. One of the unique features of the anti–Vietnam War protests were acts of resistance and civil disobedience despite government attempts at suppression. The era of visible resistance and active obstruction marked many of the demonstrations. For example, the peace group Women Strike for Peace staged sit-ins in congressional offices and die-ins at draft boards and at the corporate headquarters of major defense contractors. Protesting the selective service law also reached widespread proportions as many young men burned their draft cards or fled to Canada to avoid induction into the military. Numerous Reserve Officers Training Corps buildings on college campuses were the object of physical acts of destruction. Raiding draft boards and burning selective service files or pouring blood on the files was another popular tactic of antiwar activists. One of the more spectacular actions in this regard took place in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968, led by Roman Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. The African American protest movement also brought other issues, personnel, and tactics into the antiwar movement. In January 1966, linking the war to domestic oppression, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s leaders declared their support for draft resisters—“Hell No, We Won’t Go”—and attacked President Lyndon Johnson for violating international law overseas while neglecting to enforce civil rights ordinances at home. Most importantly, Martin Luther King Jr.—the civil rights movement’s spiritual leader and 1964 Nobel Peace Prize recipient—disputed the war policy. In the late 1960s, there was a moratorium movement as well. It urged Americans to set aside one day in a month to protest the war by not purchasing items supporting the war effort. Adding to the antiwar dissent was the formation of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Its most dramatic protest occurred in Washington, D.C., from April 19 through April 23, 1971. Dubbed Operation Dewey Canyon III, it was based upon two short military incursions into Laos. With Gold Star Mothers leading the

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protest march, more than 1,100 veterans walked across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to the Arlington National Cemetery. Though refused entrance into the cemetery, they conducted a memorial service outside the gates. That evening, protesting veterans defied a Justice Department injunction banning them from setting up camp at the Mall. On April 20, some 200 members of VVAW listened to hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on proposals to end American military involvement, while others marched back to Arlington National Cemetery, where they were now permitted to enter as a result of public criticisms of the government’s actions against the veterans. Additional members performed guerrilla theater on the Capitol steps, depicting combat scenes and search-and-destroy missions. On April 21, more than 50 veterans marched to the Pentagon and attempted to surrender and turn themselves in as war criminals. The following day, large numbers of the organization’s members demonstrated on the steps of the Supreme Court demanding to know why it had not ruled on the constitutionality of the Vietnam War. The final day of protest culminated with more than 800 veterans tossing their medals, ribbons, and combat badges on the steps of the Capitol as a show of defiance and anger at the war. Despite disagreements involving tactics, values, and the priority of peace versus wars of liberation, the anti–Vietnam War protests were not only some of the most spectacular in American history, but also some of the most effective. Although the broad movement itself was more assembled than organized, its effectiveness remains indisputable. The antiwar protests of this era did help end the war. Recovering from the brutal wounds of the Vietnam War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War ended quickly, thus allowing little time for antiwar activists to demonstrate. In addition, America’s military success was perceived as a way to atone for the Vietnam debacle. In 2004, however, that would change with the Iraq War. Angered by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the George W. Bush administration decided to launch an all-out military offensive against the regime of Saddam Hussein based on the misguided assumption that the Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction. From the spring of 2004 to 2008, large antiwar demonstrations continued as did smaller ones in towns and communities across the nation. For instance, the American Friends Service Committee initiated its own novel protest, which has been copied by other antiwar groups. Called “False Pretenses,” AFSC first introduced the idea of a memorial by placing 500 pairs of boots at the Federal Building Plaza in Chicago to symbolize graphically the number of soldiers killed at that point in the war. Other antiwar activists built mock coffins and stretched out on busy roads. During the 2004 Republican Convention in Manhattan, hundreds of demonstrators carried coffins down Seventh Avenue. During the convention, one member of Code Pink disrupted Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech. Jodie Evans, cofounder of Code

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Pink, was forcibly removed from the convention floor when she showed off her pink slip with anti-Bush slogans on it. Some 700 to 800 people were arrested at the convention. One antiwar group that captured the national media’s attention is Grandmothers against the War. In late 2005, 17 grandmothers, ranging in age from 49 to 90, were arrested. On October 17, these aging but fiercely determined activists attempted to enlist in the military at New York City’s Times Square recruiting station. After being refused entry into the station, they then sat down and were promptly arrested. At their arraignment, one of the protesters, 65-year-old Eva-Lee Baird, called her arrest “a badge of honor.” Their actions inspired other elderly females to take up the cause in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. What has separated the current antiwar protests and demonstrations from that of previous military conflicts has been its online organizing, which has helped many antiwar groups succeed in their efforts to mobilize at the grass roots. Among the various antiwar groups relying on the Internet to organize, raise money, and influence politicians and the media through blogs and e-mail messages are Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, MoveOn.org, WHY WAR? ANSWER, and United for Peace and Justice. There are also antiwar organizations, which are more than online organizations. Among those organizations that mobilize online or receive their initial start through the Internet are Veterans for Common Sense, Operation Truth, and Iraq Veterans against the War. In contrast to the Vietnam protests, the current demonstrations have been far less contentious and disruptive due to the Internet groups’ focus on political persuasion rather than obstructive resistance. Although the current war in Iraq appeared to be ending with the Barack Obama administration’s commitment to pull all U.S. forces out by 2011, the war in Afghanistan began to draw the attention of antiwar activists. Unlike Iraq, however, the American public has been more patient since it involves waging war against terrorist groups, which supported or carried out the 9/11 attacks. At present, antiwar protests have not been large and sustainable since the spring of 2008. In conclusion, during the War of 1812, dissent forced the Madison administration to reach a peace agreement in which neither side claimed a clearcut military victory. The Mexican-American War forced President James K. Polk to abandon his desire to obtain further territorial concessions from Mexico. The Anti-Imperialist League pressured President William McKinley and later Theodore Roosevelt to end the fighting in the Philippines. The intensity and magnitude of the anti–Vietnam War protests were unparalleled in American history up to that time and resulted in passage of the 1973 War Powers Act, imposing a limit on the number of days the president could commit troops to combat without congressional authorization. The ongoing unpopularity of the Iraq War resulted from antiwar groups using the Internet, among other tools, to stimulate discussion

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and mobilize public opinion in favor of a U.S. troop withdrawal. The antiwar movement in American history has played a vital role, if not always successful, in calling into question government actions affecting the nation’s foreign policy. —Charles F. Howlett See also all entries under New York Draft Riots (1863); Women’s Movement (1870s); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Bonus Army (1932); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s).

Further Reading Allen, Devere. The Fight for Peace. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1930. Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Brock, Peter. Pacifism in the United States from the Colonial Era to the First World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Brock, Peter, and Nigel Young. Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Chatfield, Charles. “American Insecurity: Dissent from the ‘Long War.’ ” In The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II, ed. Andrew Bacevich, 456–516. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971. Chatfield, Charles, with Robert Kleidman. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Conlin, Joseph R., ed. American Antiwar Movements. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1968. Cooney, Robert, and Helen Michalowski, eds. The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1987. Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Curran, Thomas F. Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Curti, Merle. Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1936. DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. DeBenedetti, Charles, with Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr. The Civilian and the Military. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Howlett, Charles F. The American Peace Movement: References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Howlett, Charles F., and Robbie Lieberman. A History of the American Peace Movement from Colonial Times to the Present. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Juhnke, James C., and Carol M. Hunter. The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History. Kitchner, ON: Pandora Press, 2001. Marchand, C. Roland. The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Patterson, David S. Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Peterson, H. C., and Gilbert C. Fite. Opponents of War, 1917–1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957. Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

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Counterculture “Counterculture” describes the emergence of a generational rejection of American lifestyles and commercial veneration marked by drugs, sex, communal living, and “acid” rock music. Called “hippies,” these young Americans were drawn to the anti–Vietnam War movement as one avenue to express their dissatisfaction with American society. Most veteran peace activists resented their involvement in the antiwar movement. Along with the appearance of the rebellious Students for a Democratic Society and its Port Huron Statement (1962), the growing opposition to the Vietnam War gave birth to a popular counterculture movement. Building coalitions to end the war was tricky business, and the inclusion of counterculturalists added not only tensions within the movement as a whole, but also problems for veteran peace activists who resented these nonconformists wedded to drugs, promiscuity, outlandish costumes, and a desire to build alternative institutions. One of the most striking cultural characteristics of the anti–Vietnam War protests was the number of hippies, schooled in matters of drugs like LSD, open sex, and “natural lifestyle, who were attracted to the peace cause.” During the mid-1960s, highlighted by an overflowing population of flower children in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, many young Americans had no respect for their parents’ skills or wisdom and had disdain for their money. Generational conflict, acerbated by the war, began to replace social conflict as the critically divisive issue. Representing the nation’s more recent bohemian subculture, the hippies shocked the country’s somewhat dour population with their dirty dungarees, long hair, less-than-acceptable vocabulary, and use of mind-altering drugs, liberated sexual mores, and “acid” rock music. The Woodstock Festival of 1969 symbolized the impact that the counterculture movement had in the United States. The counterculturalists argued for simplicity, communal life, and peace. Turned on by Ken Kesey, author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, they considered all politics a dead end. Between 1965 and 1970, the counterculturalists were easily noticeable. Their distinguishing attire including wearing beads, raising their fingers in a V-shape, and simply saying, “Peace.” Their attraction to the antiwar movement was superficial at best. However, they did add color to the movement even though their disdain for discipline and organization did not sit well with the serious-minded antiwar leaders. The antics of Abbie Hoffman and his “yippies”—the political component of the hippies—was more a matter of style than substance. Nevertheless, it was though the efforts of Jerry Rubin, Hoffman’s associate, that some veteran antiwar activists expanded the vision of a militant, politicized counterculture as part of the antiwar movement. By the late 1960s and early

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1970s, the Weather Underground, which broke away from the SDS, the Yippies, the Crazies, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and other revolutionary groups took part in antiwar protests. In general, the counterculturalists’ simplicity in political matters rendered them ineffective in the larger antiwar movement. Their antics also provided additional ammunition that supporters of the war and administration officials used to discredit the antiwar protests. The notion that antiwar protesters and stoned hippies were dupes of a communist conspiracy was widely believed among the war’s supporters. What could not be denied was the confluence of political responsibility, ideological awareness, and cultural creativity expanding the influence of antiwar protests. —Charles F. Howlett

Further Reading Farber, David. “The Counterculture and the Anti-war Movement.” In Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, ed. Melvin Small and William D. Hoover. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Fraser, Ronald, ed. 1968. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Zaroulis, Nancy, and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1984.

Kent State (1970) The announcement on April 30, 1970, by President Richard M. Nixon that American forces had expanded the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia triggered a new wave of student antiwar protests across the nation’s college campuses. The next day, Friday, May 1, a large student demonstration against the war took place at Kent State University in Ohio. To symbolize the belief that the war was unconstitutional because Congress had not enacted a declaration of war, a copy of the Constitution was buried on the campus commons. Another antiwar rally was scheduled for May 4. Students gathered that night as usual in the bars in downtown Kent. Although the evening started out peacefully, violence broke out as protesters, both students and persons from out of town, took to the streets and were confronted by Kent police. Fires were started in the streets, and protesters broke store windows and windshields of police cruisers. Reinforcements from other area police departments

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and from the county sheriff’s office were called in to help bring the rioting under control. Finally, after the police used tear gas, the protesters were dispersed. Kent mayor Leroy Satrom immediately declared a state of emergency and, fearful of further violence, asked Governor James A. Rhodes to send the Ohio National Guard to Kent to help maintain peace on the Kent State campus. Units of the Guard were already on duty in northeast Ohio, and Guardsmen arrived on the Kent State campus around 10:00 on the evening of May 2. The Guardsmen found the campus in chaos. The ROTC building had been set on fire, and an estimated 1,000 protesters were cheering as the building burned to the ground. Confrontations between protesters and guardsmen continued through the night. Tear gas was used once again, and a number of protesters were arrested for interfering with efforts by the fire department to fight the blaze consuming the ROTC building. Further altercations between the Guard and protesters occurred on Sunday, May 3. Governor Rhodes arrived in Kent and issued a provocative statement in which he compared the protesters to revolutionaries and communist conspirators. Although students and Guardsmen appeared to get along during the day, violence broke out again that evening. Protesters pelted the Guardsmen with rocks, and they retaliated with more tear gas and bayonets. Several arrests were made and the atmosphere on campus, now occupied by about 1,000 National Guard troopers, became increasingly tense. Efforts had been made to prohibit the scheduled May 4 rally, but to no avail. Students began gathering on the campus commons around 11:00 a.m., and by noon, some 3,000 persons had arrived there. Facing them were about 70 Guardsmen. The protesters, who may well have been protesting the presence of the Guard on campus more than the Cambodian invasion, were ordered to disperse. When the students refused to do so, another order to disperse was given. This led to jeering and rock throwing, and the Guardsmen were ordered to lock and load their weapons. Then the Guardsmen fired tear gas into the mass of protesters and began to march across the Commons in an effort to break up the rally. The students retreated to a nearby practice football field, where the two sides faced each other for several minutes. The Guardsmen then retreated back across the commons, up a hill known as Blanket Hill. Without warning, a number of the Guardsmen suddenly turned and fired upon the crowd, killing four students and wounding nine more. Killed were students Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer, and Allison Krause. Those wounded included Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, John Cleary, Douglas Wrentmore, Robert Stamps, James Russell, Robert Stamps, Donald MacKenzie, and Dean Kahler. Kahler was the most seriously injured of the wounded students, suffering a fractured vertebra, which left him paralyzed from the chest down. The university closed immediately and did not reopen for six weeks. Summer classes were held, however, and the administration and faculty began the process

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of healing as well as assisting students to complete the term that had been interrupted by the shootings. Furthermore, the faculty embarked upon a process of scholarship in an effort to try to bring a sense of understanding to the tragic events that had occurred. Some faculty began to search for alternative forms of protest that could be conducted peacefully to prevent further violence on the nation’s college campuses. The reasons as to why the Guardsmen fired upon the students remain in dispute. The Guardsmen claimed to be afraid for their lives and testified accordingly in several investigations and trials. While some scholars have supported this argument, others have asserted that their lives were never in danger. Ultimately, a series of federal civil and criminal procedures supported the contention of the Guardsmen that they believed their lives were in jeopardy. The legal ramifications of the shootings were finally resolved in 1979, when an out-of-court settlement led to the payment of $675,000 by the state of Ohio to the families of the students who had been killed and to the wounded students. The 28 Guardsmen who had fired their weapons also signed a statement, which in their view was nothing more than an expression of regret rather than an apology or admission of guilt. Today, the tragic events at Kent State University in May 1970 stand as the most eloquent symbol of how deeply divided the American nation had become as a result of the Vietnam War. —Gregory Moore

Further Reading Bills, Scott. Kent State/May 4: Echoes through a Decade. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988. Caputo, Philip. 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings. New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005. Casale, Ottavio M., and Louis Paskoff, eds. The Kent Affair: Documents and Interpretations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Davies, Peter. The Truth about Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. Grant, Edward J., and Michael Hill. I Was There: What Really Went on at Kent State. Lima, OH: C. S. S. Publishing Co, 1974. Hensley, Thomas R. The Kent State Incident: Impact of Judicial Process on Public Attitudes. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Hensley, Thomas R., and Jerry M. Lewis. Kent State and May 4th: A Social Science Perspective. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1978. Isserman, Maurice, and Kazin, Michael. America Divided: The Civil Wars of the 1960s. 3rd ed. New York. Oxford University Press, 2007. Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970.

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The Moratorium (1969) The Moratorium was an effort by young activists in liberal Democratic politics in which Americans were asked to set aside one day in a month for a moratorium on business as usual to reflect on the Vietnam War in any shape or form deemed appropriate. It was designed around a decentralized, grassroots form of antiwar protest. During the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to bring “peace with honor.” When Nixon entered the White House, the new president revealed his plan for the stabilization of South Vietnam. While promising a gradual reduction in U.S. troop strength, he assured Americans that the communist North Vietnamese government was nearing collapse and that real peace would be achieved by honoring and fulfilling the original goal of a sovereign, anticommunist South Vietnam. His remarks prompted the antiwar movement to organize two new coalition efforts aimed at massive protests in the fall of 1969. One of these coalitions was the Moratorium; the other was the New Mobilization. The Moratorium was organized by several young activists in the aftermath of the 1968 presidential campaign. All were involved in liberal Democratic politics. The idea was simple and largely the brainchild of Sam Brown and David Hawk. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Brown became a leader in the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign and later returned to Harvard University to complete his doctoral studies in divinity. Hawk, meanwhile, had been working in the Washington office of the National Student Association. Both had been working on antidraft projects. In the spring of 1969, both composed a letter in which 253 student leaders from major universities vowed to refuse induction into the armed forces because the war was immoral and unjust. Avoiding the more radical usage of the word strike for fear of alienating segments of the middle-class constituency Brown and Hawk intended to rally to their cause, they deliberately coined their new action a “moratorium.” Instead of taking it to the streets in dramatic fashion, their plan was to ask people to set aside one day a month for a moratorium on business as usual for the purpose of reflection on and protest against the Vietnam War. Geared to the grassroots, decentralized nature of antiwar sentiment, the moratorium required that there would be no haggling over terms among the sponsoring protest groups. The concept itself was based on four precedents: the 1967 Vietnam Summer experiment, the March halt in research at Massachusetts Institute in Technology, the various New Politics campaigns blending reasonable protest with forceful measures for change, and traditional labor strikes that were long a staple in worker organizing. With funding assured from antiwar liberals, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee established a headquarters in Washington and began to start its protest in October.

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The plan called for starting a monthly antiwar escalation that would mobilize the widest combination of liberal groups, intellectuals, civil rights and religious leaders, and organized labor. The committee wanted to initiate an escalating protest, which would force the government to make a firm commitment to a definite timetable for total withdrawal or conclude with a negotiated settlement. The plan was even endorsed by 24 Democratic senators. Along with Brown and Hawk were David Mixner, a former staff member of George McGovern’s commission on the reform of the Democratic Party, and Marge Sklencar, who helped to form the Conference of Concerned Democrats. On October 15, 1969, a nationwide protest was held. It was diverse in form, locally based, and consisted of representatives from all the public sectors. There were rallies consisting of as few as 10 people and as many as over 100,000 people. Some estimates of the moratorium counted a quarter of a million ordinary citizens and elected officials, housewives, television and movie entertainers, business people, and workers more popularly referred to as “hard hats.” What captured the media’s attention was the deeply patriotic tone of the moratorium’s protest: one calling for an end to American military involvement. Stung by the protest, Nixon and the White House took the offensive and disparaged the Moratorium’s organizers. Nixon immediately called for counterdemonstrations in the name of “Americanism” as a way of showing the nation’s support for the troops. A televised speech by Nixon on November 3 appealing to the silent majority of citizens proved devastating to the Moratorium leaders. Congress withheld a vote on legislation requiring a withdrawal, and polls suggested many Americans backed Nixon’s position. Moratorium leaders, however, went ahead with their support of the November 15 protest organized by the New Mobilization Committee, which had also been part of their plan. It was the largest protest demonstration in American history to that time, but it had very little impact on the public. The Moratorium and New Mobilization sought to create mass demonstrations demanding an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, but the president’s policy of Vietnamization (turning the fighting over to South Vietnamese and withdrawing American forces) and the public concern for domestic order proved more compelling. In the end, the public’s opposition to the war yet distaste for antiwar protests frustrated many antiwar activists. —Charles F. Howlett

Further Reading Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement in the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Howlett, Charles F., and Robbie Lieberman. A History of the American Peace Movement from Colonial Times to the Present. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Small, Mel. Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Zaroulis, Nancy, and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1984.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) The most important political organization of the 1960s, SDS called for expansive changes in the economic and social structure of America. It symbolized the nation’s transformation from respectable protest and reform to resistance and rebellion often marked by violence. It looked to the universities as the vehicle for social change. The creation of SDS had been sparked by the 1962 publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The most prominent New Left organization was Students for a Democratic Society, which traced its beginnings to a convention held in June 1962 at Port Huron, Michigan. There, about 200 activists put forth the Port Huron Statement, which made an explicit connection between ending the Cold War and advancing domestic reform. Tom Hayden wrote the manifesto. These activists looked first to college campuses, where knowledge was produced, in their call for social reconstruction and political awareness. Two issues especially troubled this generation. First was the stark reality of American citizens as victims of an unfair social and economic system, symbolized by the struggle against racial bigotry. Many college student activists recognized the debilitating effects of racial discrimination in America. Second, the Cold War, symbolized by the bomb, brought insecurity and a desperate desire for change before it was too late. New Left activists wanted reform from the bottom up, and one important part of the equation for reform was a reorganization of the nation’s priorities. How much more money could be devoted to health care, improving the inner cities, creating jobs for the poor, and building better schools if it was not being put into the Pentagon’s pockets? Would there be future generations, given the awesome power of the bomb?

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On the national level, SDS had a highly decentralized structure barely kept together by a tiny, highly mobile, and poorly paid staff located in Chicago. Distrusting bureaucratic structures, the organization insisted that each local chapter work out its own programs. After SDS sponsored the first big demonstration against the Vietnam War, in April 1965, hundreds of chapters sprang up around the country. Each one was autonomous and addressed a range of issues, from local concerns as mundane as male visiting hours in women’s dormitories to national elections and international issues. SDS members approached peace and social justice issues with high moral conviction and emotional commitment. SDS became a vehicle for students to comment on the society their parents’ generation had built, which, in their view, placed too much emphasis on material gain at the expense of more meaningful pursuits. Their actions also marked the era of “obstructive demonstration” and a new, more confrontational approach to trying to stop the war machine and military involvement in Vietnam. SDS introduced tactical innovations such as antiwar teach-ins, draft counseling, and “resistance” campaigns. In its call for radical action against the war, for example, students would lie down in front of troop trains to block their progress; challenge the right of companies such as Dow Chemical, maker of napalm, to recruit on campus; and target symbols of university complicity with the “war machine.” From 1965 to 1970, SDS activists were involved in some 2,000 demonstrations and strikes directed at university leaders. Some of its most dramatic campus confrontations involved opposition to Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programs (these increased in intensity after 1968, when a new draft law went into effect). Very often, these were loud and boisterous, involving, in certain cases, the burning down of the ROTC building on campus. It was also in the forefront of the anti-draft movement calling for an end to mandatory ROTC programs and military recruiters on campus. During the major antiwar demonstrations in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., SDS members were visibly present. In its origins, however, SDS was mainly concerned with expanding democracy to end racism and poverty in America. It is fair to state that SDS failed to establish a permanent leadership presence within the antiwar movement due to its extremist views and actions, which led to its fragmentation. At the end of 1969, it had become bitterly divided and reduced to a small group devoted to violence and revolution. Its actions thereafter were largely carried out underground as its aboveground political impact diminished in importance. —Charles F. Howlett

Further Reading Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Brines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle, and Dan Geogakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. DeBenedetti, Charles, with Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Farrell, James J. The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism. New York: Routledge, 1997. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Miller, James. “Democracy in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Sale, Kirpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Speech Delivered by Paul Potter, President of Students for a Democratic Society, at the Washington Monument (1965) The following speech was delivered on April 17, 1965, during a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) meeting in front of the Washington Monument by SDS president Paul Potter. After picketing for two hours at the White House, Potter closed the Washington Monument meeting with this address. Potter died in 1984. Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with no design for external conquest, that sought primarily the opportunity to develop its own resources and its own mode of living. If at some point we began to hear vague and disturbing things about what this country had done in Latin America, China, Spain and other places, we somehow remained confident about the basic integrity of this nation’s foreign policy. The Cold War with all of its neat categories and black and white descriptions did much to assure us that what we had been taught to believe was true. But in recent years, the withdrawal from the hysteria of the Cold War era and the development of a more aggressive, activist foreign policy have done much to force many of us to rethink attitudes that were deep and basic sentiments about our country. The incredible war in Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestige of illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American foreign policy. The saccharine self-righteous moralism that promises the Vietnamese a billion dollars of economic aid at the very moment we are delivering billions for economic and social destruction and political repression is rapidly losing what power it might ever have had to reassure us about the decency of our foreign

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) policy. The further we explore the reality of what this country is doing and planning in Vietnam the more we are driven toward the conclusion of Senator Morse that the United States may well be the greatest threat to peace in the world today. That is a terrible and bitter insight for people who grew up as we did—and our revulsion at that insight, our refusal to accept it as inevitable or necessary, is one of the reasons that so many people have come here today. The President says that we are defending freedom in Vietnam. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of the Vietnamese. The first act of the first dictator, Diem, the United States installed in Vietnam, was to systematically begin the persecution of all political opposition, non-Communist as well as Communist. The first American military supplies were not used to fight Communist insurgents; they were used to control, imprison or kill any who sought something better for Vietnam than the personal aggrandizement, political corruption and the profiteering of the Diem regime. The elite of the forces that we have trained and equipped are still used to control political unrest in Saigon and defend the latest dictator from the people. And yet in a world where dictatorships are so commonplace and popular control of government so rare, people become callous to the misery that is implied by dictatorial power. The rationalizations that are used to defend political despotism have been drummed into us so long that we have somehow become numb to the possibility that something else might exist. And it is only the kind of terror we see now in Vietnam that awakens conscience and reminds us that there is something deep in us that cries out against dictatorial suppression. The pattern of repression and destruction that we have developed and justified in the war is so thorough that it can only be called cultural genocide. I am not simply talking about napalm or gas or crop destruction or torture, hurled indiscriminately on women and children, insurgent and neutral, upon the first suspicion of rebel activity. That in itself is horrendous and incredible beyond belief. But it is only part of a larger pattern of destruction to the very fabric of the country. We have uprooted the people from the land and imprisoned them in concentration camps called “sunrise villages.” Through conscription and direct political intervention and control, we have destroyed local customs and traditions, trampled upon those things of value which give dignity and purpose to life. What is left to the people of Vietnam after 20 years of war? What part of themselves and their own lives will those who survive be able to salvage from the wreckage of their country or build on the “peace” and “security” our Great Society offers them in reward for their allegiance? How can anyone be surprised that people who have had total war waged on themselves and their culture rebel in increasing numbers against that tyranny? What other course is available? And still our only response to rebellion is more vigorous repression, more merciless opposition to the social and cultural institutions which sustain dignity and the will to resist. Not even the President can say that this is a war to defend the freedom of the Vietnamese people. Perhaps what the President means when he speaks of freedom is the freedom of the American people.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) What in fact has the war done for freedom in America? It has led to even more vigorous governmental efforts to control information, manipulate the press and pressure and persuade the public through distorted or downright dishonest documents such as the White Paper on Vietnam. It has led to the confiscation of films and other anti-war material and the vigorous harassment by the FBI of some of the people who have been most outspokenly active in their criticism of the war. As the war escalates and the administration seeks more actively to gain support for any initiative it may choose to take, there has been the beginnings of a war psychology unlike anything that has burdened this country since the 1950s. How much more of Mr. Johnson’s freedom can we stand? How much freedom will be left in this country if there is a major war in Asia? By what weird logic can it be said that the freedom of one people can only be maintained by crushing another? In many ways this is an unusual march because the large majority of people here are not involved in a peace movement as their primary basis of concern. What is exciting about the participants in this march is that so many of us view ourselves consciously as participants as well in a movement to build a more decent society. There are students here who have been involved in protests over the quality and kind of education they are receiving in growingly bureaucratized, depersonalized institutions called universities; there are Negroes from Mississippi and Alabama who are struggling against the tyranny and repression of those states; there are poor people here—Negro and white—from Northern urban areas who are attempting to build movements that abolish poverty and secure democracy; there are faculty who are beginning to question the relevance of their institutions to the critical problems facing the society. Where will these people and the movements they are a part of be if the President is allowed to expand the war in Asia? What happens to the hopeful beginnings of expressed discontent that are trying to shift American attention to long-neglected internal priorities of shared abundance, democracy and decency at home when those priorities have to compete with the allconsuming priorities and psychology of a war against an enemy thousands of miles away? The President mocks freedom if he insists that the war in Vietnam is a defense of American freedom. Perhaps the only freedom that this war protects is the freedom of the warhawks in the Pentagon and the State Department to experiment with counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Vietnam, we may say, is a laboratory run by a new breed of gamesmen who approach war as a kind of rational exercise in international power politics. It is the testing ground and staging area for a new American response to the social revolution that is sweeping through the impoverished downtrodden areas of the world. It is the beginning of the American counterrevolution, and so far no one—none of us—not the N.Y. Times, nor 17 Neutral Nations, nor dozens of worried allies, nor the United States Congress have been able to interfere with the freedom of the President and the Pentagon to carry out that experiment. Thus far the war in Vietnam has only dramatized the demand of ordinary people to have some opportunity to make their own lives, and of their unwillingness, even under incredible odds, to give up the struggle against external domination. We are told, however, that the struggle can be legitimately suppressed since it might lead to the development of a Communist system, and before that ultimate menace all criticism is supposed to melt.

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) This is a critical point and there are several things that must be said here—not by way of celebration, but because I think they are the truth. First, if this country were serious about giving the people of Vietnam some alternative to a Communist social revolution, that opportunity was sacrificed in 1954 when we helped to install Diem and his repression of non-Communist movements. There is no indication that we were serious about that goal—that we were ever willing to contemplate the risks of allowing the Vietnamese to choose their own destinies. Second, those people who insist now that Vietnam can be neutralized are for the most part looking for a sugar coating to cover the bitter pill. We must accept the consequences that calling for an end of the war in Vietnam is in fact allowing for the likelihood that a Vietnam without war will be a self-styled Communist Vietnam. Third, this country must come to understand that creation of a Communist country in the world today is not an ultimate defeat. If people are given the opportunity to choose their own lives it is likely that some of them will choose what we have called “Communist systems.” We are not powerless in that situation. Recent years have finally and indisputably broken the myth that the Communist world is monolithic and have conclusively shown that American power can be significant in aiding countries dominated by greater powers to become more independent and self-determined. And yet the war that we are creating and escalating in Southeast Asia is rapidly eroding the base of independence of North Vietnam as it is forced to turn to China and the Soviet Union, involving them in the war and involving itself in the compromises that that implies. Fourth, I must say to you that I would rather see Vietnam Communist than see it under continuous subjugation of the ruin that American domination has brought. But the war goes on; the freedom to conduct that war depends on the dehumanization not only of Vietnamese people but of Americans as well; it depends on the construction of a system of premises and thinking that insulates the President and his advisors thoroughly and completely from the human consequences of the decisions they make. I do not believe that the President or Mr. Rusk or Mr. McNamara or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil men. If asked to throw napalm on the back of a ten-year-old child they would shrink in horror—but their decisions have led to mutilation and death of thousands and thousands of people. What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions? What kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose? What kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people throughout the country impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and promise of American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies and makes those the place where people spend their lives and do their work, that consistently puts material values before human values—and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world? What place is there for ordinary men in that system and how are they to control it, make it bend itself to their wills rather than bending them to its? We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it. For it is only when that system is changed and brought under control that there can be any hope for stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) murder in the South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innumerable more subtle atrocities that are worked on people all over—all the time. How do you stop a war then? If the war has its roots deep in the institutions of American society, how do you stop it? Do you march to Washington? Is that enough? Who will hear us? How can you make the decision makers hear us, insulated as they are, if they cannot hear the screams of a little girl burnt by napalm? I believe that the administration is serious about expanding the war in Asia. The question is whether the people here are as serious about ending it. I wonder what it means for each of us to say we want to end the war in Vietnam—whether, if we accept the full meaning of that statement and the gravity of the situation, we can simply leave the march and go back to the routines of a society that acts as if it were not in the midst of a grave crisis. Maybe we, like the President, are insulated from the consequences of our own decision to end the war. Maybe we have yet really to listen to the screams of a burning child and decide that we cannot go back to whatever it is we did before today until that war has ended. There is no simple plan, no scheme or gimmick that can be proposed here. There is no simple way to attack something that is deeply rooted in the society. If the people of this country are to end the war in Vietnam, and to change the institutions which create it, then the people of this country must create a massive social movement—and if that can be built around the issue of Vietnam then that is what we must do. By a social movement I mean more than petitions or letters of protest, or tacit support of dissident Congressmen; I mean people who are willing to change their lives, who are willing to challenge the system, to take the problem of change seriously. By a social movement I mean an effort that is powerful enough to make the country understand that our problems are not in Vietnam, or China or Brazil or outer space or at the bottom of the ocean, but are here in the United States. What we must do is begin to build a democratic and humane society in which Vietnams are unthinkable, in which human life and initiative are precious. The reason there are twenty thousand people here today and not a hundred or none at all is because five years ago in the South students began to build a social movement to change the system. The reason there are poor people, Negro and white, housewives, faculty members, and many others here in Washington is because that movement has grown and spread and changed and reached out as an expression of the broad concerns of people throughout the society. The reason the war and the system it represents will be stopped, if it is stopped before it destroys all of us, will be because the movement has become strong enough to exact change in the society. Twenty thousand people, the people here, if they were serious, if they were willing to break out of their isolation and to accept the consequences of a decision to end the war and commit themselves to building a movement wherever they are and in whatever way they effectively can, would be, I’m convinced, enough. To build a movement rather than a protest or some series of protests, to break out of our insulations and accept the consequences of our decisions, in effect to change our lives, means that we can open ourselves to the reactions of a society that believes it is moral and just, that we open ourselves to libeling and persecution, that we dare to be really seen as wrong in a society that doesn’t tolerate fundamental challenges.

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) It means that we desert the security of our riches and reach out to people who are tied to the mythology of American power and make them part of our movement. We must reach out to every organization and individual in the country in the country and make them part of our movement. But that means that we build a movement that works not simply in Washington but in communities and with the problems that face people throughout the society. That means that we build a movement that understands Vietnam in all its horror as but a symptom of a deeper malaise, that we build a movement that makes possible the implementation of the values that would have prevented Vietnam, a movement based on the integrity of man and a belief in man’s capacity to tolerate all the weird formulations of society that men may choose to strive for; a movement that will build on the new and creative forms of protest that are beginning to emerge, such as the teach-in, and extend their efforts and intensify them; that we will build a movement that will find ways to support the increasing numbers of young men who are unwilling to and will not fight in Vietnam; a movement that will not tolerate the escalation or prolongation of this war but will, if necessary, respond to the administration war effort with massive civil disobedience all over the country, that will wrench the country into a confrontation with the issues of the war; a movement that must of necessity reach out to all these people in Vietnam or elsewhere who are struggling to find decency and control for their lives. For in a strange way the people of Vietnam and the people in this demonstration are united in much more than a common concern that the war be ended. In both countries there are people struggling to build a movement that has the power to change their condition. The system that frustrates these movements is the same. All our lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system. Source: Reprinted in Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984), 218–225.

Students for a Democratic Society Leaflet Distributed at the Antiwar March on Washington (1965) The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) distributed the following leaflet at the antiwar March on Washington on November 27, 1965. The leaflet calls not only for an end to the war in Vietnam, but also for social justice at home. In the name of freedom, America is mutilating Vietnam. In the name of peace, America turns that fertile country into a wasteland. And in the name of democracy, America is burying its own dreams and suffocating its own potential. Americans who can understand why the Negroes of Watts can rebel should understand too why Vietnamese can rebel. And those who know the American South and the grinding poverty of our Northern cities should understand that our real problems lie not in Vietnam but at home—that the fight we seek is not with Communism but with the social desperation that makes good men violent, both here and abroad.

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The War Must Be Stopped Our aim in Vietnam is the same as our aim in the United States: that oligarchic rule and privileged power be replaced by popular democracy where the people make the decisions which affect their lives and share in the abundance and opportunity that modern technology makes possible. This is the only solution for Vietnam in which Americans can find honor and take pride. Perhaps the war has already so embittered and devastated the Vietnamese that that ideal will require years of rebuilding. But the war cannot achieve it, nor can American military presence, nor our support of repressive unrepresentative governments. The war must be stopped. There must be an immediate cease fire and demobilization in South Vietnam. There must be a withdrawal of American troops. Political amnesty must be guaranteed. All agreements must be ratified by the partisans of the “other side”—the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam. We must not deceive ourselves: a negotiated agreement cannot guarantee democracy. Only the Vietnamese have the right of nationhood to make their government democratic or not, free or not, neutral or not. It is not America’s role to deny them the chance to be what they will make of themselves. That chance grows more remote with very American bomb that explodes in a Vietnamese village. But our hopes extend not only to Vietnam. Our chance is the first in a generation to organize the powerless and the voiceless at home to confront America with its racial injustice, its apathy, and its poverty, and with that same vision we dream for Vietnam: a vision of a society in which all can control their own destinies. We are convinced that the only way to stop this and future wars is to organize a domestic social movement which challenges the very legitimacy of our foreign policy; this movement must also fight to end racism, to end the paternalism of our welfare system, to guarantee decent incomes for all, and to supplant the authoritarian control of our universities with a community of scholars. This movement showed its potential when 25,000 people—students, the povertystricken, ministers, faculty, unionists, and others—marched on Washington last April. This movement must now show its force. SDS urges everyone who believes that our warmarking must be ended and our democracy-building must begin, to join in a March on Washington on November 27, at 11 A.M. in front of the White House. Source: Reprinted in Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984), 226–227.

Statements of the Fort Hood Three (1966) On June 30, 1966, Private Dennis Mora read the following statement at a news conference held in New York City. The statement was written jointly by Mora, Private David Samas, and PFC James Johnson, who became known as the “Fort Hood Three.” The three soldiers refused to be shipped to Vietnam and announced in their joint statement that they were initiating legal action against the secretary of defense and the secretary of the army to prevent their

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) deployment to Vietnam. The joint statement of the Fort Hood Three is reproduced here, as are the individual statement of each of the three soldiers. Samas prepared his statement for a meeting to be held at the Community Church in New York on July 7, 1966. However, because Samas was seized by military police minutes before the meeting, his wife, Marlene Samas, read the speech. Johnson’s statement was also to be delivered at the Community Church meeting on July 7, but Johnson was also arrested before the meeting and taken to Fort Dix for “investigative detention.” Johnson’s statement was thus read by Darwin Johnson, James’s brother. The Fort Hood Three subsequently served time in prison for their refusal to be sent to Vietnam.

Joint Statement by Fort Hood Three We are Pfc. James Johnson, Pvt. David Samas, and Pvt. Dennis Mora, three soldiers formerly stationed at Fort Hood, Texas in the same company of the 142 Signal Battalion, 2nd Armored Division. We have received orders to report on the 13th of July at Oakland Army Terminal in California for final processing and shipment to Vietnam. We have decided to take a stand against this war, which we consider immoral, illegal and unjust. We are initiating today, through our attorneys, Stanley Faulkner of New York and Mrs. Selma Samols of Washington, D.C. an action in the courts to enjoin the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army from sending us to Vietnam. We intend to report as ordered to the Oakland Army Terminal, but under no circumstances will we board ship for Vietnam. We are prepared to face Court Martial if necessary. We represent in our backgrounds a cross section of the Army and of America. James Johnson is a Negro, David Samas is of Lithuanian and Italian parents, Dennis Mora is a Puerto Rican. We speak as American soldiers. We have been in the army long enough to know that we are not the only G.I.s who feel as we do. Large numbers of men in the service either do not understand this war or are against it. When we entered the army Vietnam was for us only a newspaper box score of G.I.s and Viet Cong killed or wounded. We were all against it in one way or another, but we were willing to “go along with the program,” believing that we would not be sent to Vietnam. We were told from the very first day of our induction that we were headed for Vietnam. During basic training it was repeated often by sergeants and officers, and soon it became another meaningless threat that was used to make us take our training seriously. But later on Vietnam became a fact of life when some one you knew wondered how he could break the news to his girl, wife, or family that he was being sent there. After he solved that problem, he had to find a reason that would satisfy him. The reasons were many—“Somebody’s got to do it,” “When your number’s up, your number’s up,” “The pay is good,” and “You‘ve got to stop them someplace” were phrases heard in the barracks and mess hall, and used by soldiers to encourage each other to accept the war as their own. Besides, what could be done about it anyway? Orders are orders. As we saw more and more of this, the war became the one thing we talked about most and the one point we all agreed upon. No one wanted to go and more than that, there was no reason for anyone to go.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) The Viet Cong obviously had the moral and physical support of most of the peasantry who were fighting for their independence. We were told that you couldn’t tell them apart—that they looked like any other skinny peasant. Our man or our men in Saigon has and have always been brutal dictators, since Diem first violated the 1954 Geneva promise of free elections in 1956. The Buddhist and military revolt in all the major cities proves that the people of the cities also want an end to Ky and U.S. support for him. The Saigon Army has become the advisor to American G.I.s who have to take over the fighting. No one used the word “winning” anymore because in Vietnam it has no meaning. Our officers just talk about five and ten more years of war with at least ½ million of our boys thrown into the grinder. We have been told that many times we may face a Vietnamese woman or child and that we will have to kill them. We will never go there—to do that— for Ky! We know that Negroes and Puerto Ricans are being drafted and end up in the worst of the fighting all out of proportion to their numbers in the population; and we have first hand knowledge that these are the ones who have been deprived of decent education and jobs at home. The three of us, while stationed together, talked a lot and found we thought alike on one over-riding issue—the war in Vietnam must be stopped. It was all talk and we had no intentions of getting into trouble by making waves at that stage. Once back in Texas we were told that we were on levy to Vietnam. All we had discussed and thought about now was real. It was time for us to quit talking and decide. Go to Vietnam and ignore the truth or stand and fight for what we know is right. We have made our decision. We will not be a part of this unjust, immoral, and illegal war. We want no part of a war of extermination. We oppose the criminal waste of American lives and resources. We refuse to go to Vietnam!!!!!!

Statement by Dennis Mora I was active in the peace movement before I was drafted. The Army knew this and took me anyway. My opposition to this criminal war of aggression has become stronger while I have been in the Army. The decision as to what I will give my life for remains mine and mine alone. Contrary to what the Pentagon believes, cannon-fodder can talk. It is saying that we are not fighting for “freedom” in South Vietnam, but supporting a Hitler-loving dictator. It is saying that it will not accept as a rationale for exterminating a whole people, theories of dominoes, Chinese “aggression” or arguments of “appeasement.” It further says that the only foreign power in Vietnam today is the United States and that the Vietcong is an indigenous force which has the support of most of the people and is in control of 80% of the country. It is a war of genocide. A genocide which has at its disposal the technology of a military chamber of horrors from bomblets to napalm, gas and defoliants. The American people are victims of their war in a very real sense. Apart from the tragedy of losing

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) American boys in a war we cannot win, the war is a colossal waste of resources which are urgently needed here at home. The hypocrisy of a war on poverty is clear. It is all guns and no butter. The war has created inflation and the chief sufferer is the working man. Corporate profits soar and union men are told to hold to 3.2 wage increase in the “national interest.” Free lunch programs are cut by 80%. Are we now ready to accept, in the national interest of course, the malnutrition of our children in order to incinerate Vietnamese children? This is the price we must pay for military miracles. As a Puerto Rican the first war I knew was against the poverty of Spanish Harlem. My mother worked for $35 a week to help make ends meet and we seldom saw her. I went to school where teachers counseled Puerto Ricans to forget plans for higher education because they were Puerto Ricans and therefore somehow inferior. The first uniform I knew was that of the cop on the corner. He was there to let you know that you could only look at the clean world outside as a prisoner looks from his cell. The billy clubs told us to keep our place. The first casualties I knew in this war were two childhood buddies who became drug addicts. They died trying to escape a world which held no jobs or education for them, and where they were made to feel ashamed of their color, language and culture. This is the war we must fight. The billions for slaughter must be invested in the reconstruction of our country’s ghettoes and the meeting of our social and educational needs. This is the only battle which makes sense and which can truly honor the U.S. There must be jobs provided for all youth—White, Negro, Puerto Rican and Mexican-American. Our leaders have just brought us knowingly another step closer to an all out land war in Asia with the attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong. Will this mean war for generations to come? I will not fight for the blood money of war industries nor will I give my life so that U.S. corporations can claim as their property the people and resources of Vietnam.

Statement by David Samas [Read by His Wife, Marlene Samas] Thank you. I was asked to read my husband’s speech tonight, since I guess you already know he’s unable to be here. This is a rough draft actually because he intended to proofread it on the way down here, but circumstances have prevented that, so bear with me. I’ve been in the army since December 1965 and my feelings about the Vietnam situation have always been as they are now. I’ve been opposed to American participation in Vietnam from the very beginning but have never until a few days ago made my feelings public. Last Thursday afternoon we held a press conference in this same church and announced our refusal to participate in any way in the Vietnam war. Since that time we have been plagued by federal agents and what can only be called hired thugs. I kept my whereabouts secret from the press and the police and only my parents and a very few people knew where I was living. The Modesto city police visited my parents in California saying they had been sent by some "higher authorities" but were not able to reveal those authorities. An officer who my father happened to know approached him in a friendly manner saying he came to help the family. My parents live three thousand

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) miles away in California and it is not easy to remain in close and constant contact with them, so they don’t realize the actual circumstances that exist here in New York. And they are not familiar with any of the peace groups—either here or on the West Coast. It didn’t prove hard for the police to persuade my parents into believing I was being used as a tool of the Communists. They were told that I was in serious trouble and that the only way for them to help was to reveal my address to the police so that the authorities in New York might get in contact with me and try to help and protect me. My father became terribly upset, fearing for my safety, and gave the police my address in New York. He immediately sent me a telegram urging me to call home as soon as possible. I called and found my parents very upset and they told me what the police had said to them. Although they have absolutely no authority the Modesto city police had offered me a deal. They had told my father that if I would retract my statement and withdraw completely from the civil action now in progress that I would receive a discharge from the army and no serious repercussions would result. In their concern for me my parents believed this fantastic story. The next morning, when we left our apartment we were followed by three men in their early twenties who made no attempt to be discreet about tailing us. They remained within twenty feet of us all day long and when approached would deny any connection with us. Since then there have at all times been at least two men parked in front of our apartment. Undoubtedly they are present now. They have attempted to intimidate the three of us in one way or another and have approached all of our parents in different ways. But we have not been scared. We have not been in the least shaken from our paths. And we will not be, even if physical violence is used. We are not pacifists. We are not non-violent, and if the need arises we will fight back. I have never been involved with any of the peace groups until a few weeks ago when we approached the Parade Committee for help. As a civilian I was interested and extremely concerned, but I neglected to show my concern. In a great way I too am responsible for the boys who already are in Vietnam. But even as an unaffiliated civilian, I was closer to the peace movement than most soldiers are now. To me the peace movement always looked like concerned students and citizens trying to protect their country from war and nuclear devastation. To a soldier the movement appears very differently. The soldier is very far indeed from the outside world and the normal news media do not usually reach him. News of the free world reaches him through letters from home, or through his buddies. It often seems that the peace groups are united against the soldier, and that forces the soldiers to cling together and ignore the real issues made public by the peace movement. The stories that reach the soldiers usually show that the peace movement is backing their enemies, and is against the Army, and against the individual soldiers. Upon too many occasions groups have offered aid to the Viet Cong and too few times have they approached the G.I.s with help. The G.I. should be reached somehow. He doesn’t want to fight. He has no reasons to risk his life. Yet he doesn’t realize that the peace movement is dedicated to his safety. Give the G.I. something to believe and he will fight for that belief. Let them know in

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Vietnam that you want them home, let them know that you are concerned about their lives also. Tell them you want them to live, not die. Bring home our men in Vietnam! The three of us here, James, Dennis, and I came to the movement for help and we received help. We asked for support in our stand and we received that support. We asked for money for the case and have gotten some. The legal aspects of our case are numerous and complex, but we cannot depend alone upon our legal stand. The war in Vietnam cannot be stopped just by legal action. The war can only be stopped by the efforts of the movement with the sympathy of the public. In the end we depend entirely upon the public. We have placed ourselves in the hands of the people of the United States, and all of our hopes lie with them. We win or lose depending upon how the people respond. We risk our futures and maybe our lives on the hopes of the American public. We need your help.

Statement by James Johnson [Read by His Brother Darwin Johnson] I was with Jimmy when he got arrested today. Just like Dave and Dennis he didn’t finish his speech either, so this is just a rough draft of his speech but I’ll do my best to see how it comes out. Okay? On December 6, 1965, I entered the Army reluctantly. Although I did not voice my opposition I was opposed to the war in Vietnam. But like most of the other G.I.s I was inducted and went along with the program. After basic training I began to seriously consider the prospect of Vietnam. I devoted much of my free time to reading, listening, and discussing America’s role in Vietnam. I felt that I had been following blindly too long in the Army. A soldier is taught not to question, not to think, just to do what he is told. Are your convictions and your conscience supposed to be left at home, or on the block? I had to take a stand. I once told a Colonel about my opposition to the war. I was told that I was being paid to be a soldier not a politician. Should I let the Pentagon decide whether I should live or die? After studying the situation in Vietnam, I learned that the government was not being honest with the American people. The government tells us that the United States is in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government in Saigon. They fail to tell us, though, that the Saigon government was not elected by the people. There have never been free elections there. In fact the U.S. government installed a regime of its own choosing, headed by Diem, in 1954. Since then there has been a succession of military dictators. All supported at our expense. Not one of these governments was worth the support of the people. They were supported by our army. The government also tells us that we are spending our men and money to preserve freedom in Vietnam. Yet the current dictator, General Ky, declared that Adolf Hitler is his hero. Like Hitler he uses extreme brutality to crush any opposition that may arise. President Johnson tells us that he is trying to bring about discussions for peace in Vietnam. Yet peace offers were made by North Vietnam last spring. But they were rejected by our government and the American people were not told about them.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Is the U.S. afraid of losing Asia to the Communists? I read a statement by Senator Church which said, "We cannot lose what we never owned. We cannot force everyone to adopt our way of life. We must escape the trap of becoming so preoccupied with communism that we dissipate our strength in a vain attempt to force local quarantine against it." Now there is a direct relationship between the peace movement and the civil rights movement. The South Vietnamese are fighting for representation, like we ourselves. The South Vietnamese just want a voice in the government, nothing else. Therefore the Negro in Vietnam is just helping to defeat what his black brother is fighting for in the United States. When the Negro soldier returns, he still will not be able to ride in Mississippi or walk down a certain street in Alabama. There will still be proportionately twice as many Negroes as whites in Vietnam. Those Negroes that die for their country still cannot be assured of a burial place which their family feels is suitable for them. His children will still receive an inferior education and he will still live in a ghetto. Although he bears the brunt of the war he will reap no benefits. It is time that the Negro realizes that his strength can be put to much better use right here at home. This is where his strength lies. We can gain absolutely nothing in Vietnam. All this is lending to the decision I have made. I know it is my right to make this decision. This is what my brother was going to say, but they wouldn’t let him speak. They just wouldn’t give him a chance. Source: The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee, The Fort Hood Three (New York: The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee, July 1966), 9–11, 14–20. Reprinted in Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984), 301–309.

Excerpts from United States v. Spock: Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Others Accused of Conspiring to Aid and Abet Draft Evasion (1969) In 1967, Dr. Benjamin Spock, well-known author of the book Baby and Child Care; William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University; and other prominent antiwar figures published a document entitled A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority. For this and for their other involvement in meetings and protests that urged resistance to the draft and the war, Spock, Coffin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber were convicted of conspiring to counsel, aid, and abet draft evasion and other acts prohibited by the Universal Military Training and Service Act. When these convictions were appealed, the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the convictions, arguing that although the encouragement of draft evasion was proscribed protest, the actions of the defendants and, specifically, publication of the Call, was lawful protest protected under the First Amendment. Reproduced here are excerpts of the First Circuit Court of Appeals decision, including, in the appendix, excerpts from the Call itself.

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) Aldrich, Chief Judge. These are appeals by four defendants convicted under a single count indictment for conspiracy. We reverse. As is well known, the war in Vietnam and the draft to support it have engendered considerable animosity and frustration. In August 1967 a number of academic, clerical, and professional persons discussed the need of more vigorous opposition to governmental policies. From their eventually consolidated efforts came a document entitled “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority. . . .” Inseparable from the question of the sufficiency of the evidence to convict are the rights of the defendants, and others, under the First Amendment. We approach the constitutional problem on the assumption, which we will later support, that the ultimate objective of defendants’ alleged agreement, viz., the expression of opposition to the war and the draft, was legal, but that the means or intermediate objectives encompassed both legal and illegal activity without any clear indication, initially, as to who intended what. This intertwining of legal and illegal aspects, the public setting of the agreement and its political purposes, and the loose confederation of possibly innocent and possibly guilty participants raise the most serious First Amendment problems. In comparing the present private and public interests we start with the assumption that the defendants were not to be prevented from vigorous criticism of the government’s program merely because the natural consequences might be to interfere with it, or even lead to unlawful action. Thus Bond v. Floyd held that the First Amendment protected an expression of “sympathy . . . and support [for] the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft.” The Court said, with specific reference to [the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1967], “[T]his statement alone cannot be interpreted as a call to unlawful refusal to be drafted.” The defendants here are not charged, however, with expressions of sympathy and moral support, but with conspiring to counsel, aid and abet Selective Service registrants to disobey various duties imposed by the Selective Service Act. The maintenance of an army in peacetime is a valid, in fact vital, governmental function. If a registrant may be convicted for violation of the draft laws, surely “[a] man may be punished for encouraging the commission of [the] crime.” The government’s ability to deter and punish those who increase the likelihood of crime by concerted action has long been established. Restricting it to punishment of substantive violations ignores the potency of conspiratorial conduct; to wait for the substantive offense may be to wait too long. Congress has a right to prefer registrants to felons. . . . Despite the validity of the government’s present interest, the defendants were entitled under the cases to certain protections before they could be convicted of conspiracy in what we might call a bifarious undertaking, involving both legal and illegal conduct. . . . When the alleged agreement is both bifarious and political within the shadow of the First Amendment, we hold that an individual’s specific intent to adhere to the illegal portions may be shown in one of three ways: by the individual defendant’s prior or subsequent unambiguous statements; by the individual defendant’s subsequent commission of the very illegal act contemplated by the agreement; or by the individual defendant’s

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) subsequent legal act if that act is “clearly undertaken for the specific purpose of rendering effective the later illegal activity which is advocated.” Application of such a standard should forcefully answer the defendants’ protests that conviction of any of them would establish criminal responsibility of all of the many hundreds of persons who signed the Call. Even if the Call included illegal objectives, there is a wide gap between signing a document such as the Call and demonstrating one’s personal attachment to illegality. Of greater importance, it responds to the legitimate apprehension of the amicus that the evil must be separable from the good without inhibiting legitimate association in an orderly society. At the same time, this principle demonstrates a fundamental error in the government’s approach. Adopting the panoply of rules applicable to a conspiracy having purely illegal purposes, the government introduced numerous statements of third parties alleged to be co-conspirators. This was improper: The specific intent of one defendant in a case such as this is not ascertained by reference to the conduct or statements of another even though ha has knowledge thereof. . . . The principle of strictissimi juris requires the acquittal of Spock. It is true that he was one of the drafters of the Call, but this does not evidence the necessary intent to adhere to its illegal aspects. Nor does his admission to a government agent that he was willing to do “anything” asked to further opposition to the war. Specific intent is not established by such a generalization. Whatever the reason the fact is that his speech was limited to condemnation of the war and the draft, and lacked any words or content of counseling. The jury could not find proscribed advocacy from the mere fact, which he freely admitted, that he hoped the frequent stating of his views might give young men “courage to take active steps in draft resistance.” This is a natural consequence of vigorous speech. Similarly, Spock’s actions lacked the clear character necessary to imply specific intent under the First Amendment standard. . . . The verdicts are set aside, and the judgments vacated. Judgments are to be entered for the defendants Spock and Ferber, and a new trial is ordered for defendants Goodman and Coffin. APPENDIX A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority To the young men of America, to the whole of the American people, and to all men of good will everywhere: . . . 5. Therefore, we believe on all these grounds that every free man has a legal right and a moral duty to exert every effort to end this war, to avoid collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same. . . . Each must choose the course of resistance dictated by his conscience and circumstances. Among those already in the armed forces some are refusing to obey specific illegal and immoral orders, some are attempting to educate their fellow servicemen on the murderous and barbarous nature of the war, some are absenting themselves without official leave. Among those not in the armed forces some are applying for status as conscientious objectors to American aggression in Vietnam, some are refusing

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) to be inducted. Among both groups some are resisting openly and paying a heavy penalty, some are organizing more resistance within the United States and some have sought sanctuary in other countries. 6. We believe that each of these forms of resistance against illegitimate authority is courageous and justified. Many of us believe that open resistance to the war and the draft is the course of action most likely to strengthen the moral resolve with which all of us can oppose the war and most likely to bring an end to the war. 7. We will continue to lend our support to those who undertake resistance to the war. We will raise funds to organize draft resistance unions, to supply legal defense and bail, to support families and otherwise aid resistance to the war in whatever ways may seem appropriate. 8. We firmly believe that our statement is the sort of speech that under the First Amendment must be free, and that the actions we will undertake are as legal as is the war resistance of the young men themselves. . . . 9. We call upon all men of good will to join us in this confrontation with immoral authority. Especially we call upon the universities to fulfill their mission of enlightenment and religious organizations to honor their heritage of brotherhood. Now is the time to resist. . . . Source: 416 F.2d 165 (1st Cir., 1969).

A Father’s Disgust with Antiwar Demonstrations (1970) When President Richard Nixon announced the American invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, a new wave of protests and demonstrations against the war in Southeast Asia spread across American campuses, culminating in the death of four students shot by National Guardsmen during a demonstration at Kent State University. Reproduced here are excerpts from a letter written at the time by Dr. Paul Williamson of McComb, Mississippi, to his son, who was about to enter Tulane University in New Orleans. Williamson expresses the anger and frustration that many older Americans felt toward the ongoing antiwar protests and demonstrations by students. Dear Nathan: Of course, you know that your mother and I love you deeply. There are limits to that love. Let me discuss one with you today. You are going to Tulane. We are proud and happy for you. There are, however, awkward things that must be discussed. College kids over the nation are “protesting.” They use may beautiful phrases. What it often amounts to is a contest with the duly constituted authorities of the United States government. The only term that could apply is revolution. People are quite rightly shot in revolutions.

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) I suppose there is the legal differentiation between a peaceful demonstration and breaking windows. One graduates into the other by such indifferent degrees it is difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. The duly constituted authorities have been merciful beyond belief—far too merciful, I think—with students. Obviously, this patience is nearing an end. . . . I have seldom heard of a student being shot at his study desk. When he goes in the open and contests the ground with the National Guard, he may very likely be shot—and very rightly. . . . It may sound like great martyrdom to give your life for an ideal. Indeed, it may be when you are old enough to judge ideals. Trying to whip the National Guard or the Army appeals to me as damned foolishness. . . . I have been shot and it hurts like hell. It’s funny, but you don’t think of ideals over the pain. Now use your head, son. Remember this country is getting tired of student demonstrations which lead to revolution. The National Guard can shove in a couple of clips and clean Tulane. I think they ought to when students disturb the peace and destroy property. One thing of which you have probably not thought: Tulane is a nonprofit corporation belonging to the public, which means one brick is yours. The National Guard is a public organization, which means that one bolt on one rifle may have been paid for with your tax. It seems awfully foolish for you to pay for the bolt that snaps the cartridge home which kills you. It seems even more foolish to tear down the bricks you own. When I went to Oklahoma City University, I always thought of it as my university. Ann and I probably own one bit of cement between the bricks. Believe me, sir, I was very careful of that bit of cement. I, too, had ebullient spirits but I used them for more practical purposes. Have you ever considered how many co-eds there are to be kissed? This is a much more worthy purpose than absorbing a bullet and not nearly so painful. Think of these things. Love, Dad Source: Harrison Salisbury, ed., The Eloquence of Protest: Voices of the 70s (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 27–28.

Displaying the Flag on the Seat of His Pants: Excerpts from Smith v. Goguen (1974) In January 1970, a man in Leominster, Massachusetts, was charged under a Massachusetts flagmisuse statute with contempt of the American flag for wearing it sewn unto the seat of his blue jeans. The case was one of many that came to the courts in the 1960s and 1970s regarding dress and grooming styles that arose out of the counterculture and antiwar movements. In these excerpts from the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Goguen, the case that arose

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Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) out of the 1970 Leominster incident, Justices Powell and White find the Massachusetts law too vague and overbroad to be upheld. The decision reinforces the notion that government cannot compel people to adopt or express a particular idea or attitude. Smith v. Goguen was among the last cases of this kind arising out of the antiwar movement to come before the Court. Mr. Justice Powell . . . . The slender record in this case reveals little more than that Goguen wore a small cloth version of the United States flag sewn to the seat of his trousers. The flag was approximately four by six inches and was displayed at the left rear of Goguen’s blue jeans. On January 30, 1970, two police officers in Leominster, Massachusetts, saw Goguen bedecked in that fashion. The first officer encountered Goguen standing and talking with a group of persons on a public street. The group apparently was not engaged in any demonstration or other protest associated with Goguen’s apparel. No disruption of traffic or breach of the peace occurred. When this officer approached Goguen to question him about the flag, the other persons present laughed. Some time later, the second officer observed Goguen in the same attire walking in the downtown business district of Leominster. The following day the first officer swore out a complaint against Goguen under the contempt provision of the Massachusetts flag-misuse statute. The relevant part of the statute then read: Whoever publicly mutilates, tramples upon, defaces or treats contemptuously the flag of the United States . . . , whether such flag is public or private property. . . , shall be punished by a fine of not less than ten nor more than one hundred dollars or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or both. . . . Despite the first six words of the statute, Goguen was not charged with any act of physical desecration and contempt, the officer charged specifically and only that Goguen “did publicly treat contemptuously the flag of the United States” . . . [Goguen was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.] * * * . . . Where a statute’s liberal scope, unaided by a narrowing state court interpretation, is capable of reaching expression sheltered by the First Amendment, the doctrine demands a greater degree of specificity than in other contexts. The statutory language at issue here, “publicly . . . treats contemptuously the flag of the United States . . . ” has such scope (verbal flag contempt), and at the relevant time was without the benefit of judicial clarification. Flag contempt statutes have been characterized as void for lack of notice on the theory that “[w]hat is contemptuous to one man may be a work of art to another.” Goguen’s behavior can hardly be described as art. Immaturity or “silly conduct” probably comes closer to the mark. But we see the force of the District Court’s observation that the flag has become “an object of youth fashion and high camp. . . .” As both courts below noted, casual treatment of the flag in many contexts has become a widespread contemporary phenomenon. Flag wearing in a day of relaxed clothing styles may be simply for adornment or a ploy to attract attention. It and many other current, careless uses of

Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s) the flag nevertheless constitute unceremonial treatment that many people may view as contemptuous. Yet in a time of widely varying attitudes and tastes for displaying something as ubiquitous as the United States flag or representations of it, it could hardly be the purpose of the Massachusetts Legislature to make criminal every informal use of the flag. The statutory language under which Goguen was charged, however, fails to draw reasonably clear lines between the kinds of nonceremonial treatment that are criminal and those that are not. Due process requires that all “be informed as to what the State commands or forbids,” and that “men of common intelligence” not be forced to guess at the meaning of the criminal law. Given today’s tendencies to treat the flag unceremoniously, those notice standards are not satisfied here. Mr. Justice White, concurring in the judgment. It is self-evident that there is a whole range of conduct that anyone with at least a semblance of common sense would know is contemptuous conduct and that would be covered by the statute if directed at the flag. In these instances, there would be ample notice to the actor and no room for undue discretion by enforcement officers. There may be a variety of other conduct that might or might not be claimed contemptuous by the State, but unpredictability in those situations does not change the certainty in others. I am also confident that the statute was not vague with respect to the conduct for which Goguen was arrested and convicted. It should not be beyond the reasonable comprehension of anyone who would conform his conduct to the law to realize that sewing a flag on the seat of his pants is contemptuous of the flag. [ Justice White concurred in the judgment of reversal on the grounds that convicting Goguen for treating the flag contemptuously was to punish him for communicating an idea, a direct violation of the First Amendment.] Source: 415 U.S. 566 (1974).

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Watts Riot (1965) On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye was pulled over by California Highway Patrol (CHIP) officer Lee Minikus for driving erratically. This was to be a routine traffic stop, Minikus’s first action in the Watts section of Los Angeles that day. The day was extremely hot—93 or 94 degrees—and Minikus was four hours into a 12-hour shift when a black man waved him down and indicated that Frye was drunk. The stop quickly moved from routine. A crowd gathered, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers came as backup, and Frye became increasingly sour as his chances of beating the rap diminished. Frye’s brother, Ronald, tried to talk the officers out of towing the car. The crowd grew, and more police backup came. One officer, Wayne Wilson, hit one of the Frye brothers after misreading disgruntlement as potential violence. Just at that moment, the boys’ mother, Rena Price, arrived. After the cops handcuffed Marquette Fry, she jumped onto Minikus’s back while her younger son was hitting Minikus. The police arrested the Fryes and left. The crowd remained. Anti-LAPD feeling was high. The police department had a reputation as one of the finest but was in fact one of the most racist and brutal. The police forces of the era recruited heavily among former military, wanting cops who were tough guys and took no lip. There was no community relations effort until Chief Parker died and a new regime took over. Although CHIP made the stop, and LAPD was just backup, because there were so many LAPD officers, they became the targets. Tommy Jacquette, a friend of Marquette, was in the riot or rebellion. He noted that the police would break up the crowd and leave. Crowds would reform, and the cops would come back. The LAPD sent 11 cars, three cops to a car, with a single shotgun per car. They reentered at Avalon and Imperial streets, rescued a couple of people, and encountered a crowd throwing concrete and rocks. The police moved the crowd out forcibly. Retired police sergeant Joe Rouzan noted that it was summer and unemployment was high. A rumor spread that white officers had beaten a pregnant black woman. The mob grew. Somebody shouted about police abuse. Somebody spat on an officer. Police backup returned, left again, and returned. The bottles and bricks were first thrown during the second or third time the police appeared. Gabriel Pope hit a patrol car with a thrown bottle. The police abandoned a car, the mob set it ablaze, and the riot was on.

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Watts Riot (1965) A group of African American women step through rubble and demolished storefronts on Central and Vernon avenues where businesses were destroyed and looted during the Watts riots in Los Angeles, California, August 1965. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Watts consisted of 54 square miles. Watts was 99 percent black with a few Hispanics and Jewish store owners. Fifty-three of the 82 Los Angeles suburbs were 99 percent white. Only 5 of the area’s 205 police officers were black. Many in the community believed that police practiced brutality, including excessive force in arrests, racial slurs, and rape of black women. One-eighth of Watts’s adults had less than a high school education, and the area’s poverty and unemployment were the highest of any neighborhood in Los Angeles. Unemployment in Watts was 30 percent. The riots burned out 150 square blocks, damaging or destroying over 600 buildings. Ground zero was 103rd and Compton, “Charcoal Alley,” but the damage spread rapidly to the main business areas, and white-owned buildings burned and darkened the Los Angeles sky. The “riot” was actually a revolt against police brutality and social exploitation, and the burning was not of the black community but of the oppressors’ property. Blacks did not own most of the businesses and houses in Watts. The mostly white-owned business districts were burned to the ground. The national media regarded it as a “war zone.” For five days, a mostly black mob ran through Watts, destroying about 1,000 businesses. The riot lasted 144 hours, with 10,000 people on the streets looting, burning, and beating white passersby. Nearly 4,000 were arrested, 1,000 were hospitalized, and 34 died, 25 of them black. Hundreds of families were homeless. The cost was $40 million. The National Guard cordoned off South Los Angeles as far

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east as Alameda Street and as far west as Crenshaw Boulevard from south of the Santa Monica Freeway to near Rosecrans Avenue. The rioters numbered between 31,000 and 35,000 adults, not necessarily all at the same time or all full time. Another 70,000 perhaps were sympathetic, but not active. Many of the rioters wanted the riots to bring attention to their problems. It was a political situation, not a mindless act of rage. The riots were not a breakdown of social order, an opportunity for the criminal element, as white and official America perceived them in the immediate years after the events. Rather, they represent an uprising against an oppressive system by a black community becoming self-empowered. This is the view held by a significant number of black Americans; some whites, too. Retired police sergeant Joe Rouzan recalled the black plain-clothes cops who infiltrated Watts to see what was going on, particularly the first night and second day and evening. When they arrived, the situation was chaotic, with people randomly beating others. One picked a target, and others joined the beating. When the fire department tried to work, the firemen had to withdraw for fear of being attacked. The undercover cops mingled and tried to talk, to no avail. Even black leaders—including the churchmen—had no luck in calming the situation. The argument that the rioters were destroying their own community had no resonance. The riots had no center, no leaders, so there was no way to work a truce. Aside from those drunk on the booze they looted, much of the chaos was actually carefully focused. The first buildings to be burned were loan offices. Next, came liquor stores. After that, the stores that overcharged even by Watts’s highly inflated standard. The final location for arson was a private home. Jacquette was not interested in looting or arson; he was aiming bricks and bottles at the police. Arrested, he got out on a promise to go home but went back to the street instead. The rioters might have been furious at the cops, but they were not so enraged that they burned their own homes. In fact, as the arson and looting raged on business streets, on the side residential streets the black residents continued to water lawns, play with the kids, wash their cars, and sit on their porches. Even when the occasional National Guard patrol came by in a machine gun–mounted jeep, the residents ignored suggestions or stronger language about going inside. On undisturbed buildings in the burned-out Charcoal Alley were signs including “Negro-owned,” “Let me eat brother,” and “Blood brother.” More military and police were called in than had served in the Dominican intervention of earlier in 1965. The National Guard called out 14,000 troops, 60 percent of its strength. The curfew zone was one and a half times the size of Manhattan. Tanks and street fighting were necessary to reestablish order. Looting, rioting, arson, vandalism, and sniping damaged, looted, or destroyed a thousand buildings. In 144 hours, 34 people had died. The high number of fatalities came not from the

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cops but from the Guard, which came in late and in too few numbers and behaved like weekend warriors—panicky, poorly trained, and poorly led. Americans wondered how this could happen in a decade that had seen the greatest progress for blacks in American history. The McCone Commission blamed high unemployment, bad schools, and inadequate living conditions. Although the triggering event was the arrest of the Fryes, the causes the McCone commission documented included poverty, racial discrimination, inequality, and the November 1964 Proposition 14, which overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act and equal opportunity for black home buyers. The people were upset about high unemployment and the lack of adequate nearby medical care. The commission recommended a Watts hospital. An economic development organization came into being after the riots. Discrimination in home loans was worked on. But it was all temporary. Over time the agencies left and Watts remained an area of high black youth unemployment and no commercial development in many areas. The rioters were not the “riffraff” the McCone commission reported. But the McCone view would prevail, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would agree that communists were behind the riots, hundreds of riots would ensue, and the problems of institutional racism in the ghetto would remain ignored. Watts brought violence into mainstream civil rights, replacing the nonviolent gradualism of the old leadership. The message of the riots for young blacks was that confrontation was better than constructive efforts. Watts was the first major riot of the 1960s, but scores of cities experienced rioting and looting through the remainder of the decade. Watts was typical of the changing urban setting in the 20th century. Before World War I, Watts was home to a few thousand European immigrants as the black migration entered neighboring Furlough Track, also known by the generic “Mudtown” that many northern black neighborhoods of shanties and lean-tos shared. Furlough Track and Watts boomed during the war and they grew together and merged as Los Angeles, moving south, annexed them. World War II brought even more blacks to the area. After the war, black unemployment nationally soared, with lack of jobs particularly severe for young men between the years 1954 and 1966. Politically, in the years between World War II and the riot, old organizations—unions and civil rights organizations with progressivist roots—fell to the Red Scare, leaving an opening for black nationalism as the dominant philosophy of urban black young men. And the population became northern urban rather than southern rural as migration slowed, the “New Urban Black” was better educated, a California native, under 30, alienated, and politically sophisticated. Without access to the political process, Watts’s middle- and working-class residents were frustrated. With black nationalism came an ethic that legitimated violence as a political tool, the same as the students and other protesters of the era.

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On October 17, a report appeared in the New York Times that the increased public and private assistance to blacks after Watts was creating resentment in the Mexican American community, and two weeks later an official of the Farmers Home Administration attributed the problems in Watts to the lack of opportunity in rural America. By November 7, local blacks had created Self Leadership for all Nationalities Today (SLANT). Then in December, the first blue-ribbon commission, the McCone Commission, issued its report with recommendations. In March 1966, riots returned to Watts, killing two and injuring 25 as 600 ran through the streets. The final McCone Commission report noted rising welfare loads, scarce jobs, and a fairly standard list of grievances. It appeared in August 1967. Probably the most lasting change from the riot came from the media. KTLA television used its helicopter to spot rioters and arsonists in the act. After the riot, police and other media used helicopters. The triggering incident for the Watts riot was nothing unusual. A white cop arrested a black driver for drunk driving in south central Los Angeles. The perpetrator resisted arrest and went to jail. The incident was common, but the result was different. Watts was the first urban riot caused by blacks rather than whites. To an outsider, Watts looked good in 1965. The National Urban League rated Los Angeles in 1964 the best U.S. city for blacks. Moreover, the Great Society was just beginning to take hold. The state commission blamed the riots on high unemployment, bad schools, and generally inferior living conditions. It did little to repair the damages or deal with the underlying conditions. Another cause of the riots was Proposition 14, the constitutional amendment the California Real Estate Association backed that repealed the Fair Housing Act. White-black tension and confrontation had been building, including a fight at a swim meet, one after a football game, and other confrontations the previous year. The police intervened excessively in these cases, exacerbating hostility toward them. A near riot between the people and the police in 1961 had the potential to blow up into Watts, but fell short. Public space, where the people tended to go to escape their small homes, was a battleground even before August 1965. The civil rights episode in Selma, Alabama, resonated in Watts, where residents faced similar difficulties, what some referred to as a “cotton curtain” that kept them from the stores and jobs just a couple of miles away. Van de Kamps restaurant, Sears Roebuck, Safeway, and others practiced discriminatory hiring. Malcolm X’s assassination was a fresh memory. The chair of the Los Angeles human rights commission indicated that black anti-Semitism was rising. Civil rights protests took place in March. The owner of the bus company that served Watts noted that the city’s line refused to accept his transfers. Poor blacks in Watts had relatively few cars. Grievances were growing.

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In the aftermath, Los Angeles added light rail from Watts to other parts of the city where the jobs may be. Although blacks moved into the middle class, those who remained poor and uneducated became more isolated than before, more likely to riot from frustration and rage of the sort that fueled Watts and the national riots of subsequent years and 1992 in Watts again. The white-black relations that seemed so positive to whites in 1965 and made them so surprised at the Watts riot were the relations of middle-class people either not of the ghetto or who escaped from it. Even working-class people in Watts were unlikely to have contact with the poor and disillusioned who were ripe for riot. In 1992, when disturbances recurred, the white-owned businesses were gone, and the damaged businesses belonged to Koreans who took over black-operated businesses in the 1980s. Those riots killed 24 and injured 900 with 400 arrests for looting (while hundreds of others looted with no regard for the law). This time the rioters were not just black; there were also Hispanics, whites, and Asian Americans. The comment by black leaders during the riot was that their post office probably had the highest number of PhD mail carriers of any post office. Forty years later, Watts was 60 percent Latino, initially Mexican, then Central American. Hispanics replaced Koreans who had replaced Jews in Watts’s commercial activity. Older buildings that burned were replaced by “fortress” architecture, including low-cost housing. The intersection of 103rd and Compton has a shopping center with controlled entry and a security command post on the roof. The health care facility is operating and the post office is new after the first burned down. The police force consisted of over half women and minorities. Watts is part of South Los Angeles, the area whose image consists primarily of urban blight and street crime. Frye’s mother, Rena Price, pled nolo contendere, paid a $250 fine, and got two years’ probation. Forty years later, she denied Marquette was drunk and claimed that he lost his spark after the riot (which she had nothing to do with, being in jail and unaware of it). —John H. Barnhill See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Blohm, Kyle. “Watts in Perspective.” http://www.tcnj.edu/~blohm3/essay.htm (accessed August 2009). Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Watts Riot (1965) Home, Gerald. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Joiner, Lottie L. “Interview with Yvonne Braithwaite Burke. Q&A: Looking Back: 40 Years After the 1965 Watts Riots.” Crisis, July–August 2005. Kenner, Ron. “40 Years Ago, Watts Riot Took Urban Violence to a New Level: Remembering Watts, Part I.” American Reporter 11, no. 2,704 (August 18, 2005). Reitman, Valerie, and Mitchell Landsberg. “Watts Riots, 40 Years Later.” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2005.

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Arson According to the Kerner Report, the police were slow to respond to the unfolding events in Watts in 1965. Thinking that the disorder was handled, they left prematurely. Left on the streets, the crowds began throwing rocks at passing cars, beating whites, and burning cars. The police remained hesitant, and approximately 30 hours after the initial incident, the crowds began smashing windows, looting, and burning buildings. Looting and rioting were independent of one another, with different crowds following differing paths to the two means of destruction. Rioters were selective in their targets rather than taking out frustrations on whatever was near. In Watts, violence in one neighborhood did not necessarily spread to other neighborhoods. In the months before the riot, residents complained about the lack of affordable high-quality food; rather than supermarkets, they relied on small stores that offered overpriced, inferior, and sometimes spoiled meat, produce, and baked goods. Owners tended to be white absentees. The arsonists targeted white-owned stores, particularly (according to anecdotal evidence not verified) those with Jewish proprietors. An after-the-fact survey of owners revealed that over half the owners were Jewish but non-Jewish whites suffered greater average monetary loss. The data may be unreliable because of the small sample size and because of the likelihood that residents of Watts labeled all whites as Jews. It is also possible that the targets suffered more severe attacks because they were outsiders regardless of race. Another reason is victimization perception, with rioters believing that the merchants gouged on prices and credit or took money from the community to their homes in the suburbs. They avoided schools and banks and houses, burning instead consumer outlets such as liquor, clothing, furniture, hardware, and food stores. Some observers noted that looting and burning affected only white-owned stores that charged inflated prices for shoddy merchandise and were usurious in their credit terms. The national Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders of 1968 did find widespread resentment of ghetto merchants’ business practices. The riots also revealed that the black community was not one with the old civil rights movement, with the black nationalist response to Martin Luther King’s visit a mocking “burn, baby, burn.” The phrase first appeared after the riots, but it originated as a catchphrase of a local black disc jockey in 1963–1964. He changed to “Have Mercy, Los Angeles,” until the fires cooled. The riots damaged or burned 257 private buildings and businesses as well as 14 public ones. All of the 192 looted buildings were private, as were the 288 both burned and looted. All but one of the 268 destroyed buildings were private. The total loss was 977 buildings, only 15 of which were public. The rioters burned over 3,000 buildings at a cost of over $200 million as well as killing 34 and injuring 1,000.

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Another source says arson destroyed or damaged 600 buildings at $35 million in cost, and most of the businesses were those perceived by residents as unfair. Two thirds of Watts’s housing in 1965 was rental, and absentee landlords gouged tenants squeezed by de facto segregation that kept them from leaving. Some homes burned but only because they were too near to businesses set afire. Only 27 people were arrested for arson despite fire department claims that all fires were set. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading Glaser, Mitch. “Paradox Unbound: The Watts Riots 40 Years Later.” MitchGlaser.com, August 14, 2005. http://www.mitchglaser.com/journal/2005/08/watts-riots-40-years -later.html (accessed July 22, 2010). Stark, M. J. A., W. J. Raine, S. L. Burbeck, and K. K. Davison. “Some Empirical Patterns in a Riot Process.” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 865–876. Tierney, Kathleen J., Lisa Reshaur, and David Ames. “Patterns of Property Damage in the Los Angeles Unrest.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, CA, August 5–9, 1994. http://dspace.udel.edu:8080/ dspace/bitstream/19716/588/1/PP203.pdf (accessed July 22, 2010). Wasow, Omar. “What Effect Did Police Response Have on Urban Riot Severity? Investigating the Consequences of Initial Police Response to the Urban Riots of the 1960s and 1970s.” http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/ocvprogram/conf_papers/Wasow.pdf (accessed August 2009). Zabel, Bryce. “Watts Riots: “Burn, Baby, Burn.” August 18, 2005. http:// www.brycezabel.com/instanthistory/2005/08/watts_riots_40t.html (accessed August 2010).

Looting The Watts Riots lasted four days, August 13–16, 1965, but the actual rioting lasted two days. The largest number of arrests was for looting, not arson or shooting, which totaled well under 100. Looting was inevitable given human nature and the abundance revealed every day. Of the 3,438 arrestees, 1,164 had only minor criminal records, and 1,232 had no prior arrests. All of the 192 looted buildings were private, as were the 288 both burned and looted. All but one of the 268 destroyed buildings were private. The total loss was 977 buildings, only 15 of which were public. The looting and arson began on Friday evening as a guerrilla tactic in response to the increased police presence. Looters took advantage of the distraction and anonymity of mobs hundreds or thousands. Looters ranged from small children to senior citizens. Those who identified themselves as looters or burners were

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more likely to think that discrimination was the reason they didn’t have a better job. They hated whites as well as well-off blacks, and did not think the United States was worth fighting for. Rioters were more likely to be working poor rather than undereducated and unemployed “riffraff.” Looting inevitably called out the military and police, whose mission was to protect property. The police used insufficient manpower, and few were at the scene when crowds gathered the morning after the incident, two miles from the original location, and began looting. The first two days, the authorities were slow to send adequate forces, and by the third day, the rioters had the firepower from looting gun stores to enable them to fire on police helicopters. Without police, the looters became bolder and began breaking into stores in a broader neighborhood. Initially, the police had no clear guidance about deadly force, but some did shoot black looters. Black lives were of lesser importance than white refrigerators, at least according to a leftist critique. Some wondered if the police would have shot a white looter, and the dead black looters seemed to support that charge. Some looters were systematic. A car would drive by a target, and passengers would break windows then drive away. Other cars would follow, their passengers grabbing the loot. Afterward, sometimes, arson would occur. Looters were not necessarily habitual criminals. Some looters were not taking merchandise. Rather, they were removing credit files from unfriendly businesses. More often looters were working- or middle-class people who took of the opportunity to acquire a couch, a television, a dinette set that they could not afford otherwise. The riots damaged or burned 257 private buildings and businesses as well as 14 public ones. Motivation, for some at least, was a chance to get material goods or to express anger. The looters were not engaged in random acts of rage. Rather, they bypassed black-owned stores as well as the few white-owned businesses that gave fair terms of credit. They targeted the stores that charged high prices and were hostile to black customers—food, liquor, and clothing stores as well as department stores and pawn shops. When they broke into a liquor store, they more often destroyed the inventory than stole it, and they left untouched the narcotics in the looted pharmacies. Not all the loot was taken for personal use. During the riots, young black toughs organized regular distribution of looted food each day. One black girl noted that a decade of looting would be insufficient to recompense the community for all that had been taken from it. In the aftermath of the riot, one speaker at a street-corner meeting disregarded the destruction and death, the end of the local shopping districts, and claimed that the rioters won—they made the world pay attention to them, including the mayor and police chief, who had never before visited Watts. —John H. Barnhill

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Further Reading “Burning All Illusions; LA Insurrection 1965/1992.” Do or Die 9 (2001). http://www .eco-action.org/dod/no9/panthers_insurrection.htm (accessed July 22, 2010). Home, Gerald. Fire This Time. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Lytle, Mark Hamilton. America’s Uncivil Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Norrell, Robert J. The House I Live In. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Rustin, Bayard. “The Watts.” Commentary, March 1966.

Excerpt from the Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California (1965) Reproduced here is an excerpt from the report entitled Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? which was compiled by the commission appointed by California governor Edmund G. Brown to investigate the causes and course of the riots that erupted in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965. The governor also charged the commission, which was chaired by John A. McCone, with developing recommendations for how to avoid similar violence in the future. The following excerpt describes how the riot started and grew. 144 HOURS IN AUGUST 1965

The Frye Arrests On August 11, 1965, California Highway Patrolman Lee W. Minikus, a Caucasian, was riding his motorcycle along 122nd street, just south of the Los Angeles City boundary, when a passing Negro motorist told him he had just seen a car that was being driven recklessly. Minikus gave chase and pulled the car over at 116th and Avalon, in a predominantly Negro neighborhood, near but not in Watts. It was 7: 00 p.m. The driver was Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old Negro, and his older brother, Ronald, 22, was a passenger. Minikus asked Marquette to get out and take the standard Highway Patrol sobriety test. Frye failed the test, and at 7:05 p.m., Minikus told him he was under arrest. He radioed for his motorcycle partner, for a car to take Marquette to jail, and a tow truck to take the car away. They were two blocks from the Frye home, in an area of two-story apartment buildings and numerous small family residences. Because it was a very warm evening, many of the residents were outside. Ronald Frye, having been told he could not take the car when Marquette was taken to jail, went to get their mother so that she could claim the car. They returned to the scene about 7:15 p.m. as the second motorcycle patrolman, the patrol car, and tow truck arrived. The original group of 25 to 50 curious spectators had grown to 250 to 300 persons. Mrs. Frye approached Marquette and scolded him for drinking. Marquette, who until then had been peaceful and cooperative, pushed her away and moved toward the crowd, cursing and shouting at the officers that they would have to kill him to take him to jail. The patrolmen pursued Marquette and he resisted.

Watts Riot (1965) The watching crowd became hostile, and one of the patrolmen radioed for more help. Within minutes, three more highway patrolmen arrived. Minikus and his partner were now struggling with both Frye brothers. Mrs. Frye, now belligerent, jumped on the back of one of the officers and ripped his shirt. In an attempt to subdue Marquette, one officer swung at his shoulder with a night stick, missed, and struck him on the forehead, inflicting a minor cut. By 7:23 p.m., all three of the Fryes were under arrest, and other California Highway Patrolmen and, for the first time, Los Angeles police officers had arrived in response to the call for help. Officers on the scene said there were now more than 1,000 persons in the crowd. About 7:25 p.m., the patrol car with the prisoners, and the tow truck pulling the Frye car, left the scene. At 7:31 p.m., the Fryes arrived at a nearby sheriff’s substation. Undoubtedly the situation at the scene of the arrest was tense. Belligerence and resistance to arrest called for forceful action by the officers. This brought on hostility from Mrs. Frye and some of the bystanders, which, in turn, caused increased actions by the police. Anger at the scene escalated and, as in all such situations, bitter recriminations from both sides followed. Considering the undisputed facts, the Commission finds that the arrest of the Fryes was handled efficiently and expeditiously. The sobriety test administered by the California Highway Patrol and its use of a transportation vehicle for the prisoner and a tow truck to remove his car are in accordance with the practices of other law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department.

The Spitting Incident As the officers were leaving the scene, someone in the crowd spat on one of them. They stopped withdrawing and two highway patrolmen went into the crowd and arrested a young Negro woman and a man who was said to have been inciting the crowd to violence when the officers were arresting her. Although the wisdom of stopping the withdrawal to make these arrests has been questioned, the Commission finds no basis for criticizing the judgment of the officers on the scene. Following these arrests, all officers withdrew at 7:40 p.m. As the last police car left the scene, it was stoned by the now irate mob. As has happened so frequently in riots in other cities, inflated and distorted rumors concerning the arrests spread quickly to adjacent areas. The young woman arrested for spitting was wearing a barber’s smock, and the false rumor spread throughout the area that she was pregnant and had been abused by police. Erroneous reports were also circulated concerning the treatment of the Fryes at the arrest scene. The crowd did not disperse, but ranged in small groups up and down the street, although never more than a few blocks from the arrest scene. Between 8:15 p.m. and midnight, the mob stoned automobiles, pulled Caucasian motorists out of their cars and beat them, and menaced a police field command post which had been set up in the area. By 1:00 a.m., the outbreak seemed to be under control but, until early morning hours, there were sporadic reports of unruly mobs, vandalism, and rock throwing. Twenty-nine persons were arrested.

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A Meeting Misfires On Thursday morning, there was an uneasy calm, but it was obvious that tensions were still high. A strong expectancy of further trouble kept the atmosphere tense in the judgment of both police and Negro leaders. The actions by many individuals, both Negro and white, during Thursday, as well as at other times, to attempt to control the riots are commendable. We have heard many vivid and impressive accounts of the work of Negro leaders, social workers, probation officers, churchmen, teachers, and businessmen in their attempts to persuade the people to desist from their illegal activities, to stay in their houses and off the street, and to restore order. However, the meeting called by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, at the request of county officials, for the purpose of lowering the temperature misfired. That meeting was held beginning about 2:00 p.m. in an auditorium at Athens Park, eleven blocks from the scene of the arrest. It brought together every available representative of neighborhood groups and Negro leaders to discuss the problem. Members of the press, television, and radio covered the meeting. Various elected officials participated and members of the Los Angeles Police Department, Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney’s Office were in attendance as observers. Several community leaders asked members of the audience to use their influence to persuade area residents to stay home Thursday evening. Even Mrs. Frye spoke and asked the crowd to “help me and others calm this situation down so that we will not have a riot tonight.” But one Negro high school youth ran to the microphones and said the rioters would attack adjacent white areas that evening. This inflammatory remark was widely reported on television and radio, and it was seldom balanced by reporting of the many responsible statements made at the meeting. Moreover, it appears that the tone and conduct of the meeting shifted, as the meeting was in progress, from attempted persuasion with regard to the maintenance of law and order to a discussion of the grievances felt by the Negro. Following the main meeting, certain leaders adjourned to a small meeting where they had discussions with individuals representing youth gangs and decided upon a course of action. They decided to propose that Caucasian officers be withdrawn from the troubled area, and that Negro officers in civilian clothes and unmarked cars be substituted. Members of this small group then went to see Deputy Chief of Police Roger Murdock at the 77th Street Station, where the proposals were rejected by him at about 7:00 p.m. They envisaged an untested method of handling a serious situation that was rapidly developing. Furthermore, the proposal to use only Negro officers ran counter to the policy of the Police Department, adopted over a period of time at the urging of Negro leaders, to deploy Negro officers throughout the city and not concentrate them in the Negro area. Indeed, when the proposal came the police had no immediate means of determining where the Negro officers on the forces were stationed. At this moment, rioting was breaking out again, and the police felt that their established procedures were the only way to handle what was developing as another night of rioting. Following those procedures, the police decided to set up a perimeter around the center of trouble and keep all crowd activity within that area.

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An Alert Is Sounded About 5:00 p.m. Thursday, after receiving a report on the Athens Park meeting, Police Chief William H. Parker called Lt. Gen. Roderic Hill, the Adjutant General of the California National Guard in Sacramento, and told hirn that the Guard might be needed. This step was taken pursuant to a procedure instituted by Governor Brown and agreed upon in 1963 and 1964 between the Los Angeles Police Department, the Governor and the Guard. It was an alert that the Guard might be needed. Pursuant to the agreed-upon procedure, General Hill sent Colonel Robert Quick to Los Angeles to work as liaison officer. He also alerted the commanders of the 40th Armored Division located in Southern California to the possibility of being called. In addition, in the absence of Governor Brown who was in Greece, he called the acting Governor, Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson, in Santa Barbara, and informed him of the Los Angeles situation. The Emergency Control Center at Police Headquarters—a specially outfitted command post—was opened at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday. That day, one hundred and ninety deputy sheriffs were asked for and assigned. Between 6:45 and 7:15 p.m., crowds at the scene of the trouble of the night before had grown to more than 1,000. Firemen who came into the area to fight fires in three overturned automobiles were shot at and bombarded with rocks. The first fire in a commercial establishment was set only one block from the location of the Frye arrests, and police had to hold back rioters as firemen fought the blaze. Shortly before midnight, rock-throwing and looting crowds for the first time ranged outside the perimeter. Five hundred police officers, deputy sheriffs and highway patrolmen used various techniques, including fender-to-fender sweeps by police cars, in seeking to disperse the mob. By 4:00 a.m. Friday, the police department felt that the situation was at least for the moment under control. At 5:09 a.m., officers were withdrawn from emergency perimeter control. During the evening on Thursday, Lt. Gov. Anderson had come to his home in suburban Los Angeles from Santa Barbara. While at his residence, he was informed that there were as many as 8,000 rioters in the streets. About 1:00 a.m. Friday, he talked by phone to John Billett of his staff and with General Hill, and both advised him that police officials felt the situation was nearing control. About 6:45 a.m., at Lt. Gov. Anderson’s request, Billet called the Emergency Control Center and was told by Sergeant Jack Eberhardt, the intelligence officer on duty, that “the situation was rather well in hand,” and this information was promptly passed on to Anderson. Anderson instructed Billett to keep in touch with him and left Los Angeles at 7:25 a.m. for a morning meeting of the Finance Committee of the Board of Regents of the University of California in Berkeley, and an afternoon meeting of the full Board.

Friday, the 13th Around 8:00 a.m., crowds formed again in the vicinity of the Frye arrests and in the adjacent Watts business area, and looting resumed. Before 9:00 a.m., Colonel Quick called

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Watts Riot (1965) General Hill in Sacramento from the Emergency Control Center and told him riot activity was intensifying. At approximately 9:15 a.m., Mayor Sam Yorty and Chief Parker talked on the telephone, and they decided, at that time, to call the Guard. Following this conversation, Mayor Yorty went to the airport and boarded a 10:05 flight to keep a speaking engagement at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Mayor Yorty told our Commission that “by about 10:00 or so, I have to decide whether I am going to disappoint that audience in San Francisco and maybe make my city look rather ridiculous if the rioting doesn’t start again, and the mayor has disappointed that crowd.” The Mayor returned to the City at 3:35 p.m. The riot situation was canvassed in a Los Angeles Police Department staff meeting held at 9:45 a.m. where Colonel Quick, of the California National Guard, was in attendance, along with police officials. At 10:00 a.m., according to Colonel Quick, Chief Parker said, “It looks like we are going to have to call the troops. We will need a thousand men.” Colonel Quick has said that Chief Parker did not specifically ask him to get the National Guard. On the other hand, Chief Parker has stated that he told Colonel Quick that he wanted the National Guard and that Quick indicated that he would handle the request. In any event, at 10:15 a.m., Colonel Quick informed General Hill by telephone that Chief Parker would probably request 1,000 national guardsmen. General Hill advised Colonel Quick to have Chief Parker call the Governor’s office in Sacramento. At 10:50 a.m., Parker made the formal request for the National Guard to Winslow Christian, Governor Brown’s executive secretary, who was then in Sacramento, and Christian accepted the request. By mid-morning, a crowd of 3,000 had gathered in the commercial section of Watts and there was general looting in that district as well as in adjacent business areas. By the time the formal request for the Guard had been made, ambulance drivers and firemen were refusing to go into the riot area without an armed escort.

Calling the Guard At approximately 11:00 a.m., Christian reached Lt. Gov. Anderson by telephone in Berkeley and relayed Chief Parker’s request. Lt. Gov. Anderson did not act on the request at that time. We believe that this request from the chief law enforcement officer of the stricken city for the National Guard should have been honored without delay. If the Lieutenant Governor was in doubt about conditions in Los Angeles, he should, in our view, have confirmed Chief Parker’s estimate by telephoning National Guard officers in Los Angeles. Although we are mindful that it was natural and prudent for the Lieutenant Governor to be cautious in acting in the absence of Governor Brown, we feel that, in this instance, he hesitated when he should have acted. Feeling that he wished to consider the matter further, Lt. Gov. Anderson returned to Los Angeles by way of Sacramento. A propeller-driven National Guard plane picked him up at Oakland at 12:20 p.m., and reached McClellan Air Force Base, near Sacramento, at 1:00 p.m. Anderson met with National Guard officers and civilian staff members and received various suggestions, ranging from advice from Guard officers that he commit the Guard immediately to counsel from some civilian staff members that he examine

Watts Riot (1965) the situation in Los Angeles and meet with Chief Parker before acting. Although Anderson still did not reach a decision to commit the Guard, he agreed with Guard officers that the troops should be assembled in the Armories at 5 p.m., which he had been told by General Hill was the earliest hour that it was feasible to do so. Hill then ordered 2,000 men to be at the armories by that hour. Anderson’s plane left Sacramento for Los Angeles at 1:35 p.m. and arrived at 3:35 p.m. At the time Lt. Gov. Anderson and General Hill were talking in Sacramento, approximately 856 Guardsmen in the 3rd Brigade were in the Long Beach area 12 miles to the south, while enroute from San Diego, outfitted with weapons, to summer camp at Camp Roberts. We feel it reasonable to conclude, especially since this unit was subsequently used in the curfew area, that further escalation of the riots might have been averted if these Guardsmen had been diverted promptly and deployed on station throughout the riot area by early or mid-afternoon Friday. Friday afternoon, Hale Champion, State Director of Finance, who was in the Governor’s office in Los Angeles, reached Governor Brown in Athens. He briefed the Governor on the current riot situation, and Brown said he felt the Guard should be called immediately, that the possibility of a curfew should be explored, and that he was heading home as fast as possible. Early Friday afternoon, rioters jammed the streets, began systematically to burn two blocks of 103rd Street in Watts, and drove off firemen by sniper fire and by throwing missiles. By late afternoon, gang activity began to spread the disturbance as far as fifty and sixty blocks to the north. Lieutenant Governor Anderson arrived at the Van Nuys Air National Guard Base at 3:35 p.m. After talking with Hale Champion who urged him to call the Guard, Anderson ordered General Hill to commit the troops. At 4:00 p.m., he announced this decision to the press. At 5:00 p.m., in the Governor’s office downtown, he signed the proclamation officially calling the Guard. By 6:00 p.m., 1,336 National Guard troops were assembled in the armories. These troops were enroute to two staging areas in the rioting area by 7:00 p.m. However, neither the officials of the Los Angeles Police Department nor officers of the Guard deployed any of the troops until shortly after 10:00 p.m. Having in mind these delays, we believe that law enforcement agencies and the National Guard should develop contingency plans so that in future situations of emergency, there will be a better method at hand to assure the early commitment of the National Guard and the rapid deployment of the troops. The first death occurred between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. Friday, when a Negro bystander, trapped on the street between police and rioters, was shot and killed during an exchange of gunfire.

The Worst Night Friday was the worst night. The riot moved out of the Watts area and burning and looting spread over wide areas of Southeast Los Angeles several miles apart. At 1:00 a.m. Saturday, there were 100 engine companies fighting fires in the area. Snipers

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Watts Riot (1965) shot at firemen as they fought new fires. That night, a fireman was crushed and killed on the fire line by a falling wall, and a deputy sheriff was killed when another sheriff’s shotgun was discharged in a struggle with rioters. Friday night, the law enforcement officials tried a different tactic. Police officers made sweeps on foot, moving en masse along streets to control activity and enable firemen to fight fires. By midnight, Friday, another 1,000 National Guard troops were marching shoulder to shoulder clearing the streets. By 3:00 a.m. Saturday, 3,356 guardsmen were on the streets, and the number continued to increase until the full commitment of 13,900 guardsmen was reached by midnight on Saturday. The maximum commitment of the Los Angeles Police Department during the riot period was 934 officers; the maximum for the Sheriff’s Office was 719 officers. Despite the new tactics and added personnel, the area was not under control at any time on Friday night, as major calls of looting, burning, and shooting were reported every two to three minutes. On throughout the morning hours of Saturday and during the long day, the crowds of looters and patterns of burning spread out and increased still further until it became necessary to impose a curfew on the 46.5 square-mile area on Saturday. Lieutenant Governor Anderson appeared on television early Saturday evening to explain the curfew, which made it a crime for any unauthorized persons to be on the streets in the curfew area after 8:00 p.m.

The Beginning of Control Much of the Saturday burning had been along Central Avenue. Again using sweep tactics, the guardsmen and police were able to clear this area by 3:30 p.m. Guardsmen rode “shotgun” on the fire engines and effectively stopped the sniping and rock throwing at firemen. Saturday evening, road blocks were set up in anticipation of the curfew. The massive show of force was having some effect although there was still riot activity and rumors spread regarding proposed activity in the south central area. When the curfew started at 8:00 p.m., police and guardsmen were able to deal with the riot area as a whole. Compared with the holocaust of Friday evening, the streets were relatively quiet. The only major exception was the burning of a block of stores on Broadway between 46th and 48th Streets. Snipers again prevented firemen from entering the area, and while the buildings burned, a gun battle ensued between law enforcement officers, the Guard, and the snipers. During the day Sunday, the curfew area was relatively quiet. Because many markets had been destroyed, food distribution was started by churches, community groups, and government agencies. Governor Brown, who had returned Saturday night, personally toured the area, talking to residents. Major fires were under control but there were new fires and some rekindling of old ones. By Tuesday, Governor Brown was able to lift the curfew and by the following Sunday, only 252 guardsmen remained. Coordination between the several law enforcement agencies during the period of the riot was commendable. When the California Highway Patrol called for help on Wednesday evening, the Los Angeles Police Department responded immediately. When the situation grew critical Thursday evening, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office committed

Watts Riot (1965) substantial forces without hesitation. Indeed, the members of all law enforcement agencies—policemen, sheriff’s officers, highway Patrolmen, city Marshalls—and the Fire Departments as well—worked long hours, in harmony and with conspicuous bravery, to quell the disorder. However, the depth and the seriousness of the situation were not accurately appraised in the early stages, and the law enforcement forces committed and engaged in the several efforts to bring the riots under control on Thursday night and all day Friday proved to be inadequate. It required massive force to subdue the riot, as demonstrated by the effectiveness of the Guard when it moved into position late Friday night and worked in coordination with the local law enforcement units.

Other Areas Affected As the word of the South Los Angeles violence was flashed almost continuously by all news media, the unrest spread. Although outbreaks in other areas were minor by comparison with those in South Central Los Angeles, each one held dangerous potential. San Diego, 102 miles away, had three days of rioting and 81 people were arrested. On Friday night, there was rioting in Pasadena, 12 miles from the curfew zone. There, liquor and gun stores were looted and Molotov cocktails and fire bombs were thrown at police cars. Only prompt and skillful handling by the police prevented this situation from getting out of control. Pacoima, 20 miles north, had scattered rioting, looting, and burning. There was burning in Monrovia, 25 miles east. On Sunday night, after the curfew area was quiet, there was an incident in Long Beach, 12 miles south. About 200 guardsmen and Los Angeles police assisted Long Beach police in containing a dangerous situation which exploded when a policeman was shot when another officer’s gun discharged as he was being attacked by rioters. Several fires were set Sunday night in the San Pedro–Wilmington area, 12 miles south.

Was There a Pre-established Plan? After a thorough examination, the Commission has concluded that there is no reliable evidence of outside leadership or pre-established plans for the rioting. The testimony of law enforcement agencies and their respective intelligence officers supports this conclusion. The Attorney General, the District Attorney, and the Los Angeles police have all reached the conclusion that there is no evidence of a pre-plan or a pre-established central direction of the rioting activities. This finding was submitted to the Grand Jury by the District Attorney. This is not to say that there was no agitation or promotion of the rioting by local groups or gangs which exist in pockets throughout the south central area. The sudden appearance of Molotov cocktails in quantity and the unexplained movement of men in cars through the areas of great destruction support the conclusion that there was organization and planning after the riots commenced. In addition, on that tense Thursday, inflammatory handbills suddenly appeared in Watts. But this cannot be identified as a master plan by one group; rather it appears to have been the work of several gangs, with membership of young men ranging in age from 14 to 35 years. All of these activities

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The Grim Statistics The final statistics are staggering. There were 34 persons killed and 1,032 reported injuries, including 90 Los Angeles police officers, 136 firemen, 10 national guardsmen, 23 persons from other governmental agencies, and 773 civilians. 118 of the injuries resulted from gunshot wounds. Of the 34 killed, one was a fireman, one was a deputy sheriff, and one a Long Beach policeman. In the weeks following the riots, Coroner’s Inquests were held regarding thirty-two of the deaths. The Coroner’s jury ruled that twenty-six of the deaths were justifiable homicide, five were homicidal, and one was accidental. Of those ruled justifiable homicide, the jury found that death was caused in sixteen instances by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department and in seven instances by the National Guard. The Coroner’s Inquest into one of the deaths was canceled at the request of the deceased’s family. There was no inquest into the death of the deputy sheriff because of pending criminal proceedings. A legal memorandum analyzing the procedures followed in the inquests, which was prepared at the request of the Commission, has been forwarded to the appropriate public officials for their consideration. It has been estimated that the loss of property attributable to the riots was over $40 million. More than 600 buildings were damaged by burning and looting. Of this number, more than 200 were totally destroyed by fire. The rioters concentrated primarily on food markets, liquor stores, furniture stores, clothing stores, department stores, and pawn shops. Arson arrests numbered 27 and 10 arson complaints were filed, a relatively small number considering that fire department officials say that all of the fires were incendiary in origin. Between 2,000 and 3,000 fire alarms were recorded during the riot, 1,000 of these between 7:00 a.m. on Friday and 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. We note with interest that no residences were deliberately burned, that damage to schools, libraries, churches and public buildings was minimal, and that certain types of business establishments, notably service stations and automobile dealers, were for the most part unharmed. There were 3,438 adults arrested, 71% for burglary and theft. The number of juveniles arrested was 514, 81% for burglary and theft. Of the adults arrested, 1,232 had never been arrested before; 1,164 had a "minor" criminal record (arrest only or convictions with sentence of 90 days or less); 1,042 with "major" criminal record (convictions with sentence of more than 90 days). Of the juveniles arrested, 257 had never been arrested before; 212 had a “minor” criminal record; 43 had a “major” criminal record. Of the adults arrested, 2,057 were born in 16 southern states whereas the comparable figure for juveniles was 131. Some of the juveniles arrested extensively damaged the top two floors of an auxiliary jail which had been opened on the Saturday of the riots. Those involved in the administration of justice—judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, and others—merit commendation for the steps they took to cope with the

Watts Riot (1965) extraordinary responsibility thrust on the judicial system by the riots. By reorganizing calendars and making special assignments, the Los Angeles Superior and Municipal Courts have been able to meet the statutory deadlines for processing the cases of those arrested. Court statistics indicate that by November 26, the following dispositions had been made of the 2278 felony cases filed against adults: 856 were found guilty; 155 were acquitted; 641 were disposed of prior to trial, primarily by dismissal; 626 are awaiting trial. Of the 1133 misdemeanor cases filed, 733 were found guilty, 81 were acquitted, 184 dismissed and 135 are awaiting trial. The Police and Sheriff’s Department have long known that many members of gangs, as well as others, in the south central area Possessed weapons and knew how to use them. However, the extent to which pawn shops, each one of which possessed an inventory of weapons, were the immediate target of looters, leads to the conclusion that a substantial number of the weapons used were stolen from these shops. During the riots, law enforcement officers recovered 851 weapons. There is no evidence that the rioters made any attempt to steal narcotics from pharmacies in the riot area even though some pharmacies were looted and burned. Overwhelming as are the grim statistics, the impact of the August rioting on the Los Angeles community has been even greater. The first weeks after the disorders brought a flood tide of charges and recriminations, Although this has now ebbed, the feeling of fear and tension persists, largely unabated, throughout the community. A certain slowness in the rebuilding of the fired structures has symbolized the difficulty in mending relationships in our community which were so severely fractured by the August nightmare. Source: Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? (Los Angeles: The Commission, 1965).

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Detroit Riots (1967) In late July 1967, rioting erupted in Detroit, Michigan, resulting in one of the most violent upheavals of the 1960s. Urban race riots occurred in a number of other cities in the summer of 1967, including Newark, New Jersey, just days before the disorder in Detroit. However, the violence and destruction in Detroit surpassed that of any of the other uprisings. The violence in Michigan’s largest city stemmed from a number of factors all related to racial tensions between the city’s blacks and whites. The riot, which resulted in the deaths of 43 people, helped to expose the plight of poor, urban African Americans in cities such as Detroit. However, the riots contributed to a severe decline in the city’s population and economy, and more than four decades after the event, Detroit had yet to fully recover.

Causes of the Riots A number of factors combined to create a socioeconomic situation in Detroit that was ripe for a violent reaction by the city’s African American population. Many of these factors had been brewing for decades, as a growing number of African American migrants from the South moved to Detroit to find manufacturing jobs in the Motor City. Indeed, the 1967 riot was not the first eruption of racial violence in Detroit. In a 1943 riot, blacks and whites fought violently over wartime industrial jobs. The Detroit Free Press conducted a survey after the riots, and residents indicated that the number one issue that caused the uprising was police harassment and brutality. During the 1960s, four-man police units known as the “Big Four” or the “Tac Squad” raided bars and arrested prostitutes in the city. However, many of these police units notoriously harassed and humiliated African Americans. In several notable cases, excessive police force led to the injury or death of blacks. In the Free Press survey, the second-most important factor according to residents was a lack of affordable housing. Detroit had a long history of housing discrimination against African Americans through both legal and extralegal methods. Racial segregation in the Detroit housing market was pronounced, and blacks paid noticeably higher prices than whites for similar housing. Furthermore, urban renewal projects in Detroit exacerbated the housing shortage for African Americans. The city demolished entire neighborhoods to make room for projects

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such as freeways that connected the city to the suburbs. Usually, the affected areas were black neighborhoods. Another contributing factor was the economic inequality between blacks and whites in Detroit. African Americans were especially hard hit by changes occurring in the automobile industry, the backbone of the city’s economy. Automation and outsourcing led to a reduction in the number of jobs available in Detroit’s automobile factories. Due to the fact that African Americans generally had less seniority and held lower-level positions, they were most affected by these changes. Young black males with no postsecondary education were most severely hurt, as the entry-level jobs that existed in the 1940s and 1950s disappeared. The subsequent difficulty in finding employment led to an atmosphere of anger and despair among the African American community. This situation was made worse by the obvious gap in income, employment, and education between blacks and whites in the city. Such inequalities led to a growth of black militancy in Detroit. Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanaugh was a liberal Democrat who had appointed a number of African Americans to important posts in city government. The mayor also enjoyed a good relationship with the mainstream civil rights movement. However, a number of young black leaders in Detroit increasingly viewed the civil rights movement as a failure. Due to a perceived lack of genuine change, these young African Americans became more militant in their approach to race relations. For example, Reverend Albert Cleage called for self-determination and separatism for African Americans because Detroit’s white population seemed to be unwilling to share power. Demographic changes in Detroit also contributed to the tense racial atmosphere in which the riots occurred. During the 1950s, white flight became a significant issue for the city, as the city’s white population declined by 23 percent. At the same time, Detroit’s nonwhite population increased by 13 percent, as the African American population grew from 303,000 to 487,000. This trend continued during the 1960s, and by the time of the riots in 1967, the city’s black population stood at 40 percent. The 12th Street neighborhood, where the rioting began, was particularly affected by the demographic changes. As more blacks began to move into the area after World War II, many whites began to move out. At first, middle-class African Americans relocated to the neighborhood. Later, poorer and indigent residents moved into the area. As the white population left, many commercial establishments also closed down, to be replaced by pool halls, liquor stores, bars, and pawn shops. The neighborhood also became densely packed, with six to eight families living in subdivided housing that formerly held two families. With a population density of more than 21,300 people per square mile, the 12th Street neighborhood was twice as crowded as the city average. When combined with the other factors, people living in such close quarters created a situation ready for a social explosion.

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The Riots In the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, members of the Detroit Police raided a “blind pig,” or an illegal, after-hours bar located on Twelfth Street in a predominantly African American area of the city. The police expected to find perhaps two dozen patrons in such an establishment. However, inside, 82 people celebrated the return of two Vietnam War veterans. The police proceeded to arrest everyone in the bar and took them all outside to await transportation to police stations. Soon, a large crowd gathered as word spread through the neighborhood that the police had used excessive force during the operation. When all of the police had finally left the scene, some people in the crowd began to loot nearby stores. The local news media consciously sought to avoid reporting on the escalating disorder to avoid copycat reactions. However, looting, arson, and sniper fire soon spread across Detroit. Reluctant to be seen as overreacting with too much force, the Detroit police allowed the riot to escalate. Arsonists began to set buildings on fire, first whiteowned stores, but they later burned black-owned businesses also. While firefighters controlled some of the fires, sniper fire prevented them from effectively combating the growing numbers of blazes. Along with the fires, looting, gunfights, and knife fights on the streets of Detroit increased. Mayor Cavanaugh imposed a curfew on the city. He also requested the aid of the National Guard to quell the growing disorder. Michigan governor George Romney declared a state of emergency. At first, authorities relied on the Michigan National Guard to aid the Detroit police. However, as the violence continued to grow, on July 24, Romney requested help from federal troops. President Lyndon Johnson authorized sending paratroopers to a base near Detroit should such aid become necessary. Johnson also sent Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance to survey the situation in Detroit. When Vance toured the city, much of the violence and many of the fires had subsided, so he did not immediately recommend the use of federal troops. In the meantime, some prominent people attempted to calm angry Detroiters. U.S. representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, stood on the hood of a car and urged residents to stop the violence. Rioters ignored the pleas of the congressman and threw rocks and bottles at his car. Likewise, Detroit Tigers player Willie Horton, a black Detroit resident who grew up in the city, tried to sooth a crowd after a game while still in his baseball uniform. Like Conyers, Horton failed to end the violence. After Vance’s tour of Detroit, on the night of July 24, sniper fire in the city had resumed, leading President Johnson to authorize the use of federal troops just before midnight. At about 1:30 a.m. on July 25, 8,000 federalized National Guard troops arrived to combat the violence in Detroit. The guardsmen were later joined

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by 4,700 U.S. Army paratroopers and 360 members of the Michigan State Police. The newly arrived troops used tanks and machine guns to quell the violence in the city. Many observers claimed that the arrival of the federal troops contributed to even more violence in the short term, as the troops and snipers fired on each other. Since most of the National Guard troops were white, their presence often fueled a violent reaction among black Detroiters. In contrast, many of the Army troops were African Americans. Furthermore, the federal troops had been ordered to only load their weapons when given the direct order to do so by their officers. Indeed, the U.S. Army soldiers present during the disturbance killed only one person. The actions of the National Guard troops, however, were called into question in a report that Cyrus Vance prepared after the riot. Perhaps the most controversial incident of the Detroit riots occurred when the police killed three African Americans at the Algiers Motel and Manor House in the early hours of July 26. After receiving a telephone report of sniping, a group of Detroit police officers and National guardsmen arrived at the motel. For an hour, the police brutally interrogated a group of unarmed black men and two white women. When the police left the scene, three of the men had been shot to death, and the other detainees had all been severely beaten. All of this occurred despite the fact that the reports of sniping proved to be false and that there were no weapons on the premises. The incident seemed to prove to African Americans that police brutality was a serious problem in Detroit. In his well-known chronicle of the event, The Algiers Motel Incident, author John Hersey concluded that the police had murdered the black men “for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls . . . for being, all in all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time.” However, none of the police officers involved in the killings were convicted for their role in the incident. By July 27, order had largely returned to the city. On that day, ammunition was taken from the National Guard troops, and officials ordered them to sheath their bayonets. The last fire of the riot occurred on July 28, the same day that the withdrawal of troops began. The last troops left Detroit on July 29.

The Aftermath of the Riots When the riots finally ended on July 27, 43 people had died in the violence. Of the dead, 33 were African Americans. Police and soldiers had killed 27 of those who died during the rioting. In addition to the dead, 1,189 people suffered injuries. Law enforcement detained more than 7,200 people and charged more than 4,000 with crimes. Twenty-seven people were charged with sniping during the disorder, although three of them went to court. Firefighters faced nearly 1,700 fires during the riots. The fires and looting amounted to some $50 million in damages in Detroit.

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In the aftermath of the riots, city officials along with prominent Detroiters formed the New Detroit Committee, which sought to identify and solve those problems that had resulted in the 1967 riots. Also, in March 1968, Focus: HOPE was created in response to the causes of the riots. The nondenominational, nonprofit organization hoped to create a more harmonious community in which diverse peoples could live together. To this day, Focus: HOPE attempts to overcome racism and poverty through education and training for minorities. The riots hurt the strength of political liberals in Detroit who had administered the federal antipoverty programs in the city throughout the 1960s. Also, in 1974, Detroiters elected Coleman Young as the city’s first African American mayor. African Americans have held the mayor’s office ever since. Most business owners did not rebuild in the city after the riots. Instead, much of Detroit’s affluent population left for the suburbs. In 1968, some 80,000 people moved out of the city. Those who left included much of the white population. In 1967, the city still had a majority white population, but by the early 1970s, African Americans made up the bulk of Detroit’s population. Four decades after the riots in 2007, Detroit’s white population stood at a mere 11 percent. In addition, many middle-class blacks also left the city, making Detroit a shrinking city with a population consisting of mainly poor African Americans. In the 2000 census, Detroit recorded fewer than one million people for the first time since 1910. As evidence of the flight from the city, decades after the riots, many buildings still stood empty and the city was dotted with vacant lots. Worse yet, the city suffered from high crime rates and poor public schools. As of 2010, city officials still struggled to restore Detroit’s economy and reputation. —Ronald Young See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading Belknap, Michael R., ed. Civil Rights, the White House, and the Justice Department, 1945–1967: Urban Race Riots. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. Fine, Sidney. Violence in the Model City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Gordon, Leonard. A City in Racial Crisis: The Case of Detroit Pre- and Post- the 1967 Riot. Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown, Company, 1971. Hersey, John. The Algiers Motel Incident. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Locke, Hubert G. The Detroit Riot of 1967. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969.

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Detroit Riots (1967) Rutgers University. “The Detroit Riots of 1967.” http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/ d_index.htm (accessed November 2, 2008). Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sullivan, Will. “Summer in the City: Detroit and Newark Are Still Recovering from the Violence That Erupted 40 Years Ago.” U.S. News and World Report 143, no.3 (July 23, 2007): 34.

Excessive Force Excessive force on the part of the police was among the major causes of the 1967 Detroit riots. In a Detroit Free Press survey in the aftermath of the riots, residents identified police harassment and brutality as the number one problem that they faced in the period preceding the events of 1967. During the 1960s, the so-called “Big Four” or “Tac Squads” operated on the streets of Detroit. The elite, fourman units developed a reputation among black Detroiters for treating African American residents unfairly and even violently. The police frequently stopped young blacks and demanded to see identification. Often, these stops resulted verbal abuse, with the police calling young black men “boy” or “nigger.” While most encounters did not proceed beyond this humiliating verbal abuse, if an African American could not produce proper identification, the stop could result in an arrest or even police violence. In some extreme cases, such police brutality resulted in injury or even death of those detained. For example, in 1962, when a black prostitute named Shirley Scott attempted to flee from the back of a patrol car, Detroit police shot her in the back. Among the other notable case of police brutality in the years leading up to the riots were the severe beating of another prostitute, Barbara Jackson, in 1964, and the beating of Howard King, a black teenager, for allegedly disturbing the peace. African Americans in Detroit also resented police raids on the after-hours drinking clubs known as blind pigs. These establishments had been an important part of African American social life in Detroit for decades, dating backed to the Prohibition period. In addition, these clubs were a response to the fact that many Detroit restaurants and bars discriminated against African Americans. Many blacks in Detroit also resented the aggressive and sometimes violent way in which the police handled the issue of prostitution in the city’s African American ghetto. African American leaders had complained that the police did little to prevent white male clients from exploiting black female prostitutes. However, in the weeks leading up to the riots, police launched an aggressive campaign to limit prostitution in the area where the riots erupted. When a prostitute was killed on July 1, rumors circulated that the police had killed her. The police in turn claimed that local pimps had killed the woman. There were some unsuccessful attempts to reform the Detroit police before the riots. Police commissioner George Edwards did try to recruit and promote African American police officers. However, he refused to establish a civilian police review board, which upset the African American population. At the same time, by working to actively discipline police officers guilty of brutality, Edwards often lost the support of many on his force and incurred the wrath of many white Detroiters who

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came to view him as too soft on crime. Outside groups also found that despite such attempts at reform, the Detroit police was indeed a racist organization. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission conducted a study in 1965 that the Detroit police recruited “bigots” and reinforced racial discrimination through its value system. Furthermore, President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration concluded that 45 percent of Detroit police officers working in predominately African American neighborhoods were “extremely anti-Negro.” —Ronald Young

Further Reading Fine, Sidney. Violence in the Model City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Rutgers University. “The Detroit Riots of 1967.” http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/ d_index.htm (accessed August 8, 2009).

Housing A lack of affordable, quality housing was a major concern for black Detroiters. In its survey conducted after the riots, the Detroit Free Press found that residents listed housing as the second-most important cause of the 1967 disturbances. Only police brutality outranked housing as a contributing factor to the riots. The city had a long history of housing discrimination that dated back to the turn of the century when black migrants first began to arrive in Detroit. Problems arose when middle-class African-Americans began to attempt to integrate traditionally white neighborhoods. By the 1940s and 1950s, white Detroiters tried through both legal and extralegal means to prevent such integration. In one notorious example, a developer built a six-foot-high wall along Eight Mile Road to clearly divide areas meant for blacks and whites. By the 1960s, blacks had expanded their residential areas, but racial segregation had become even more pronounced, with many invisible walls along with the real ones dividing black and white Detroit. Both quality and the cost of housing were key problems for African Americans in 1960s Detroit. In general, the homes owned by blacks were older, of poorer quality, and less valuable than those owned by whites. The median value of homes owned by nonwhites was $10,200, while those owned by whites averaged $12,600. Among white-owned homes in Detroit, about 10 percent were considered deteriorating or dilapidated, compared with 28 percent of those owned by nonwhites. A significantly greater percentage of white residents owned homes compared to the African American population. About 65 percent of whites owned their own home, while only 39 percent of nonwhites did. Rents were about the

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same for all racial groups, with whites paying $77 per month compared to $76 for nonwhites. However, since whites had much higher average incomes, they paid about 20 percent of their monthly income for rent, while nonwhites paid 29 percent of their income for their monthly rent. Those African Americans who could not afford home ownership lived predominantly in public housing projects. These projects were densely packed with residents and highly segregated. The concentration of blacks in public housing only served to reinforce the racial and class isolation of Detroit’s African American population. Furthermore, there was not enough public housing available to meet demand, resulting in overcrowding. This trend was strengthened by the city’s urban renewal projects. Urban renewal often resulted in the destruction of areas considered to be “slums.” In Detroit, as elsewhere, entire neighborhoods were sometimes destroyed to build freeways to the suburbs and other urban renewal projects. This destruction generally affected black areas of the city. Such was the case of Black Bottom, Detroit’s oldest African American enclave, which served as the commercial and cultural heart of the black community. The area was bulldozed and buried under concrete to build Interstate 75. This action angered many in the city’s African American community. It also forced many black residents to move to other areas of the city. Many of them moved into the 12th Street area, where the riots erupted in 1967. This movement into new areas often led to overcrowding and decay, which in turn contributed to the outbreak of the riots. —Ronald Young

Further Reading Farley, Reynolds, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer. Detroit Divided. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Kerner Commission (1967–1968) On July 27, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the creation of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which became more commonly known as the Kerner Commission. The president established the commission in the aftermath of the 1967 race riots in Newark and Detroit. The commission, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, consisted of 11 members, including politicians as well as representatives from the civil rights movement, labor, business, and law

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enforcement. The other members of the commission included Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York; Senator Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts; Iorwith Wilbur “I. W.” Abel, president of the United Steelworkers; Charles Thornton, president and chairman of the board of Litton Industries; Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma; Representative William M. McCulloch of Ohio; Representative James C. Corman of California; Katherine Graham Peden, commerce commissioner of the state of Kentucky; and Herbert Jenkins, chief of police of Atlanta, Georgia. Upon signing the order establishing the commission, President Johnson charged the members with finding the answers to three basic questions about the riots: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it happening again and again?” After studying the 1967 riots, the Kerner Commission released its report in early 1968. The final report, officially known as the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, is best remembered for the conclusion that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two separate societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal.” The Kerner Report contained a number of sections in which the members sought to answer Johnson’s questions. The report examined the causes of the race riots in 1967 and looked into whether each riot followed a distinct pattern. It explored whether there was planning or organization in the riots and outlined the history of the African American protest in the United States. The report also studied the factors that allowed for the persistence of African American ghettos and examined the problems of unemployment, family structure, and social disorganization in the urban ghettos. The Kerner Report also explained how the community’s response to these factors would cause or prevent riots. In addition, it considered police responses that would serve to diffuse crises, recommended a plan by which only experienced police would cover ghetto areas, and proposed the creation of an emergency justice system to handle arrests during riots or similar crises. The report further traced the federal government’s role in cleaning up the affected areas and praised the media for a balanced and factual handling of the 1967 riots. The commission described its vision of the future of American cities if no reforms were taken and also made recommendations for national action. In 1988, 20 years after the original commission issued its report, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights created a follow-up commission to conduct a new survey of racism in America and the impact made by the original Kerner Commission. This new commission presented its findings to the House subcommittee on May 25, 1988. —Ronald Young

Detroit Riots (1967)

Further Reading Barnhart, William E., and Eugene P. Schlickman. Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Rutgers University. “The Detroit Riots of 1967.” http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/ d_index.htm (accessed August 8, 2009).

Excerpts from Cyrus R. Vance’s Report on the Riots in Detroit (1967) Cyrus R. Vance, then a special assistant to the secretary of defense, was sent to Detroit by the Johnson Administration in July 1967 to coordinate the federal response to the riots in the city with state and local authorities. The following excerpts from Vance’s official report on his activities describes the actions taken by authorities to quell the disorders; it is not a description of the disorders themselves or an attempt to determine the causes of the riot. After three years of what would be known as the “Long Hot Summer” riots (1965–1967), Vance’s purpose was to gather information that could help the government respond more effectively to similar urban disorders in the future.

I. Introduction This report covers the Federal activities connected with the riots in Detroit, Michigan, during the period 23 July through 2 August 1967. Its purpose is to recount the sequence of events, to summarize the experience gained, and to focus upon the problems encountered, both resolved and unresolved, for consideration in planning for or conducting future operations of a similar nature. This report does not treat with the underlying causes of the loss of law and order in Detroit, which required Federal intervention. My participation commenced shortly after 1100 on Monday, 24 July. The facts with respect to the period prior to my participation have been taken from the records of the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense.

II. Narrative of Events The first contact between city and state officials in Detroit and Attorney General Clark occurred Sunday night, 23 July at 2355. Mayor Cavanagh, who was with Governor Romney at the time, called the Attorney General at his home and said a very dangerous situation existed in the city. The Attorney General promptly relayed this information to Secretary of the Army Resor. At 0240 on Monday, Governor Romney called the Attorney General at his home and said he thought he might need Army troops to quell the rioting. Mr. Clark said he would begin the alert so that the Army could make preparations and be ready promptly if needed. Immediately upon the completion of this conversation, the Attorney General again called Secretary Resor to inform him of the situation and of the need for the Army to commence preparations.

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Detroit Riots (1967) The Attorney General called the President, at about 0300, to advise him of the disorders in Detroit. At 0340 the Attorney General called Governor Romney, who reported that the situation was about the same and that he still might need help from the Army. The Attorney General said the Army could be present by late morning, if necessary. At this point, the Attorney General proceeded to his office, where he called Secretary Resor at 0420. The Army Secretary stated that General Moore, of the Michigan National Guard, believed the Guard could handle the situation. Secretary Resor also said that the Army could place troops in Detroit before noon, if necessary. The Attorney General called Secretary Resor at 0450 to review the situation and again at 0500. On this latter occasion, Secretary Resor said General Simmons, the Commanding General of the 46th Infantry Division, Michigan National Guard, had toured the riot area and believed that the Guard could handle the situation. Secretary Resor said he was informed that 2,000 Guardsmen were in the area, 3,000 more would be there by noon and another 3,000 were not yet called from a reserve force. The Secretary also reported again that General Moore believed the Guard could handle the situation. He reported that Inspector Gage of the Detroit Police was of the same view. Attorney General Clark called Governor Romney at 0515 and relayed the information that General Simmons, General Moore and Inspector Gage felt the situation was under control and could be handled locally. The Governor replied that rather than take any chance, he should get Federal help. He said he had just told the press that Federal troops were requested. The Attorney General said that a written request for Federal troops would be desirable before their commitment. He advised the Governor that he would have to exhaust his resources and be prepared to say that there was a state of insurrection in Michigan or that there was domestic violence he was unable to suppress. The Governor replied that he would talk to General Simmons and advise the Attorney General later of his decision. He said the situation at that time was not as bad as it had been in Watts or Newark. He also said he appreciated the assistance he had been given. The Attorney General called Secretary Resor at 0535 to report this conversation with Governor Romney. At 0550 Secretary Resor called the Attorney General to say that 2,400 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and 2,400 from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, were in a position to move into Selfridge Air Base, Michigan, by noon, if ordered to do so within the next 10 or 15 minutes. At 0640 the Secretary informed Mr. Clark that 2,190 National Guardsmen were in Detroit and it was estimated 5,000 would be there by noon. Governor Romney called the Attorney General at 0650 to say that major looting continued and new fires were breaking out. He stated that no one could say whether the situation was contained or not. He said he was going out to look the situation over and would call back in an hour. The Attorney General told Governor Romney that if Federal troops were used, it would probably be necessary to Federalize the National Guard. The Attorney General went on to say that the Governor should not ask for the troops unless they were needed. He also stated that the Army had troops in a state of readiness to move and that the Governor would need to decide within three hours to ask for the troops if they were to arrive in daylight.

Detroit Riots (1967) Mr. Clark called Secretary Resor at 0700 to report his conversation with Governor Romney. At 0855 the Governor called the Attorney General and read a statement recommending the use of Federal troops. Mr. Clark replied that, under the Constitution and other laws, it would be necessary for the Governor to request the use of Federal troops, and to give assurances that a full commitment of State resources had been made and that he was unable to suppress the violence. Governor Romney answered that he understood and would get in touch with the Attorney General as soon as he could. At 0915 Secretary Resor informed Mr. Clark that General Throckmorton would be in command of the Army troops if they were to be used. At 0935 the Attorney General briefed the President. At 0945 Governor Romney called the Attorney General and read a draft of a telegram to the President requesting troops. The Attorney General said the telegram was adequate and that if the Governor decided to send it, he should do so quickly. The Governor said a decision would be made promptly. Mr. Clark relayed the gist of this conversation to Secretary Resor at 1000 and then to the President at 1010. The President instructed the Attorney General to tell Secretary Resor to move full speed ahead. Mr. Clark did so at 1015. At 1046 Governor Romney sent the President the telegram he had read to the Attorney General. The telegram was received by the President at 1056 and he replied at 1105 with a wire informing Governor Romney that he was dispatching Federal troops. At 1155 the Attorney General, then at the White House, reached Governor Romney and read the President’s telegram to him. The Governor said it was very helpful. The Attorney General informed him that I would be in charge of the Federal operations. Thereupon I took the phone and talked briefly with the Governor. At approximately 1100 I had received a telephone call at home from Secretary McNamara who said that he was at the White House with the President and wished to know whether it would be possible for me to go to Detroit in connection with the riots which had started on Sunday. I replied affirmatively, and told him that I would come to the White House as soon as possible. I arrived at the White House at about 1150 and went to the Cabinet Room where a meeting was in progress. Among those present at the meeting were the President, Secretary McNamara, Attorney General Clark, Deputy Attorney General Christopher, Assistant Attorney General Doar and Mr. Wilkins, the Director of the Department of Justice Community Relations Service. Secretary McNamara summarized the situation and gave me two telegrams to read. One was from Governor Romney; the second was the response from the President. (Copies of these telegrams are attached as Appendices A and B.) Governor Romney’s telegram stated that as Governor of the State of Michigan he was officially requesting the immediate deployment of Federal troops into Michigan to assist state and local authorities in re-establishing law and order in the City of Detroit. His telegram stated “there is reasonable doubt that we can suppress the existing looting, arson and sniping without the assistance of Federal troops. Time could be of the essence.” The President’s

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Detroit Riots (1967) telegram stated that he had directed the troops, which had been requested by the Governor, to proceed at once to Selfridge Air Force Base. The President’s telegram further stated that these troops would be available for immediate deployment as required to support and assist city and state police and Michigan National Guard forces. The telegram also stated that I was being sent as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense to confer with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh and to make specific plans for providing such support and assistance as might be necessary. At 1155, as reported above, Attorney General Clark read to Governor Romney over the telephone the text of the telegram from the President which had been dispatched. I spoke briefly to Governor Romney and told him I would be catching a special military aircraft as soon as possible, and hoped to be in Detroit within 1-1/2 to 2 hours. I asked if he could have a car available at Selfridge Air Force Base to take me to downtown Detroit immediately to meet with him and Mayor Cavanagh. He said he would arrange this. The President made it very clear to me that he was delegating to me all the responsibility which he could under the Constitution and laws enacted by the Congress and that I should take such action as I believed necessary after I evaluated the situation in Detroit. He asked that I keep Secretary McNamara informed. Secretary McNamara then asked me to designate the individuals whom I wished to take with me to Detroit. I designated Mr. Christopher, Mr. Doar, Mr. Wilkins, Mr. Fitt, General Counsel of the Army; Mr. Henkin, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs; and Colonel Elder. At approximately 1220 I reached General Throckmorton by telephone at Fort Bragg, and told him to commence as soon as possible the deployment of the already alerted and waiting troops from Fort Bragg, and Fort Campbell, to Selfridge Air Force Base, approximately 25 miles outside of Detroit. I asked General Throckmorton to meet me at Selfridge, and told him we would then proceed together to meet with the Governor and Mayor and their staffs in downtown Detroit. At 1335, as soon as we could assemble our team, the other members and I departed National Airport for Selfridge. On the plane, we reviewed the facts which were then available and the mission that had been assigned to us. Specific assignments were made to each member of the team for the collection of detailed information which would be needed to form the basis of an objective, comprehensive and independent appraisal of the situation in Detroit and of the Federal support and assistance which might be required. Members of my team present at this time included Mr. Christopher, Mr. Doar, Mr. Wilkins, Mr. Henkin, Mr. Fitt, and Colonel Elder. I arrived at Selfridge at 1510 and was met by General Throckmorton, who had arrived shortly before from Fort Bragg. We conferred briefly and agreed to put all incoming troops on a 30-minute alert so they would be able to move instantly into Detroit if required. We also confirmed that the necessary transportation was being assembled to move the troops rapidly into the city should they be needed. This transportation consisted primarily of city buses which had been hired by Fifth Army. We placed telephone call to find out where Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh were located. I was informed that they were at the Detroit Police Headquarters in downtown Detroit.

Detroit Riots (1967) General Throckmorton changed into civilian clothes and we immediately proceeded by police car to that building, arriving at about 1625. We met at Police Headquarters with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh; Detroit Commissioner of Police Girardin; Colonel Davids of the Michigan State Police; Major General Simmons, Commanding General of the 46th National Guard Division; and Major General Schnippke, Adjutant General of the State of Michigan, and other members of the Governor’s and Mayor’s staffs. Mayor Cavanagh reported that there had been 483 fires with 23 still burning on the west side and 6 on the east side; that 1800 arrests had been made and that detention facilities where being strained. He said that between 800 and 900 Detroit policemen were on the streets at that time (3000 of the Detroit Police Force normally being assigned to street duty, all shifts). Mayor Cavanagh further stated that he believed local forces were inadequate to cope with the situation, and that there had been intelligence reports that there would be attacks on Monday night on the homes of middle-class Negroes, and that they, in turn, were arming themselves. Governor Romney asked General Simmons to brief me on the deployment of the Michigan National Guard. General Simmons reported that a substantial number of Guardsmen had not been deployed into the streets and that they were awaiting instructions. I asked him what they were waiting for, and was informed that they were waiting for us. General Throckmorton and I recommended that they immediately deploy additional Guard units into the streets. General Simmons left the room to take such action. Governor Romney further indicated there were 730 State Police available in Detroit. He said that he felt Federal troops would be necessary to quell the riots. I asked Governor Romney whether he was stating that there was a condition of insurrection or domestic violence which state and local law enforcement forces could not control. Governor Romney replied that he was not prepared to so state but had said “there was reasonable doubt” as to whether the situation could be controlled by state and local law enforcement agencies. He said that he did not wish to state that there was an insurrection because he had been advised that such action might result in the voiding of insurance policies. I pointed out that the commitment of Federal troops to the streets presented grave legal issues and that it was necessary, under the law, to have a finding that a condition of insurrection or domestic violence existed and that local law enforcement agencies could not control the situation prior to the commitment of Federal troops. He did not state that either of those conditions existed.I then requested that space be made available for our headquarters and that it be as close as possible to offices being used by the Mayor and the Police Commissioner. This request was filled immediately. Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh suggested that we take a tour of the city with them to assess the situation. I concurred in this suggestion and said that I wished to make a personal evaluation of the situation on the ground in the riot-torn areas of the city. At about 1730, Governor Romney, Mayor Cavanagh, General Throckmorton, Mr. Christopher, Mr. Doar and I departed on an automobile tour of the areas of the city

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Detroit Riots (1967) which had suffered the most from the rioting, looting and burning. This tour covered a period of about an hour and three-quarters. Our tour took us through all the hardesthit areas. In a few areas, fires were burning but they appeared to be coming under the control of fire fighting equipment on the scene. Furthermore, there were large areas of the city where only an occasional window was broken or store burned out. In the downtown business district there was no evidence of lawlessness. The only incident during our tour of the city was a flat tire. Upon our return to Police Headquarters, I received preliminary reports from the local Federal agencies (i.e., the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Community Relations Service) and the members of my party. These reports indicated that the situation was much quieter than the preceding day. The information available at this time was fragmentary and in oral form, and left much to be desired. Colonel Elder soon thereafter began to assemble data from all sources— principally the local police—on the number of incidents, both current and for the period prior to our arrival, in order to provide a sounder basis for our subsequent assessments of the situation. This compilation proved invaluable. I was informed that there was a delegation of community leaders who wished to meet with Governor Romney, Mayor Cavanagh and me. We met with this group at about 1930. The group consisted of approximately 15 community leaders, including Congressman Diggs and Congressman Conyers. The meeting was chaired by Mr. Damon Keith, a lawyer and Chairman of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. Mr. Keith stated at the outset of the meeting that time was short and that the fundamental issue on which the community leaders wished to express their views was the question of whether Federal troops should be deployed in the city. To the best of my recollection, about eight of those present spoke. Congressman Diggs was the first to speak, stating he believed the situation demanded immediate deployment of Federal troops into the city. Congressman Conyers then spoke, saying he did not believe the situation was sufficiently critical to justify the deployment of Federal troops at that time, and that he felt the deployment of Federal troops into the city might inflame rather than quiet the situation. He also said that he believed the rioting had passed its peak and was on the downturn. Of those who spoke, the majority were in favor of the immediate deployment of troops and the remainder were opposed. I closed the meeting by thanking the community leaders for the expression of their views on this critical question and stated that while I tended to agree with Congressman Conyers, I had not finally made up my mind and wished to meet briefly with my staff to review all available evidence prior to making a decision. General Throckmorton and I and the members of my staff, after reviewing the available evidence, concluded unanimously that there was an insufficient basis at that time to justify the deployment of Federal troops into the city. We gave special weight to two points. First, the incident rate as reflected in the figures now available was about one-third of what it had been the previous day and was holding approximately level. (See Appendix C). Second, there were now three times as many National Guard troops

Detroit Riots (1967) in the city as on the previous day and it was not clear that law and order could not be re-established with this additional force.1 At approximately 2015 Governor Romney, Mayor Cavanagh and I held a joint press conference. I stated publicly that I had just met with a group of community leaders and also had completed a tour of the city with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh. I said with respect to the evening we hoped very much that the situation would quiet down and that by tomorrow morning people would be able to return to work. I told the newsmen that Federal troops were moving into Selfridge Air Force Base and that we hoped it would not be necessary for them to be used. I said that the City Of Detroit and the State of Michigan had an excellent police force and National Guard. I noted that these forces were on the streets at the present time, and said I was hopeful that it would be possible to contain the situation during the night without the necessity of using Federal troops. I further said the Governor, the Mayor and I would continue to follow the situation throughout the entire night and that I would take whatever action might be required. Governor Romney then stated that he thought the situation was more hopeful that night as a result of these basic facts—number one, the Army was at Selfridge and available to give assistance if necessary; number two, the effort throughout the community, including the police and National Guard, was better organized than the night before; number three, about three times as many National Guardsmen were available for duty in the streets as the night before; and, number four, the fire fighting organization, including units from adjacent communities, unlike the preceding night, was in being and available to deal with that aspect of the situation. He also cited a rising desire on the part of people throughout the community to see the disorder and lawlessness ended. The Governor urged everyone in the community to work for the restoration of law and order and the reestablishment of community life on a peaceful basis, and suggested it might be possible the next day to lift the emergency bans. Mayor Cavanagh stated that although he saw some hopeful signs that didn’t exist yesterday, he would still like to see the Federal troops committed at this point. Following the news conference, we returned to our headquarters room, which was located immediately adjacent to the Press Room and to the Police Commissioner’s office, from which Mayor Cavanagh was operating. Governor Romney had an office a few doors away on the same floor. Shortly after the press conference at about 2030, Governor Romney came into my office and stated privately that it would soon be dark and that he felt strongly that Federal troops should be deployed into the city before nightfall. I told him that I was still not satisfied that the situation could not be controlled by the local law enforcement agencies but that we would follow the matter on a continuous basis as the evening developed. General Throckmorton and I continued to follow the reports of incidents, both by type and number, on a one-half hour basis as reports were received from the police and other sources. Between this time and 2100, the incident rate data began to climb. (This and subsequent incident rate data are reflected in

1.

Some uncertainty now exists regarding the deployment status of the Michigan National Guard during the afternoon of Monday, 24 July. There are several accounts.

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Detroit Riots (1967) Appendix C.)2 Most of the incidents, as reported over the police net, were cases of arson or looting.As the incident rate continued to increase, General Throckmorton and I decided at about 2130 that we should move three battalions of paratroopers to the Fairgrounds within the Metropolitan area of Detroit so they might be more readily available in case they should have to be deployed into the streets. General Throckmorton gave the necessary orders to implement this decision. During the next hour and one-half the incidents throughout the city, as reported over police radio, continued a steady rise. Just before 2300, General Throckmorton and I, after further consultation with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh, determined that the local law enforcement agencies could not control the situation. The Governor and the Mayor both now informed me that they had committed all available police and National Guard forces. At approximately 2310, I recommended to the President, with the concurrence of all of the members of my team, that Federal troops be deployed into the streets. At 2320, the President signed the Proclamation and Executive Order authorizing the use of Federal troops in the City of Detroit and Federalizing the Army and Air National Guard of the State of Michigan. I made a public statement at a news conference about 2325 announcing the action which was being taken; General Throckmorton immediately took command of all the military forces. He ordered the deployment of Regular U.S. Army forces into the eastern half of the city, with the responsibility for the western half assigned to the Michigan National Guard. The rules of engagement issued to all troops under Federal control were to use the minimum force necessary to restore law and order. Specifically the troop commanders were instructed to apply force in the following order of priority: a. Unloaded rifles with bayonets fixed and sheathed b. Unloaded rifles with bare bayonets fixed c. Riot control agent CS—tear gas d. Loaded rifles with bare bayonets fixed Immediately after the President signed the Executive Order, General Throckmorton called Major General Simmons to inform him that he was under General Throckmorton’s command and requested him to stand by at his headquarters for a visit, and to send a liaison officer to General Throckmorton’s office at Police Headquarters. General Throckmorton then drove to the Fairgrounds where he contacted Major General Seitz, Commander of the Federal troops (Task Force 82) and instructed him to assume responsibility from the 46th Division (National Guard) for the restoration of law and order in the eastern half of the city—east of Woodward Avenue. The time of changeover would be mutually agreed upon by the commanders concerned.

2.

The incident rate data must be used with caution. Although an incident was at all times described as “an event requiring police action,” a review of the specific incidents logged reveals a wide range of variation and apparent validity. Substantial numbers of individual incidents which were surveyed did not bear any relation to the riot. Hence, these data may be useful to identify trends, and were used in that way, but should not be considered an absolute indicator.

Detroit Riots (1967) From the Fairgrounds, General Throckmorton preceded to the 46th Division CP at the Artillery Guard Armory where he issued instructions to General Simmons, relieving him of responsibility for the east side of town and charged him with retaining responsibility for the west side. Prior to General Throckmorton’s departure from the 46th Division CP, General Seitz arrived to coordinate with General Simmons. During the inspection tour which we had taken with the Mayor and Governor commencing at 1730, we visited three areas which had been harder hit by the disturbances than any others. These were in the 2d Precinct along Grand River Avenue, the area around 12th Street north of Grand River Avenue in the 10th Precinct and the area around Mack Avenue in the 5th Precinct in the eastern part of the city (a city map is at Appendix E). Of the three areas, 12th Street had been the hardest hit; however, as it became dark the incidents in the eastern half of the city began to increase over those in the western part of the city. Thus, at the time the decision was made to assign TF 82 to the eastern portion of the city, it appeared that the Regular troops were taking over the most active sector. Other factors influencing the decision to assign the eastern portion to TF 82 were the closer proximity of eastern Detroit to Selfridge and the proximity of the 46th Division CP to western Detroit. At 0410 on Tuesday, 25 July, TF 82 completed relief of the 46th National Guard Division elements in that portion of the city east of Woodward Avenue, and the remainder of the Federal troops were moved from Selfridge to the Fairgrounds. These and subsequent troop deployments are reflected in Appendix D. At 0225, General Throckmorton and I made a statement to the press outlining the situation and delineating the areas of responsibility of the Federal and National Guard troop units. General Throckmorton and I made another tour of the city beginning at 0330. On our return we held another press conference at 0520 at Police Headquarters. Our objective was to keep the public fully informed of all developments connected with the restoration of law and order to Detroit. Based on the situation as I saw it then, I proposed to Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh that a joint announcement be made to the effect that Detroit industrial plants, businesses and offices should be reopened that day. They concurred and such a statement was released at 0703. Throughout the morning of Tuesday, 25 July, the members of my group and I participated in a series of discussions with state and city officials and community leaders concerning health and medical problems; food distribution; emergency shelter needs, processing, confinement and disposition of persons in arrest; and other matters which required consideration at once in order to begin and expedite the return to normal. Early Tuesday morning, on the basis of a deteriorating situation in other parts of Michigan, Governor Romney requested the release of 250 National Guard troops for use outside of the Detroit area. He said he also wanted to remove 250 State Police for use elsewhere in the State. These actions were taken. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday further releases of National Guard and police to State control were made. Adjustments also were made in troop dispositions within the city to take account of changes in the situation in Detroit and nearby areas.

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Detroit Riots (1967) The incident rate on Tuesday during daylight hours ran at about half the rate for Monday. Although it rose sharply again in the evening, the peak rate at 2300 was only 166 per hour versus 231 at the same hour on Monday. There were 11 deaths between noon on Tuesday and daylight Wednesday and about 60 fires were reported between 2100 and midnight, a rate well above normal. On Wednesday night, Mayor Cavanagh, Governor Romney and I all agreed that it was essential that we assure the leadership of the city that law and order was being reestablished and that we urge the leadership to mobilize to take the necessary steps to begin to rebuild the city. A list of those to be invited to attend a meeting on Thursday was prepared by the staffs of the Mayor and the Governor and telegrams were sent out asking them to attend a meeting on Thursday at 1500. In view of the improved situation which existed early Thursday morning, the first steps of restoring full responsibility for the maintenance of law and order to the state and local authorities were initiated. As an initial step, General Throckmorton and I agreed that an order should be issued that bayonets be sheathed and ammunition removed from the weapons of the Regular Army and National Guard troops. This was done. An announcement of the lifting of the curfew and the easing of gasoline restrictions was made by the Governor at 1000 Thursday, 27 July. The lifting of curfew, however, was withdrawn later that day by the Governor because of the congestion caused by “spectators, gawkers and photographers” in the damaged areas. On Thursday, additional attention was given to the definition of the tasks that needed to be performed to get the stricken city moving again. The meeting of several hundred community leaders was held at 1615 that day for the purpose of discussing how best to organize to meet this challenge. General Throckmorton and I gave brief situation reports on the status of law and order and on Federal actions being taken to provide for emergency food, health and safety needs. Following remarks made by a number of participants, Governor Romney announced the appointment of Mr. Joseph L. Hudson Jr. to head a broadly based committee of community leaders to proceed with the development of recovery plans for the city. By Friday morning, the situation had improved sufficiently so that, after coordination with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh, the first steps could be taken in the withdrawal of Federal troops from Detroit. Units of TF 82 were withdrawn from the First, Seventh and Thirteenth Precincts and were assembled at City Airport and the Fairgrounds. Their sectors were taken over by National Guard troops of the 46th Infantry Division. The 5th precinct remained under the responsibility of the Regular U. S. Army forces. I met with Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh on Friday morning, in accordance with the President’s telegram of 27 July to discuss further the emergency health, food and safety needs of the citizens of Detroit. At 1200 we announced results of these discussions at a joint press conference. These matters are discussed further in a later section of the report. At 1230, Mr. Christopher, Mr. Doar and I met with Governor Romney, Mayor Cavanagh and state, city and county legal and judicial authorities to review the problems associated with the large numbers of persons in custody and awaiting disposition. These matters are discussed in some detail later in the report.

Detroit Riots (1967) On Saturday morning, 29 July, I returned to Washington to report to the President and to attend the first meeting of the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Following my meeting with the Commission, a news conference was held at which I announced the Small Business Administration’s declaration of Detroit as a disaster area. This declaration had the effect of authorizing low interest (3%) long-term (30 year) loans for repairing or replacing small businesses, homes and personal property destroyed or damaged by the riots. I returned to Detroit at 2040 that night and met with my group to discuss further plans. Deputy Attorney General Christopher returned to Washington upon my arrival in Detroit. On Sunday, I met with Mr. Phillips, Regional Director of the SBA with responsibility for the Detroit area, to discuss the actions needed to carry out the previous day’s SBA declaration of Detroit as a disaster area. Mr. Phillips agreed to open a temporary office in the riot-torn 12th Street area, to consider opening an additional office in the most heavily damaged area on the east side, to supplement his personnel in the Detroit area, and to hold a press conference with me in Police Headquarters on Monday morning to announce the special arrangements which had been made. These arrangements were completed on Sunday and an announcement was made at 0935 on Monday morning. On Wednesday, 2 August, Mr. Moot, Administrator designate of the SBA, visited Detroit with members of his staff for further discussions of the SBA program and its potential contribution to the city’s recovery. During Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Federal troops were withdrawn progressively from the Detroit area and the TF 82 sectors were taken over by the 46th Division. On Monday, the last units of TF 82 were withdrawn from the streets of Detroit and three battalions were moved to Selfridge Air Force Base with the remaining four held in assembly areas at the City Airport and the Fairgrounds. On Tuesday, four battalions were airlifted to their home stations at Fort Campbell and all remaining battalions were assembled at Selfridge Air Force Base from which they were airlifted to Fort Bragg on Wednesday. The 46th National Guard Division was de-Federalized and returned to the control of the State of Michigan (to operate under the State Police Director) at 1200 on Wednesday, 2 August, as the last units of TF 82 were being returned home. The curfew was relaxed concurrently with the withdrawal of Federal troops; the effective period was 2400 to 0530 on Monday night—Tuesday morning and it was discontinued entirely on Wednesday. Liquor sales, which had been suspended, were resumed outside curfew hours beginning on Monday. The return of the control of the city to the National Guard and local authorities, and the relaxation of curfew and the restriction on liquor sales, did not result in any increase in incident rates. These rates had lessened each day, reaching a low of 280 incidents in 24 hours on Tuesday, 1 August. On Monday, 31 July, I met with Mr. Crook, Director of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and Mr. Brabson, VISTA Program Officer, to review the VISTA program in support of Detroit’s recovery. A subsequent report of VISTA’s activity, submitted to me by Deputy Director Kennedy on Wednesday, 2 August is at Appendix F. My principal activities and those of my staff on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, 31 July-2 August, were to meet and talk with as wide a segment of the citizens of Detroit as

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Detroit Riots (1967) possible in order to gain additional insights into the problems which had caused the riots and those which had grown from them. Although these meetings proved highly productive, they did not lead me to any simple conclusions with respect to the problems which Detroit must meet and overcome; they convinced me anew of the tangled economic, sociological, and psychological origins of the riots and of the enormity of the related tasks to be performed. At 0935 on Wednesday, 2 August, General Throckmorton and I held a final press conference in the Police Headquarters press room. At that time we announced that “law and order have been restored to Detroit . . . responsibility for maintaining law and order in Detroit will be returned at noon to state authorities.” At 2110 I departed from Detroit, arriving in Washington with my mission completed at 2310. A more detailed chronology of the events relating to this narrative is at Appendix G. First is the account given to us at the initial conference at about 1625 by General Simmons, the Commander of the 46th National Guard Infantry Division. His report stated that approximately half of the Guard units were not deployed at that time. Governor Romney stated that these deployments were being held up pending arrival of the Federal troops. Second is the report given to Colonel Elder by Colonel Phillips, Chief of Staff of the 46th National Guard Infantry Division, at about 1915. According to this account, the division had about 7000 troops then in the Detroit area with another 700 (2 tank battalions and a Signal unit) enroute from Camp Grayling. Of the 7000 in Detroit, 2240 were in the Central High School area and 1810 were in the Southeast High School area; 85% of both groups were reported deployed. Of the approximately 2950 remaining, 300 were beginning to be sent out to accompany the fire department to provide security and the remainder were overhead, in reserve, resting or feeding. Other accounts are based on a reconstruction of events after the fact. One was developed between the staffs of Task Force Detroit and the 46th Division on 31 July and 1 August through a detailed survey of journals, morning reports and other available documents. According to this account, there where 2725 troops deployed under the 2d Bde, 46th Div (headquarters at Central High School), 1319 deployed under the 3d Bde, 46th Div (headquarters at Central High School), 905 allocated or functioning, as guards to accompany fire trucks, 392 involved in command and support tasks, 1900 in reserve or being prepared for commitment, 713 in rear detachments at Camp Grayling, and 243 enroute (at Flint). (See Appendix D). It is clear from the above accounts that at 1630 on 24 July there were between 2,000 and 3,000 additional Army Nation Guard troops available for deployment into Detroit’s streets. In addition, none of the Air National Guard units were being used to control the riots. The total strength of the Michigan Air National Guard was 2137 of which 660 were deployed after the National Guard was federalized. Source: Final Report of Cyrus R. Vance, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Concerning the Detroit Riots, July 23 through August 2, 1967, 1–27, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/ johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Vance-C/DetroitReport.asp (accessed July 22, 2010).

Chicago Riots (1968) The 1968 Democratic Party National Convention convened from August 26 to August 29 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois. The proceedings were marred by violence on the streets of Chicago as approximately 10,000 protesters clashed with police in what would later be termed by the Walker Commission as a “police riot.” The Chicago confrontation between the forces of law and order and demonstrators challenging the legitimacy of the American political process and military presence in Vietnam was the culmination of a violent year, which exposed the polarization of American society and culture. The year began with the Tet Offensive on January 30 as North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched an assault upon the cites of South Vietnam garrisoned by the Untied States and the South Vietnamese Army. After initially being caught off guard, counterattacks by the American forces and their South Vietnamese allies regained control of these urban areas, inflicting heavy casualties upon the enemy. While the Tet Offensive resulted in a battlefield victory for the United States, the fierce fighting in Southeast Asia during the early months of 1968 fueled antiwar sentiment on the American home front. Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an antiwar platform, challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. After McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy also entered the race as a candidate opposed to American policy in Vietnam. Johnson responded to the growing opposition within his own party by announcing on March 31 that he would not seek reelection. McCarthy and Kennedy began a grueling primary campaign across the country, while the party establishment rallied behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was assassinated on April 4. King’s murder ushered in urban unrest throughout the nation, and National Guard units were dispatched to restore order in many of the nation’s largest cities; including Chicago, where King had clashed with Mayor Richard J. Daley over open housing in 1966. Only eight weeks after King’s death, Robert Kennedy was also assassinated after winning the California primary over Senator McCarthy. Against this background of violence, the leading Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, and Alabama governor George Wallace of the American Independent Party emphasized the issues of law and order against the forces of discontent unleashed in the land.

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Those who sought to expose the hypocrisy of American democracy as fostering racism, poverty, and an imperialist war in Vietnam made plans for massive demonstrations at the nominating convention of the nation’s ruling political party. These antiestablishment groups included cultural rebels as well as the growing antiwar movement. The cultural rebels were best represented by the Youth International Party (Yippies) founded by radical activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who began making plans for Chicago at Hoffman’s New York City apartment on New Year’s Eve in 1967. The Yippies emphasized an uninhibited lifestyle and employed street theater to draw the ire of mainstream America. Accordingly, Rubin and Hoffman announced that the Yippies would sponsor a Festival of Life featuring youth, music, and theater. In the initial call for the festival, the Yippies proclaimed, “Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth-seekers, peacock-freaks, poets, barricade-jumpers, dancers, lovers, and artists!” The Yippies proclaimed that they would celebrate life in contrast with the Democratic Party Convention of death. Rubin asserted that the Yippies would mock the Democrats by nominating a pig, Pigasus the Immortal, for president. Chicago authorities also took seriously Yippie claims that they would lace the city water supply with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and challenge conventional morality with public fornication. Hoffman would later insist that the Yippie assertions about spiking the water supply and storming the convention were simply part of street theater and having some fun at the expense of the uptight political establishment. More politically oriented radicals were drawn to the demonstration plans of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). Formed in 1966, the Mobe organized protest rallies against the war and racism which drew over 100,000 demonstrators to New York City and San Francisco in April 1967. On October 21, 1967, the Mobe sponsored a march on the Pentagon in which 150,000 protesters confronted the “War Makers.” Seeking to maximize the number of demonstrators, the Mobe favored a loose coalition of antiwar groups, including the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who found the Mobe’s focus upon opposing the war to be narrow. In March 1968, Mobe organizers met in Chicago to discuss protest strategies for the Democratic Convention. Among the approaches considered were mass disruption of the convention, unifying behind a peace candidate such as Eugene McCarthy, and large-scale demonstrations and teach-ins against the war. Mobe leaders Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden favored the latter strategy as did Mobe’s national coordinator David Dellinger, a pacifist who stressed nonviolence. Mobe’s original plans called for two long marches with a final rally scheduled for Soldier Field. Workshops and movement centers would be established in 10 city parks, many of them in predominantly black areas.

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The administration of Chicago mayor Richard Daley angrily asserted that the streets of Chicago would not be surrendered to outside agitators. Daley, who had served as mayor of the city since 1955, took great pride in urban renewal and transportation projects, which prevented Chicago from suffered the urban blight that characterized many other Midwestern industrial cities during the 1960s. The mayor perceived the Democratic National Convention as an opportunity to showcase the city for a national audience. Daley did not want this civic occasion marred by protest activities, and he also feared that demonstrators might ignite unrest among Chicago’s black population. African Americans were a key constituency of the Daley patronage machine, but relations between the black community and Daley administration deteriorated following the city’s failure to enforce an open housing agreement negotiated in 1966 with Martin Luther King Jr. Then, during the violence following King’s assassination, Daley antagonized many in the black community with his order that Chicago police “shoot to kill” arsonists. Accordingly, the Daley administration stalled and resented efforts by the Yippies and Mobe to obtain permits for city marches during the convention. The city also refused to set aside local ordinances that closed city parks at 11:00 p.m. Mayor Daley remarked on August 22, “We don’t permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why should we let anyone from outside the city sleep in the park. We don’t permit our own people to march at night, so why should we let a lot of people do snake dances at night thru the neighborhoods.” This statement, however, ignored the fact that the city extended the privilege of camping in the parks to the Boy Scouts and National Guard. But the Daley administration was not going to extend this privilege to protesters intent upon disrupting public order. The delaying tactics of the Daley regime, however, were successful in limiting the number of demonstrators heading to Chicago. Instead of the 100,000 protesters expected by Mobe and the Yippies, only about 10,000 demonstrators were present to question the legitimacy of the American political system in the streets of Chicago. In response to the hundreds of thousands who were anticipated, the city of Chicago requested 6,000 National Guardsmen, while city police were placed on 12-hour shifts, contributing to exhaustion and stress for a force soon to be tested by angry demonstrators. On Friday, August 23, Jerry Rubin and a group of Yippies gained media attention when they arrived at the Civic Center Plaza with Pigasus the Pig and attempted to formally nominate him as the presidential candidate of the Yippie Party. Authorities quickly arrested Rubin and confiscated Pigasus, but the Yippies had their media event. Later that day, a federal district judge denied Mobe’s request for an injunction that would have prevented the city from enforcing the 11:00 p.m. park curfew. Abbie Hoffman urged demonstrators to defy the court order, and on the evening of August 24, police and protesters clashed. More

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serious violence, however, was avoided when poet Allen Ginsberg led a chanting crowd out of Lincoln Park. August 25 was the Yippie Festival of Life. The only rock band to appear was the Detroit-based MC5, but the logistics for staging a rock concert provoked confrontation with police when Hoffman attempted to move a flatbed truck into Lincoln Park to serve as a stage. After several skirmishes, Hoffman declared that the police had prevented the musical festival. Meanwhile, a projected march scheduled by Mobe for the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many of the Democratic delegates were staying, was only able to garner approximately 300 participants. The police, however, still halted the march at Grant Park near the hotel. The day concluded with violent confrontations as the police employed tear gas and batons to clear the parks after curfew, with the fighting carrying over into nearby neighborhoods and streets. Forced out of Lincoln Park, protesters congregated at the intersection of Clark and LaSalle streets, where they taunted police. Ordered to clear Clark Street and keep traffic flowing, the police used batons to beat the demonstrators, who responded with acts of vandalism. The following evening of August 26, the violence escalated as the police attacked approximately 3,000 demonstrators, who at the urging of Hoffman refused to vacate Lincoln Park. Despite Hoffman’s exhortations, the police successfully forced the crowd out of the park and into the streets, where skirmishes continued for much of the night. Mobe leader Tom Hayden, who coauthored the SDS manifesto The Port Huron Statement, was arrested for allegedly letting the air out of the tires on a police vehicle. Protesters were back in Lincoln Park at sunrise on August 27 for chants, prayers, and meditation led by Allen Ginsberg. Later that day, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale addressed the crowd and urged resistance to the Chicago police. Meanwhile, Mobe leaders clashed with Hoffman, who argued for the abandonment of nonviolence in light of the tactics used by the Chicago police. Peace, however, remained the theme at the Chicago Coliseum, where approximately 4,000 people listed to David Dellinger, folksinger Phil Ochs, novelist William Burroughs, and other representatives of the antiwar movement. Meanwhile, the nightly ritual of the police closing Lincoln Park continued unabated. The crescendo of convention violence was reached on Wednesday, August 28, as the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey for president and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine for vice president. Hoffman was arrested that morning for public indecency as he had written the word “fuck” on his forehead. According to the Yippie leader, he was attempting to discourage the media from photographing him. In the afternoon, Dellinger, Davis, Seale, and Hayden addressed a large crowd at Grant Park, near the convention headquarters hotel, the Conrad Hilton. Hayden implored the crowd to take their protest to the streets. At approximately

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3:00 p.m., a shirtless young man climbed the flagpole and attempted to lower the American flag at Grant Park. The police responded by retrieving the flag and attacking the young man. The crowd, in turn, began to pelt the police with rocks and chunks of concrete. As tear gas engulfed the park and fighting spread to nearby streets, a full-scale riot was underway. As protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching,” police assaulted them in front of the Hilton Hotel as television cameras recorded the action. Angry and frustrated police began to indiscriminately beat both protesters and bystanders who seemed to sympathize with the demonstrators. The police also turned their wrath upon the media, whose presence the police believed was encouraging the antics of the protesters. Reporters and cameramen were beaten as the streets of Chicago descended into chaos. Rennie Davis was clubbed unconscious by the police and sent to a hospital for treatment. When police entered the hospital to arrest Davis, his friends allegedly placed a white sheet over him, moving him from room to room in an effort to elude the authorities. Meanwhile, tempers were flaring on the floor of the convention, with Daley security forces “roughing up” CBS News reporter Dan Rather. In a nominating speech for antiwar candidate and South Dakota senator George McGovern, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff asserted, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” Television cameras captured a furious Daley responding to Ribicoff with what appeared to be an ethnic slur and vulgar language, which the mayor later denied using. But neither fighting on the convention floor nor the streets of Chicago failed to halt the Humphrey nomination. Of course, the protesters had no illusions that their actions would alter the nominating process; rather, they sought to expose the failures of the political establishment, which resorted to police violence while nominating Humphrey, who secured the support of Democratic Party officials while failing to enter any state primaries. Radicals hoped that antiwar supporters of the McCarthy candidacy would realize the futility of working within the system. Following the violence of Wednesday night, McCarthy met with demonstrators on Thursday and denounced the Daley machine while vowing to sit out the 1968 election. According to the mayor’s office, over 150 officers were injured in the Wednesday evening clashes with protesters. The number of demonstrators and bystanders injured is difficult to estimate; however, during convention week at least 100 civilians were treated in area hospitals due to wounds inflicted by the police. Despite the considerable violence in the parks and streets of Chicago, no one was killed in the melee. On the eve of the convention, however, a 17-year old boy, Dean Johnson was shot and killed on August 22 by police when he allegedly attempted to draw a weapon after he was stopped for a curfew violation. Johnson was apparently in the city to

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partake in the protests, but in the buildup to the convention, his death was largely unreported by the national media. While the Yippies and Mobe believed that the violence on the streets of Chicago offered ample proof regarding the fascist nature of the American political system, many other observers perceived the Chicago riot differently. Republican nominee Richard Nixon made considerable use of the Chicago convention in his political campaign, arguing that Americans’ rights to “domestic tranquility” were threatened by protesters defying the legally constituted authority of the Chicago police. Appealing to the so-called “silent majority” of middle-class Americans appalled by the counterculture and political radicals, Nixon ran on a platform of law and order, which some critics insisted were simply code words of an anti-black backlash in the country. Nixon, nevertheless, was able to steal some of George Wallace’s thunder and narrowly edge Humphrey, whose candidacy remained haunted by the violence in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. In response to the fighting in the streets of Chicago, attorney Daniel Walker, who later served as governor of Illinois, was appointed to submit a report on the violence to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Entitled Rights in Conflict, the report was publicly released on December 1, 1969, and was based upon 20,000 pages of statements from over 3,000 eyewitnesses and participants as well as analysis of film and photographic evidence. The report concluded that the Chicago police were severely provoked by the words and deeds of the demonstrators. Furthermore, the police were exhausted by 12-hour shifts and on edge due to reports of threats to disrupt the city and convention. Despite such provocation, the report argues that the police responded in an unprofessional manner by launching a “police riot” in which demonstrators, photographers, reporters, and innocent bystanders were indiscriminately assaulted by authorities. Acknowledging that the media sometimes refused to comply with legitimate orders to disperse and also exacerbated the situation, the commission asserted that Chicago police failed to respect freedom of the press during convention week. By terming the actions of Wednesday night in front of the Hilton Hotel a police riot, Rights in Conflict maintained, “[t]hat some policemen lost control of themselves under exceedingly provocative circumstances can be understood, but not condoned. If no action is taken against them, the effect can only be to discourage the majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and further weaken the bond between police and community.” The findings of the Walker Commission were rejected by the Daley administration, which challenged the conclusion that “the vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on expressing by peaceful means their dissent either from the society generally or from the administration’s policies in Vietnam.” Daley believed that his police department had successfully defended the city

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against revolutionary outside agitators intent upon taking over the streets and parks of the city. Although the Justice Department under Attorney General Ramsey Clark was reluctant to pursue indictments under the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines for the purpose of inciting a riot, on March 20, 1969, a Chicago grand jury returned indictments against eight demonstration leaders balanced by the indictment of eight police officers. The policemen were acquitted by a Chicago jury, and most national media attention was focused upon the prosecution of the so-called Chicago Eight—a cased encouraged by the incoming Nixon administration and new attorney general John Mitchell. The eight defendants included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. The trial began September 24, 1969, in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman. The defense was headed by attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, who proposed that the cultural divide in America be addressed by a series of questions to potential jurors as to whether they could identify such rock musicians as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Judge Hoffman rejected the cultural questions, and a middle-aged jury of 2 white males and 10 women, 8 white and 2 black, was seated. The defense was divided over strategy and tactics. Hayden preferred a more traditional defense, which would also address political issues such as American participation in the Vietnam War, although Judge Hoffman resisted efforts to raise political questions during the proceedings. On the other hand, Abbie Hoffman and Rubin preferred to take the Yippie style of street theater into the courtroom. The Yippies mocked the proceedings by blowing kisses to the jurors, refusing to stand when Judge Hoffman entered the courtroom, placing the National Liberation Front flag on the defense table, and donning such attire as American flags and judicial robes. These antics antagonized Judge Hoffman, who responded with numerous contempt citations. The judge was also antagonized by the outbursts of defendant Bobby Seale, who insisted that the trial be delayed until his counsel Charles Garry recovered from gall bladder surgery. Judge Hoffman refused Seale’s motion or to let the Black Panther leader serve as his own counsel, provoking angry retorts from the defendant who called the judge a racist and fascist. When Seale refused to be silent and continued to voice his objections, Hoffman ordered the black defendant brought to the courtroom bound and gagged. The judge eventually severed Seale’s case from that of the other defendants, sentencing him to four years in prison for contempt and reducing the Chicago Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago district attorney Thomas Foran and his assistant Richard Schultz headed the prosecution. The case for the prosecution was based primarily upon the testimony of undercover agents who infiltrated various radical organizations. Robert Pierson served as a “bodyguard” for Rubin, while Irwin Bock and William

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Frappolly maneuvered themselves into leadership positions with Vets for Peace and SDS, respectively. According to the prosecution witnesses, the defendants planned to disrupt traffic, obstruct the convention, and pursue “hit-and-run guerilla tactics” on the streets of Chicago, although much of the prosecution evidence did not relate directly to the Chicago riots. The defense asserted that the defendants were responding to the escalating violence of the Chicago police, while city authorities were guilty of taking Yippie theater, such as lacing the city water supply with LSD, as realistic threats. Defense witnesses included such prominent individuals as writers Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer; drug guru and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, and folksingers Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. Perhaps Mailer best expressed the difficulties of proving a conspiracy case by remarking, “Leftwingers are incapable of conspiracy because they are all egomaniacs.” Defendant Abbie Hoffman concluded, “Conspiracy? Hell, we couldn’t agree on lunch.” The jury agreed, acquitting all the defendants on conspiracy charges. Froines and Weiner were found not guilty on all counts, but the other five defendants were found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot. Judge Hoffman sentenced each of the convicted defendants to five years in prison and $5,000 fines. The judge also inflicted severe contempt sentences upon the defendants and their attorneys for 159 acts of criminal contempt. The defendants maintained a degree of levity throughout the sentencing process, with Abbie Hoffman recommending that the judge try some LSD. On November 21, 1972, the Seventh Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of the Chicago Seven on the grounds that the defense was not allowed to examine the potential biases of jurors. Judge Hoffman was also censured for “a deprecatory and often antagonistic attitude” toward the defense. The Appeals Court also noted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the knowledge and complicity of Judge Hoffman and the prosecution, interfered with client-attorney privilege by bugging the offices of defense attorneys. The contempt citations were also overturned as the Appeals Court ruled that contempt sentences longer than six months required jury trials. The defendants and many on the political left perceived the trial as a great victory for exposing the prejudices of Judge Hoffman and the prosecution. On the other hand, the overturning of the Chicago Seven convictions provided evidence that the judicial system was capable of providing even radical elements with a fair trial. The Yippie and Mobe leaders who called for political demonstrations in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention believed that media coverage of the event would demonstrate the fascist and militaristic tendencies of the political establishment and radicalize many elements of the American population. They had seemingly achieved this purpose by provoking what was officially

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labeled “a police riot” by the Walker Commission. But rather than being radicalized by the events in Chicago, many mainstream Americans rallied behind Richard Nixon’s call for law and order. Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy never recovered from the Chicago convention. Despite Nixon’s criticisms of Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, the war continued. The political left was increasingly marginalized, with some elements, such as the Weather Underground, abandoning nonviolence. Mayor Daley and the forces of order had seemingly won the symbolic battle of Chicago. As for the Democratic Party, they would not return to Chicago until 1996 and the re-nomination of President Bill Clinton. —Ron Briley See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Boston Tea Party (1773); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Battle of Athens (1946); Antiwar Movement (1960s–1970s); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Condon, Frank, Ron Sossi, and Tom Hayden. Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008. Farber, David. Chicago ’68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Gould, Lewis L. 1968: The Election That Changed America. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1988. Raskin, Jonah. For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Royko, Mike. Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. New York: Dutton, 1971. Rubin, Jerry. Do It! New York: Ballantine Books, 1970. Walker, Daniel. United States National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Rights in Conflict: Chicago’s 7 Brutal Days. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Chicago Seven The Chicago Seven originally consisted of eight defendants indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The original eight defendants included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. Judge Julius Hoffman severed Black Panther leader Seale from the case, and the courtroom drama was termed the trial of the Chicago Seven by the media. To spotlight their opposition to the Vietnam War, the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe) and the Youth International Party (Yippies) planned demonstrations to coincide with the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August 1968. The Mobe, led by Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, focused upon organizing antiwar demonstrations, while Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin called for a festival of youth, music, and theater that would mock traditional politics by nominating a pig, Pigasus, for president. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was appalled by the antics of the protesters. City officials refused permission for the demonstrators to sleep in city parks, announcing that an 11:00 p.m. curfew would be enforced. National Guard troops were requested by Daley to support Chicago’s 12,000 police. On the evening of August 25, confrontations between demonstrators and Chicago police began, continuing through August 29 with hundreds arrested and injured in the melee. On March 20, 1969, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight defendants for crossing state lines to incite a riot. The trial commenced in the courtroom of Judge Hoffman on September 24, 1969. The prosecution was headed by District Attorney Thomas Foran and his assistant Richard Schultz, while attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass represented the defense. Bobby Seale protested that his counsel of choice, Charles Garry was unavailable due to health issues and requested a postponement of the trial. Judge Hoffman denied Seale’s request, and when the Black Panther leader angrily denounced the ruling, Hoffman ordered the black defendant bound and gagged. Eventually, the judge severed Seale from the case and sentenced him to four years in prison for contempt. The prosecution relied upon informants to support their conspiracy case, while the defense attempted to ridicule the system and Judge Hoffman by such antics as blowing kisses to the jury and dressing in judicial robes. A frustrated Judge Hoffman sentenced the defendants and their attorneys to lengthy prison terms for 159 acts of criminal contempt. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed all these contempt convictions and censured Judge Hoffman.

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Demonstrators protest the trial of the Chicago Seven (also known as the Chicago Eight). The Chicago Seven, antiwar activists arrested for protests during the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, drew attention to their cause during a lengthy and often bizarre trial. (Library of Congress)

The jury acquitted all defendants on the conspiracy charge, but Hayden, Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger, and Davis were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot. Each of the convicted men was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a five-year prison term. These convictions, however, were reversed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on November 21, 1972, due to the Appeal Court’s findings that the decisions of Judge Hoffman were prejudicial and that the FBI resorted to illegal actions such as bugging the offices of defense attorneys. The trial of the Chicago Seven became a media circus highlighting the cultural wars of the 1960s, but the overturning of the convictions and contempt citations also demonstrated a sense of justice within the American legal system. —Ron Briley

Further Reading Condon, Frank, Ron Sossi, and Tom Hayden. Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008. Schulz, John. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial. New York: Da Capo, 1993. Weiner, Jon, Tom Hayden, and Jules Feiffer. Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight. New York: New Press, 2006.

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Daley, Richard J. (1902–1976) Richard Joseph Daley served as the Democratic Party mayor of Chicago for 21 years. During the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, Daley supported the presidential nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but he was criticized for encouraging a violent police response to the demonstrations that marred the convention, contributing to Humphrey’s narrow political defeat. Daley was born in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side on May 15, 1902. His father was a steel worker and his mother a devout Catholic, who raised her son in the faith. Daley attended Catholic schools and graduated from DePaul Law School in 1934. Two years later, Daley was elected to the Illinois state senate, where he served 10 years. In 1946, Daley suffered his only electoral defeat when he failed to gain the office of Cook County sheriff. His political career was back on track in 1950 with his election as clerk of Cook County. Daley was poised for a mayoral candidacy after attaining election as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in 1953. Two years later, the voters of Chicago selected Daley for mayor—a position he maintained until his death in 1976. As mayor, Daley garnered considerable labor support, settling several disputes and assuring decent wages for municipal employees. The mayor also presided over urban renewal as well as expansion of the city’s mass transit and O’Hare Airport. The well-organized Daley political machine provided stability for the city’s white ethnics, but the mayor also maintained black political support through the use of patronage. Daley was crediting with providing an economic foundation for Chicago, which prevented the city from suffering the urban blight that characterized other Midwestern industrial cities during the 1950s and 1960s. The stability of the Daley regime, however, was challenged during the late 1960s. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. carried the civil rights movement into the North, but the Chicago open housing agreement negotiated by King was not enforced by the Daley administration. Following King’s assassination in April 1968, Daley provoked controversy by ordering Chicago police to “shoot to kill” any arsonists. In August of that same year, Daley was censured by many Democrats for his handling of the protests surrounding the party’s national convention. In response to thousands of protesters gathering in Chicago, Daley announced that the city would enforce an 11:00 p.m. curfew for the city’s parks and requested National Guard troops to support the city’s police force. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemned the mayor for employing “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” A federal commission chaired by attorney

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Daniel Walker later described the violence on the streets of Chicago as “a police riot.” Daley, however, posed as the champion of law and order, winning reelection. Although columnist Mike Royko published a 1971 best-seller, Boss, charging Daley with corruption, and some of the mayor’s associates were indicted and imprisoned, Daley was never personally accused of dishonesty. He suffered a stroke in 1974, but the mayor remained in office until his death two years later. Daley was subject to considerable criticism in 1968 for his handling of race relations and the Democratic national convention, yet at a 2005 Chicago Historical Society meeting commemorating Daley 50 years after he was first elected mayor, he was praised as one of the preeminent mayors of 20th-century America. Daley died on December 20, 1976. —Ron Briley

Further Reading Biles, Roger. Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Government of Chicago. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. Cohen, Adam, and Elizabeth Taylor. American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000. Royko, Mike. Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. New York: Dutton, 1971.

Democratic National Convention (1968) The Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago from August 25 to 29, 1968, amid cultural and antiwar protests, to select a candidate to replace President Lyndon Johnson. The violence that erupted at the convention contributed to Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey’s narrow defeat by Republican Richard Nixon in the fall general election. During the early months of 1968, President Johnson was facing increasing opposition within his own party to the war in Vietnam. Despite assurances that the war was being won by American and South Vietnamese forces, North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers during the Tet Offensive in February 1968 were able to gain a foothold in South Vietnamese urban centers before being repulsed by American troops in heavy fighting. President Johnson’s approval rating fell below 35 percent, and opposition to the war intensified. When New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, a critic of Johnson’s Vietnam policies, declined to challenge Johnson in the primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota entered the Democratic primaries as an antiwar candidate. Boosted by thousands of young volunteers, McCarthy shocked Johnson on March 12 in the

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New Hampshire primary, winning 42 percent of the vote to the president’s 49 percent. His strong New Hampshire showing provided legitimacy for McCarthy’s candidacy. Four days later, however, Robert Kennedy also entered the presidential campaign. McCarthy’s supporters labeled the New York senator an opportunist, and the two antiwar senators waged a bitter campaign throughout the Democratic primaries. In response to the McCarthy and Kennedy challenges, President Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek reelection. Following Johnson’s withdrawal, Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race but did not contest the primaries, focusing upon gaining delegates from non-primary states and Democratic Party leaders. In a fierce primary struggled marred by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and racial urban unrest in April, the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns culminated in the June 4 California contest won narrowly by the New York senator. Kennedy, however, was assassinated after his California victory speech, and the antiwar movement within the Democratic Party was in disarray. McCarthy continued with his campaign, and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota attempted to rally disaffected Kennedy delegates. Most mainstream delegates to the Chicago convention, however, were committed to the nomination of Vice President Humphrey. As the protests and violence on the streets of Chicago near the convention drew increasing media attention, the rancor spilled over into the convention floor. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, delivering a nominating speech for Senator McGovern, accused Chicago Mayor Richard Daley of employing “Gestapo tactics,” and Daley seemingly replied with an ethnic slur. Nevertheless, the delegates did nominate Humphrey, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate, to face Republican nominee Richard Nixon in the 1968 general election. Although Humphrey did narrow the gap with Nixon in the weeks preceding the election, he never seemed to fully recover from the images of violence and chaos surrounding the Democratic Convention. Humphrey gained 191 electoral votes to Nixon’s 301, while former Alabama governor George Wallace, running on the American Independent Party ticket, carried five states with 46 electoral votes. The violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago inadvertently played an important role in electing Nixon, with his law-and-order platform, to the presidency. —Ron Briley

Further Reading Farber, David. Chicago ’68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Gould, Lewis L. 1968: The Election that Changed America. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. White, Theodore H. The Making of the President, 1968. New York: Antheneum, 1969.

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Hayden, Tom (1939–) Born on December 11, 1939, Tom Hayden is a political activist noted for his opposition to the Vietnam War. As an organizer for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he was indicted as a member of the Chicago Seven and accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His conviction was overturned on appeal, and Hayden resumed his career as an activist, writer, and progressive politician. Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan, and as a student at the University of Michigan, he served as editor of the Michigan Daily. Disenchanted with the conservatism of the National Student Association, Hayden helped establish a more activist student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Hayden served as president of SDS from 1962 to 1963, and at a United Auto Workers retreat, he authored the SDS manifesto, The Port Huron Statement. Denouncing racism, militarism, and poverty within the United States, Hayden’s document called for participatory democracy to heal the nation’s ills. From 1964 to 1968, Hayden worked with impoverished residents of Newark, New Jersey, as an organizer for the Newark Community Union Project. In 1967, Newark suffered racial unrest in which 26 people died, and white authorities attempted to blame “outside agitators” such as Hayden for the violence. In response to these accusations, Hayden penned Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (1978). Hayden was also noted for his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1965 and 1967, he made trips to North Vietnam as a peace activist, but Hayden was denounced as a traitor by the war’s supporters. After returning from his second trip to Hanoi, Hayden worked with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, recruiting protesters for the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Hayden believes that Chicago mayor Richard Daley was “hoodwinked” by the FBI into believing thousands of Yippies were going to engage in public sexual acts and place drugs in the city’s water supply. On the evening of August 28, when Hubert Humphrey was to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, violence intensified after a teenager attempted to lower the American flag at Grant Park and police began to brutally beat protesters. Wearing a fake beard to move freely around the city, Hayden ended up skirmishing with police in the Hilton Hotel’s Haymarket Lounge. Indicted on conspiracy charges for his role in inciting violence at the convention, Hayden preferred a trial strategy that would allow the defendants to articulate their political views on issues such as the Vietnam War. Instead, the trial of the Chicago Seven was characterized by the guerrilla theater tactics of Abbie

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Hoffman. Hayden and four other defendants were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison along with contempt charges. The convictions, however, were reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Following the trial of the Chicago Seven, Hayden remained in the public eye, accompanying actress Jane Fonda on a controversial 1972 journey to North Vietnam. The next year Hayden married Fonda, and the couple had one child before divorcing in 1990. Taking up residence in California in the late 1970s, Hayden forged a career as a progressive activist and politician. Hayden and Fonda formed the Campaign for Economic Democracy, promoting solar energy, environmental initiatives, and antipoverty measures on the state level. In 1982, Hayden was elected to the California state assembly, serving for 10 years before winning election to the California state senate in 1992. After eight years in the senate and failure to win statewide contests for governor and the U.S. Senate, Hayden now teaches at Occidental and Pitzer Colleges, writes, and promotes progressive political causes. Forty years after the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, Hayden concluded that the violence in the streets was avoidable. According to Hayden, “It takes two for a riot to occur. And if it wasn’t for the FBI advisers, Chicago ’68 would not have happened.” —Ron Briley

Further Reading Condon, Frank, Ron Sossi, and Tom Hayden. Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008. Hayden, Tom. Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. New York: Random House, 1967. Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1988. Hayden, Tom. Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008. Lynd, Staughton, and Tom Hayden. The Other Side. New York: New American Library, 1967.

Hoffman, Abbie (1936–1989) Born on November 30, 1936, Abbott Howard “Abbie” Hoffman was a 1960s political and cultural activist indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During the conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, Hoffman earned the ire of Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation)

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for mocking the proceedings. Hoffman’s conviction and contempt-of-court citations were overturned on appeal, and he continued to be a thorn in the side of the political establishment during the 1970s and 1980s. Hoffman was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Worcester, Massachusetts. His father was the owner of a medical supply company, and his son worked as a salesman for the business. Although he encountered some disciplinary problems as a high school student, Hoffman was accepted at Brandeis University, from which he graduated with a psychology degree in 1959. After a year of graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley, Hoffman worked as a staff psychologist at the Worcester State Hospital and served as a pharmaceutical drug salesman. By the mid-1960s, Hoffman was becoming politically active. He organized the first demonstration in Worcester against the Vietnam War, and he helped establish retail outlets for craft products from the Mississippi Poor People’s Corporation. Spending more of his time as a political activist, Hoffman was fired from his pharmaceutical position and moved to New York City, where he hoped to promote a union between cultural youth rebels and New Left political activists. To implement his plan, Hoffman employed political theater, seeking media attention for his antics. In August 1967, for example, Hoffman wanted to highlight the greed at the heart of capitalism. While standing on the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, the rebel tossed dollar bills on the floor of the stock exchange and induced stockbrokers to abandon their responsibilities and scamper after the money. Hoffman also led an antiwar protest late that fall at the Pentagon in which he urged demonstrators to surround the building, exorcise its war demons, and end the Vietnam War through songs and chants. In 1968, Hoffman joined with fellow activist Jerry Rubin to form the Youth International Party or Yippies. Hoffman planned a “Festival of Life” for the Chicago Democratic National Convention, which would contrast the playful values of the counterculture with the militaristic designs of the Johnson administration. Vowing to make the Democratic Convention a “political circus,” Hoffman announced plans for public love-ins and lacing the Chicago water supply with LSD. Chicago mayor Richard Daley responded to Hoffman’s theatrics by refusing to allow the Yippies to hold their “Festival of Life” in Lincoln Park and proclaiming an 11:00 p.m. curfew for city parks. Police efforts to disperse the protesters led to violence on the streets of Chicago, which was later declared a “police riot” by the Walker Commission formed to investigate the origins of the disturbances. In March 1969, Hoffman and seven other defendants were indicted for inciting riots at the convention. While some defendants preferred a more serious defense, Hoffman used the trial for revolutionary theater, poking fun at the judge and proceedings. Hoffman performed handstands in court and mocked the process by

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appearing in judicial robes and American flag shirts. Hoffman was found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot and was sentenced to five years in prison. Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced him to an additional eight months for contempt of court. The convictions were overturned on appeal. The Chicago conspiracy trial made Hoffman a national figure who was a sought-after speaker on college campuses. He continued to be a cultural rebel and protested the Vietnam War, but he urged demonstrators to take a more moderate stance at the 1972 Democratic Convention due to the antiwar polices of nominee George McGovern. Arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover policeman in the summer of 1973, Hoffman went underground rather than face incarceration. Using the pseudonym Barry Freed, Hoffman settled in the Thousand Islands of New York, where he became a prominent environmentalist. Fearing that his true identity would be revealed, Hoffman surrendered to authorities in September 1980. After serving less than a year of jail time, Hoffman resumed his career as a political activist. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and his death on April 12, 1989, at his home in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania, was ruled a suicide. —Ron Briley

Further Reading Hoffman, Abbie. The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. Hoffman, Abbie. Revolution for the Hell of It. New York: Pocket Books, 1970. Jezer, Marty. Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Raskin, Jonah. For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe) The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe) was an antiwar organization that called for massive demonstrations at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention to protest the Vietnam policies of President Lyndon Johnson. Although the Mobe’s appeal attracted approximately 10,000 protesters, far below the anticipated number of participants, the efforts of Chicago police to impose curfews in city parks led to violence in the streets and the indictment of Mobe leaders David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis for inciting a riot.

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The Mobe was a loose coalition of groups opposed to the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. During the summer of 1966, the Inter-University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, who organized the first campus teach-ins on Vietnam in 1965, called for a national conference of antiwar groups to meet in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 10 and 11. At this meeting, the November 8th Mobilization Committee was created to focus attention on the fall elections and encourage support for antiwar candidates. A. J. Muste was the founding chairman, coining the Mobe’s motto, “What are we waiting for?” After the 1966 fall election, the November 8th Mobilization Committee morphed into the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, undertaking a variety of actions to protest the war as well as addressing other social causes such as racial injustice. Accordingly, the Mobe supported draft resistance and black liberation, sent a delegation to meet with President Lyndon Johnson, and organized protest rallies, which culminated in the April 15, 1967, massive demonstrations in New York City and San Francisco. In New York City, 400,000 protesters gathered at Central Park and, urged on by speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. and Benjamin Spock, marched to the United Nations. Following the success of these spring rallies, the organization changed its name to the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. On October 21, 1967, the Mobe gathered 150,000 demonstrators in Washington, D.C., to “confront the War makers.” The crowd marched on the Pentagon, where they were met by a heavy police and military presence and numerous arrests followed. Activist Abbie Hoffman attempted to provide some levity with his efforts to end the war by levitating the Pentagon. Frustrated by the war’s persistence, the Mobe moved from “dissent to resistance” in 1968, appealing for large-scale demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Following the confrontation between police and protesters in Chicago, Mobe leaders David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis were indicted for inciting a riot. During the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, these Mobe leaders were convicted of crossing state lines to foment a riot, but these convictions were overturned on appeal. After the violence in the streets of Chicago, the Mobe’s influence seemed to wane. Finding none of the major presidential candidates satisfactory on the war, the Mobe proclaimed a boycott of the 1968 election. Following the narrow victory of Richard Nixon, the Mobe organized a protest of his inauguration, which attracted only 10,000 demonstrators. In the summer of 1969, elements of the Mobe reorganized as the new Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The following year, this group split into the National Peace Action Coalition and the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. Although the Mobe’s impact declined after the August days of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the

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organization drew attention and support to the causes of black liberation and ending the Vietnam War. —Ron Briley

Further Reading DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Peace Now: American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Zaroulis, Nancy, and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984.

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Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971) The most visible Indian protest action of the late 1960s took place when a group of Indians from many tribes occupied the infamous former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, remaining on the island for almost 19 months. The inauguration of Richard Nixon in 1969 was greeted with some concern by Indians, who had long-standing concerns about the Republican Party, as they had whole heartedly supported the disastrous policy of “termination”—the idea that even after the long history of broken treaties and promises, the federal government owed nothing more to American Indian tribes, and that they should simply leave their own distinct cultures behind and assimilate into white American society. The implementation of termination had resulted in the federal government unilaterally severing the treaty rights of several tribes. Many, however, were pleasantly surprised that there appeared to be a genuine concern in the Nixon administration in correcting the wrongs suffered by Indian people, and good feelings for much of the year after the new administration took office. However, all was not well (nor had it ever been) in Indian Country. Reservations were in many ways the last bastions of American Indian cultures, but they were also places of extreme poverty and destitution. The median family income for American Indians was approximately $1,500 per year, less than a quarter of the national average. American Indian life expectancy was a full 21 years shorter than the national average. By late 1969, the pressures to protest began to grow again, as young Indians watched the antiwar activities continue to escalate and saw the other social movements gain general support and credibility with the public. Indian issues did not garner the public attention that African American issues had, and native leaders began to strategize ways to gain the media spotlight that had so effectively been used by other groups. In October, the San Francisco Indian Center burned down, and suddenly the Indians of the Bay Area were left without a place to meet. A group of Indians had been planning to capture Alcatraz Island, the abandoned former federal prison, since February, and now with the burning of the Indian center, the time seemed ripe. Nineteen Indian students from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, landed on Alcatraz and spent an anxious

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Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971) A group of Native Americans, members of Indians of All Tribes, occupy the former prison at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, on November 25, 1969. The occupation of the island drew public attention to the plight of Native Americans and resulted in significant changes in the federal government's policies, including improvements in education and health care. (AP/Wide World Photos)

night hiding from guards before being taken off the island. The incident received much local press, and called many local Indians to action. On November 19, almost 300 Indians, mostly college students, landed on Alcatraz, capturing one of the most famous islands in America and demanding that the government give them title to it. Federal authorities offered no resistance, and the caretaker on the island told them that the old warden’s house would be the most comfortable place for them to establish their headquarters. That night, a powwow was held to celebrate their successful landing and takeover of the island. Over the course of the next 18 months, some 5,600 American Indians and their allies would take part in the occupation, some for the entire duration, others for only a day. Although the movement stated that it was egalitarian and leaderless, the media bestowed the title of “leader of the occupation” on Richard Oakes, a Mohawk from the St. Regis Reservation in New York, who was a student at San Francisco State University. Oakes certainly was a central figure in the occupation as he did much of the planning of the takeover and was instrumental in writing the petition that stated what the occupiers wanted, but he was by no means the only voice in the occupation. He did, however, act as a spokesperson for the protesters in their communication with the media and federal government representatives. The federal government, for their part, did react by setting up a Coast Guard blockade to try to cut off the island from receiving either more occupiers or any supplies. Negotiators gave the occupiers 24 hours to leave, but the die had been cast. The protesters responded with a list of demands that the federal government

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give the Indian people the title to Alcatraz and build and operate an Indian cultural center and university on the island. The occupiers did their part to start the process, setting up a school where Indian music, dancing, and arts and crafts were taught. Though federal officials declined all of the occupiers’ demands, President Richard M. Nixon was hesitant to take action to remove the protesters, fearing a violent end to the occupation. So the occupation was allowed to continue and Indian people were allowed to come and go and deliver supplies. As their goal was to focus the national media spotlight on Indian issues, the occupiers undertook activities designed to keep the occupation in the news. One occupier, a veteran and college dropout from San Bernardino, California, named John Trudell, began to broadcast daily updates that were picked up by radio stations in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A newsletter was produced and distributed across the nation. Celebrities who cared about American Indian issues, such as Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Jonathan Winters, and the musical group Creedence Clearwater Revival visited the island. However, by late December, the demographics of the occupation began to change. Many of the original occupiers, who were college students, left the island to return to school for the beginning of the semester. The people who replaced them were older in general and less idealistic than the youth of the 1960s. Some of the occupiers were growing resentful of the primary role that Richard Oakes played in the media covering the occupation. To top it all off, tragedy struck when Oakes’s 13-year-old stepdaughter accidentally fell three stories to her death in early January. Oakes and his family left Alcatraz shortly thereafter, and his leadership was missed. By May 1970, the federal government cut all electrical power and water to the island to force an end to the standoff. The media, which had been instrumental in helping to create positive public images of the occupiers, began to change their tone as the year wore on. In June, a fire destroyed the warden’s quarters, and occupiers and the government blamed each other. The next month, armed occupiers met a Coast Guard crew sent to restore the island’s lighthouse and foghorn, and an arrow struck a harbor tour boat, leading many to the opinion that the occupation was becoming increasingly violent. Though the occupation would continue for nearly another year, the numbers of Indians on Alcatraz dwindled. By June 11, 1971, when a force of federal marshals, FBI agents, and Coast Guard sailors arrived to remove the occupiers, only 15 remained (five of whom were children), and were in no position to resist. Although the Nixon administration did not directly give in to any of the occupiers’ demands, the Alcatraz occupation was important, as it brought public attention to Indian issues and spurred many other such actions by Indians across the country. Many groups demanded the return of tribal lands. Groups held sit-ins at BIA offices in Littleton, Colorado; Chicago; and Cleveland. In 1970, a group of

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Indians from different tribes reclaimed Mount Rushmore, which is located in the Black Hills, one of the holiest places to the Sioux tribes. When interviewed long after the occupation, Bradley H. Patterson Jr., a senior aide to Nixon, directly correlated many of the changes in American Indian policy to Alcatraz, such as the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo Indians, the return of Mount Adams to the Yakama nation, the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, and the final ending of the federal policy of Termination. —Steven L. Danver See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972);Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading Blue Cloud, Peter. Alcatraz Is Not an Island. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1972. Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Kotlowski, Dean J. “Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and Beyond: The Nixon and Ford Administration’s Respond to Native American Protest.” Pacific Historical Review 72, no.2 (2003): 201–227.

Indians of All Tribes After the burning down of the San Francisco Indian Center in October 1969, American Indians in the Bay Area were left without a central place to meet and maintain native identity. Like most American cities, the San Francisco Bay Area had an extremely diverse native population, drawn from peoples and reservations across the country, many of whom had relocated to America’s urban centers as a result of the federal government’s relocation program during the 1950s. Hearing about the protests of the National Indian Youth Council against treaty violations in the area of native fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest and the activities of the nascent American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, Indians in the Bay Area decided to take action on another treaty-related matter: the land that had been taken from native people since the first arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Some in the Bay Area Native American community had been talking about taking Alcatraz Island as a symbol of the land taken from native peoples since early in the year. A disparate group made up of Indians from across the nation, the moniker Indians of All Tribes seemed to fit both the makeup of the group and the large aims of their protest. As Alcatraz occupier Peter Blue Cloud (Mohawk) put it: Indians of all tribes, who were we? From reservations and urban settlements, government boarding schools, street gangs or giant cities, plains, and desert, horse people, sheep herders, fishermen of the coastal rivers, hunters of the frozen north, we had come. Never before had the dream of Indian unity been put into reality in such a sudden way as at Alcatraz. (Johnson 1996, 117) On November 9, 1969, 75 members of the group landed on Alcatraz, most of them leaving quickly, with 14 of them spending an anxious night eluding guards before being removed. However, 11 days later, Indians of All Tribes would return in force. Led by Richard Oakes, 79 members of the group laid claim to the island and began a 20-month occupation that would galvanize the Red Power movement nationwide. Once they arrived on the Island, Indians of All Tribes issued their “Proclamation to the Great White Father,” in which they detailed their goal of purchasing Alcatraz “for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set down by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.” They then detailed 10 ways in which Alcatraz was a suitable reservation, by the standard practiced by the federal government, in that: 1. It is isolated from modern facilities and without adequate means of transportation. 2. It has no fresh running water.

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3. It has no adequate sanitation facilities. 4. There are no oil or mineral rights. 5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great. 6. There is no health care facility. 7. The soil is rocky and non-productive, and the land does not support game. 8. There are no educational facilities. 9. The population has always exceeded the land base. 10. The population has always been held prisoners and kept dependent upon others (Johnson 1996, 54). The cohesiveness of the group was initially very strong; however, when many of the college-aged activists began to leave the island to return to school, they were replaced by urban poor Indian people, and the unity of the group suffered. This point became clear when American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr. (Sioux) went to Alcatraz in the spring of 1970 to hold a national urban Indian conference, in an effort to tie the occupation to some of the larger themes facing American Indians nationwide. The meeting was immediately disrupted by a violent argument between two of the occupiers (it turned out they were husband and wife) that was indicative of the mood on the island, as different factions had split Indians of All Tribes into those supporting and those opposing Oakes (Johnson, Nagel, and Champagne 1997, 48–49). Although the unity of the group was disintegrating, the occupation continued, as the point of the occupation was more important than the existence of any single group. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Indians of All Tribes with Peter Blue Cloud, ed. Alcatraz Is Not an Island. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1972. Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Johnson, Troy R., Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Oakes, Richard (1942–1972) Born on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York in 1942, Richard Oakes was forced to leave his home at the age of 16 due to the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Becoming a high steel worker, an occupation traditionally

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filled by Mohawks, Oakes arrived in San Francisco during the early 1960s. Marrying a woman of the Pomo nation and enrolling in the American Indian Studies program at San Francisco State University, Oakes was in the right place at the right time to become an integral part of the nascent Red Power movement. By the late 1960s, the San Francisco Bay Area had become the epicenter for political activism, and the San Francisco Indian Center was not only a community center and a place for newly arrived Indian people to find community, but a place where plans were being laid for action to bring American Indian issues to the public’s attention. Adam Fortunate Eagle and others were planning a protest against federal Indian policy, including the takeover of Indian lands and suppression of Indian cultures. However, On October 10, 1969, the San Francisco Indian Center burned down. People’s discontent began to boil over. At a Halloween party later that month, Fortunate Eagle and Oakes met, and the seeds of the Alcatraz occupation were sown. Oakes rallied students from San Francisco State, the University of California, Berkeley, and even the University of California, Los Angeles, which had a very active American Indian Studies Center. After their first abortive attempt at taking the island on November 9, a determined group of Indian college students and activists arrived on Alcatraz at about 2:00 in the morning on November 20. They would occupy the island for nearly 20 months. Although the protesters decided to avoid any hierarchies, Oakes was quickly declared the “chief” of Alcatraz by the media, due to his good looks, charisma, and oratorical gifts. It was Oakes who famously declared what would become the slogan for the occupation: “We Hold the Rock!” Although not technically in charge, Oakes played a large part in organizing the protesters for a long occupation. However, Oakes was not to stay on Alcatraz for the entire occupation. On January 3, 1970, only two and a half months in to the occupation, Oakes’ 13-year-old stepdaughter fell three stories to her death inside the former warden’s residence that had become the headquarters of the occupation. Oakes and his family left Alcatraz for good a few days later, and power struggles between the protesters intensified without his uniting voice. Oakes himself was only to live another two years, as he was shot and killed in Santa Clara County, California by Michael Morgan, a YMCA camp manager on September 20, 1972. Morgan was acquitted for the killing, claiming that he shot in self-defense when Oakes attacked him, but many of Oakes’s friends have maintained that the shooting was politically motivated by Morgan’s opposition to Oakes’s positions on Indian rights issues. —Steven L. Danver

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Further Reading George-Kanentiio, Doug. “Richard Oakes the Mohawk and his Path to Alcatraz Island.” News from Indian Country, January 2010. Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Johnson, Troy R., Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Termination During the 1950s through the early 1960s, the centerpiece of federal American Indian policy was the idea of termination: the ending of the special relationship between the United States and its American Indian nations. Included in that was the dismantling of Indian reservations into individual land parcels, the ending of tribal governments, and the inclusion of all American Indians into the American body politic as citizens. Proponents of termination, such as Utah senator Arthur V. Watkins, argued that tribal communities held Indians back from economic success and integration into the American “melting pot.” A large part of the strategy of termination was the relocation, sometimes forced, of American Indian peoples to America’s urban centers, such as San Francisco. This relocation policy is largely responsible for the need that San Francisco’s Native American community had for the San Francisco Indian Center, which helped nearly 30,000 newly arrived Indians to find work and community. It was this idea of moving to urban areas to find work that drove Richard Oakes to leave the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York and find work in America’s growing cities. Although Watkins firmly believed that termination was the best course of action for the future of American Indians, he was either not in touch with or did not care about how Indian people themselves felt. Termination was implemented on three reservations, and the results were disastrous. During 1953–1964, 109 tribes faced termination, and over one and a quarter million acres of tribal land lost its protected status. Not only that, but tribal governments lost authority, and the economic and cultural lives of the tribes were devastated. To the protesters who took over Alcatraz Island in 1969, termination was just another imposed policy from the federal government that did nothing but increase the hardships that their people faced. Tribal people were subject to state laws and taxes, and the provisions of the treaties that their ancestors had negotiated with the federal government were either ignored or repealed outright. Some tribes filed suit

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in federal court, and although the termination policy officially ended in 1964, it took until 1980 for the U.S. Supreme Court to fully restore the treaty rights that had been lost. For many involved with both Alcatraz and other Red Power groups like the American Indian Movement, termination was the policy that formed the context into which they expressed their discontent. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Fixico, Donald. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Philp, Kenneth. Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to SelfDetermination, 1933–1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Trudell, John (1946–) Whereas Richard Oakes might have been the most visible leader in the first months after the takeover of Alcatraz Island, John Trudell would become known as the “voice of Alcatraz.” Born on February 15, 1946, Trudell grew up in the area in and around the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. He served in the U.S. Navy during the early 1960s and came west to attend college in San Bernardino, California, before dropping out in 1969. Not among those who began the occupation in November, Trudell headed north as soon as he heard about the takeover. Were it not for Trudell, Alcatraz might only have made a small impression on the American public, remaining a significant story only in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trudell’s contribution was significant, in that the main way the occupiers sought to communicate with the public was through a series of recordings known as “Radio Free Alcatraz” that were first broadcast by sympathetic radio stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles before being carried across the nation and throughout Indian Country. His broadcasts not only contained messages and demands of the occupiers, but also interviews with other protesters and descriptions of daily life on Alcatraz. The broadcasts not only brought notoriety, but also donations of food and money from ordinary people and celebrities, such as the rock groups Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead. After Richard Oakes left following the death of his stepdaughter, Trudell’s role became more prominent. When talks between the occupiers and the federal government about ending the occupation began in 1970, Trudell was one of the

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main negotiators. Even the birth of his son, Wovoka, the only child born on the island during the occupation, was not without significance, as Trudell announced the birth on a Radio Free Alcatraz broadcast, calling him “the first free Indian born in the past 500 years, because the government is not going to get him” (“Radio Free Alcatraz” broadcast, July 1970). Among the last group of Indians to be removed from Alcatraz in 1971, Trudell remained involved in the Red Power movement, serving as chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM) from 1973 until 1979. After his tenure with AIM, Trudell’s oratory skills took an artistic turn, as he became a successful musician and poet, always remaining true to the roots of his activism, which he said were awakened by Alcatraz. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Johnson, Troy R., Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Winton, Ben. “Alcatraz, Indian Land.” Native Peoples Magazine, Fall 1999.

The Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father and His People, November 1969 This statement, issued shortly after the takeover of Alcatraz Island on November 20, 1969, details the plans the “Indians of All Tribes” had for the island, to establish American Indian spiritual, educational, and ecological institutions, and their chief demand, that the United States government recognize American Indian peoples’ claim to the island in partial compensation for the land taken from them. Fellow citizens, we are asking you to join with us in our attempt to better the lives of all Indian people. We are on Alcatraz Island to make known to the world that we have a right to use our land for our own benefit. In a proclamation of November 20, 1969, we told the government of the United States that we are here “to create a meaningful use for our Great Spirit’s Land.” We, the native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years

Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971) ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these 16 acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acres is greater than the $0.47 per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their lands. We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the land for their own to be held in trust . . . by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs . . . in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our lifeways in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men. We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian reservation, as determined by the white man’s own standards. By this, we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations in that: 1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation. 2. It has no fresh running water. 3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities. 4. There are no oil or mineral rights. 5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great. 6. There are no health-care facilities. 7. The soil is rocky and non-productive, and the land does not support game. 8. There are no educational facilities. 9. The population has always exceeded the land base. 10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others. Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians. What use will we make of this land? Since the San Francisco Indian Center burned down, there is no place for Indians to assemble and carry on tribal life here in the white man’s city. Therefore, we plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions: 1. A Center for Native American Studies will be developed which will educate them to the skills and knowledge relevant to improve the lives and spirits of all Indian peoples. Attached to this center will be travelling universities, managed by Indians, which will go to the Indian Reservations, learning those necessary and relevant materials now about.

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Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971) 2. An American Indian Spiritual Center, which will practice our ancient tribal religious and sacred healing ceremonies. Our cultural arts will be featured and our young people trained in music, dance, and healing rituals. 3. An Indian Center of Ecology, which will train and support our young people in scientific research and practice to restore our lands and waters to their pure and natural state. We will work to de-pollute the air and waters of the Bay Area. We will seek to restore fish and animal life to the area and to revitalize sea-life which has been threatened by the white man’s way. We will set up facilities to desalt sea water for human benefit. 4. A Great Indian Training School will be developed to teach our people how to make a living in the world, improve our standard of living, and to end hunger and unemployment among all our people. This training school will include a center for Indian arts and crafts, and an Indian restaurant serving native foods, which will restore Indian culinary arts. This center will display Indian arts and offer Indian foods to the public, so that all may know of the beauty and spirit of the traditional Indian ways. Some of the present buildings will be taken over to develop an American Indian Museum which will depict our native food and other cultural contributions we have given to the world. Another part of the museum will present some of the things the white man has given to the Indians in return for the land and life he took: disease, alcohol, poverty, and cultural decimation (as symbolized by old tin cans, barbed wire, rubber tires, plastic containers, etc.). Part of the museum will remain a dungeon to symbolize both those Indian captives who were incarcerated for challenging white authority and those who were imprisoned on reservations. The museum will show the noble and tragic events of Indian history, including the broken treaties, the documentary of the Trail of Tears, the Massacre of Wounded Knee, as well as the victory over Yellow-Hair Custer and his army. In the name of all Indians, therefore, we reclaim this island for our Indian nations, for all these reasons. We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers run and the sun shall shine. We hold the rock! Source: Center for World Indigenous Studies, http://cwis.org/fwdp/Americas/ alcatraz.htm (accessed July 21, 2010).

Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s) The feminist movement sought to obtain social equality for women. Feminism is the idea that the structure and institutions of society need to be modified to enable women to achieve equality with men. The implication behind this belief is that men and women have equal abilities. The second feminist wave crested in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the first wave, which peaked in 1920, it lacked the single unifying theme of suffrage. Historians still debate such fundamental factors as the second wave’s beginning and end, goals and philosophy, activities and major milestones, and successes and failures. Some scholars find the origins of the women’s movement in World War II. This view holds that labor force participation rates of married women led to changes in women’s roles in society. Other historians suggest that a multitude of reasons sparked the second wave. The earlier women’s rights movement that began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 focused on legal rights, such as the right to vote and the right to own property. With those goals achieved by 1920, the women’s movement entered an era of doldrums. The organizations that had focused on the suffrage battle disbanded, and activist women scattered into a range of other organizations with goals that generally did not expressly include the promotion of women’s rights. Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, but she could find few individuals willing to promote it outside of her small association. Meanwhile, women continued to suffer from oppression. Some women who married, notably teachers, were automatically dismissed from their jobs. In the Great Depression, women lost jobs to men because they were viewed as only earning “pin money,” whereas men had families to support. While women were encouraged for the first time by the government to get into the workforce during World War II, they were also pressured to get out of the workforce at the war’s end to make room for men. Throughout the decades, employed women did not make as much money as men in the same jobs because their efforts were not valued as much. Women, though, rarely held the same jobs as men. Most educated women became secretaries, teachers, or nurses because they were not welcomed into other jobs such as lawyer, doctor, or business leader. The “cult” of

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domesticity, a dominant American idea since the early 19th century, continued to stress that women were temperamentally suited to be nurturing and lacked the toughness to succeed in the worlds of business and politics. Women who sought outside employment were made to feel guilty about abandoning their families. Society at large expected a woman to find all of her fulfillment through marriage and motherhood. The media, especially women’s magazines, emphasized that a woman’s real job involved pleasing her husband and raising children. Her needs did not count. As one example of this type of thinking, the Eternal Woman ideology, which identified the ideal Catholic woman as pious and suffering, dominated the American Catholic popular and clerical imagination in the 1950s and 1960s. The man led the family, and the woman stood behind him. Domestic violence shelters did not exist, because a man’s home was his castle and he could do what he pleased within it. Women could not obtain loans from banks without a man cosigning. Many universities had graduate school quotas for women because women would only become wives and mothers, thereby wasting their education. Girls had few opportunities to play sports. They could become cheerleaders, a socially acceptable activity because it involved being supportive of male athletes, but most high schools did not offer anything more. In every avenue, women received the message that they were second-rate to men. In the 1960s, large numbers of women protested against this diminished status.

The Branches of Feminism The feminist movement that burst into full flower in the 1960s has three branches. The first section consists of women who did not expressly identify as political. By working through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in women’s organizations to achieve narrow goals, these activists helped set the stage for the rise of feminism. They acted as a bridge between militant feminists and more conservative women, thereby helping to make feminism socially acceptable. The liberal wing of the feminist movement is composed of women who wanted to work through existing political channels to achieve change. The radical wing viewed the existing political structures as intrinsically hostile to women’s concerns. They sought to establish new ways of governing, doing business, and living. Most of the feminist organizations have been predominantly white and middle class, with the result that some feminists have struggled to understand the impact of racism and class oppression. Black feminism is different from white feminism in that it emphasizes the freedom of people of color. African American feminists stress the interactive effects of race, sex, and class as well as the error of analyzing the oppression of women in isolation from their race. This African American strain of feminism has been labeled “womanism” by author Alice Walker and others. In her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother’s

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Gardens, Walker coined the term from the folk expression, “You are acting womanish.” The term applies to women who behave in a bold and responsible way to promote the liberation of black people and the rest of humanity. Black women generally are more supportive of feminist issues than white women but have been hesitant to embrace a feminist movement that defines the experience of white, middle-class women as universal. They have also noted that feminism seems to be anti-male and that, as black women, they have more in common with black men than white women.

The Rise of Feminism The birth of the feminist movement is typically identified with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan, a labor journalist who had graduated from Smith College, lost her job in 1952 because she was pregnant with her second child. Friedan’s experiences of sex-based discrimination combined in 1957 to lay the groundwork for The Feminine Mystique. Friedan felt guilty that she had not lived up to the glorious future forecast for her, and she sought a reason as to why so many of the best and brightest women of her generation felt dissatisfied. She gathered masses of information and realized that she had been asking the wrong question. Rather than disprove the popular notion that education had failed to train women for lives as wives and mothers, Friedan now began to argue that domesticity did not suit all women. Friedan provided a coherent explanation for the routine belittlement that women had experienced all their lives. She argued that the feminine mystique required women to renounce their brains and deny their senses, retreat to a childlike state, and immolate themselves on the altar of their family’s needs to find satisfaction in life. The book became an instant best-seller. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan had argued that cultural attitudes were ephemeral and that women could be a force for change. Partly as a result of the book, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received a flood of job discrimination complaints from women. The EEOC simply ignored women’s problems, continuing to permit such practices as categorizing help wanted advertisements by sex. Activists planning a civil rights organization for women invited Friedan to the 1966 conference of state women’s commissions. Friedan gave the most significant feminist group of the latter part of the 20th century its name when she described the fledgling organization’s goals as “to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society—now, equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men.” Membership of the new National Organization for Women (NOW) reached 1,200 by the end of its first year, in 1966.

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The Liberal Wing NOW became the largest organization in the liberal wing of the feminist movement. Typical of liberal women’s groups, it focused on working within the system to change laws to benefit women. In 1968, much to the consternation of its conservative members, NOW called for the reform of laws restricting abortion and supported the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. A number of members left NOW in response to these demands, including the women who would establish the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). The Ohio-based organization focused on legal and economic issues, especially in the areas of employment and education. WEAL sought to achieve success through legislation and lobbying rather than more direct pressure tactics such as picketing. Lacking a large membership, WEAL could not employ tactics that required much grassroots participation. By 1972, WEAL had dropped its opposition to a woman’s right to choose abortion and had declared itself in favor of “responsible rebellion.” Other organizations that formed part of this liberal wing include the National Woman’s Party (NWP), National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), the Combahee River Collective, the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), and the Older Women’s League (OWL). The NWP is the only feminist organization of the 1960s with strong ties to the feminists of the first wave. Alice Paul, a suffrage leader, founded the group to continue feminist activities after suffrage had been won. It soon became a one-issue organization, with the Equal Rights Amendment as that issue. The other liberal feminist groups were much larger and much stronger than the tiny NWP and its elderly members. NBFO, begun in 1973, could never escape the shadow of white women. The members tried to appease black women as well as white women, and the organization soon fell apart. Some of the members formed the Combahee River Collective in 1974. The collective argued that the major systems of oppression were interlocking but did not embrace separatism. The NWPC started in 1971 when 300 women met in Washington, D.C., to mobilize the political power of women. The group addressed women’s concerns in every state and also promoted women for political offices. Like WEAL, OWL grew out of NOW. Tish Sommers, a mother, housewife, and longtime civil rights activist as well as a NOW member, found herself without any means of support upon her divorce in 1973. A no-fault divorce reform left many other longtime housewives, who lacked a traditional work history as well as few marketable skills, without financial support. Sommers formed a NOW task force called Older Women’s Liberation to link issues of aging with feminism. Older women were those over 30 years of age. Sommers, who coined the term “displaced homemaker,” used OWL to obtain job training and counseling for older women. Sommers founded the Older Women’s League in 1980. By the mid-1980s,

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OWL had succeeded in defining the discrimination faced by older housewives as a feminist issue.

The Radical Feminists Radical feminist organizations, which appeared about 1968 and died off around 1975, did not believe that the existing system could be perfected through political action. They saw the system as being inherently sexist. They aimed to expose this sexism by attacking the patriarchal perceptions at the heart of every relationship, be it work or family. To these feminists, no separation existed between the personal and the political. Radical organizations lacked a strong structure and banned men from membership, since men were the agents of oppression. The members were generally in their 20s, often younger than liberal feminists Many radicals were lesbian. The best known of the radical groups were the New York Radical Feminists, the Feminists, Redstockings, and WITCH. The New York Radical Feminists famously engaged in guerrilla theater. In 1968, they held a torchlight parade, the Burial of Traditional Womanhood as a means of protesting the Vietnam War. They viewed the submission of the traditional woman as supportive of the aggression of the soldier. Older, more traditional activists found the New York Radical Feminists to be insulting and bizarre, reflecting a generational clash. The Feminists, founded by Ti-Grace Atkinson after she denounced NOW, also specialized in guerrilla theater. Atkinson became a media star with her flair for phrases such as “Marriage means rape.” The Redstockings, based in New York City like many of the radical organizations, focused on abortion law reform. It held speak-outs in which women related tales of their illegal abortions. WITCH changed the meaning of its name to reflect whatever it chose to protest. As the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, it hexed Wall Street.

The Hidden Feminists When the feminist movement is defined, liberal and radical women’s groups are always acknowledged. However, feminists can sometimes be found in unexpected places. Members of long-established women’s groups helped sell feminism to a mainstream audience. These traditional women are the hidden feminists. Few members of the American Nurses Association (ANA), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), and Church Women United (CWU) in the 1950s and 1960s would have called themselves “feminists,” yet they acted to advance feminist goals. Other groups that comprised this traditional women’s wing would include long-standing and large women’s organizations such as the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the Women’s Division of the United

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Methodist Church, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. Members of these groups promoted greater opportunities for women and had been doing so for decades. They focused much of their attention outside of the traditional political arena in an era when women were effectively barred from positions of power within politics. By doing so, they paved the ground for the rise of the second women’s movement in the 1960s. Feminism did not crest out of nowhere. Before Friedan sat down at her typewriter, the women in these organizations articulated the reasons for their dissatisfaction and formulated plans to do something about the second-class status of women. The ANA, founded in 1896, viewed itself as a labor organization and not a women’s group. It sought to better the working conditions and pay accorded to nurses. In the 20th century, the nursing profession happened to consist almost entirely of women. The ANA discovered that it had to boost the status of women before it could boost working conditions and pay for women workers. It began to work along these lines in the 1940s and 1950s. The AAUW, begun in 1881, focused on educating women and helping women to make use of their education. To fight against the perception that women’s brains were second-rate, the AAUW had to better the social position of women. AKA, an African American sorority founded in 1909, fought sexism to uplift the race with the members realizing that men alone could not effect change. (Women in African American sororities continue to remain highly active in the organizations long after college graduation, unlike their white counterparts. Black sororities have long been part of the movements for social and political equality.) CWU, established in 1941, objected to women being only the spine of the church. They wanted to be the brain as well. Women raised much of the money to support the church, and women wanted a say in how the church operated. For all of these groups, the second-class status of women interfered with their ability to achieve their narrowly focused goals. By necessity, they embraced feminism.

Achievements of Feminism Liberal and traditional feminists promoted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as well as equal pay. They succeeded with the latter but failed spectacularly with the former. In 1945, feminists introduced a bill to protect women’s pay, but the measure gathered little support until the formation of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 1963. Pushed by Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, the CSW agreed that fairness demanded equal pay, and it endorsed the concept. Debate soon arose over whether equal pay meant that all workers at a particular job or a particular level would receive the same wages. Employers opposed the bill, and members of Congress voiced fears that equal pay would take jobs away from men, but

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opponents surrendered when they became convinced that the bill would be more symbolic than effective because of widespread job segregation by sex. The Equal Pay Act provides that employers may not pay workers of one sex at rates lower than they pay employees of the opposite sex employed in the same establishment for equal work. It applies to jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility and that are performed under similar working conditions. Exceptions to the law are permitted when sex differences in pay are due to seniority, merit, quantity or quality of production, or any factor other than sex. In 1972, the provisions of the law were extended to management and professional employees as well as to state and local government workers. Employers with fewer than 25 employees remain exempt. The NWP struggled to get other women’s organization to promote the ERA in the years since its 1923 creation. They refused to do so for fear that the legislation would wipe out protective labor laws that helped women. When Congress debated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the NWP persuaded Democratic representative Howard Smith of Virginia to sponsor an amendment adding “sex” to Title VII, the section prohibiting discrimination in employment. Smith, a conservative and no friend of progressive legislation, may have intended the amendment as a joke that would emphasize the silliness of civil rights and kill the bill. However, the act passed into law along with Title VII. Protective labor laws, which typically prohibited women from holding certain jobs and working nights, were abolished by the legislation. With the issue of protective legislation now moot, many women’s organizations came to support the ERA. NOW endorsed the amendment in 1967 and took the leadership of the ERA fight from the nearly extinct NWP. On March 22, 1972, the Senate approved the ERA by a vote of 84 to 8, and it was sent to the states. Six states ratified the amendment within two days, and by the middle of 1973, the amendment seemed well on its way to adoption with 30 of the needed 38 states having ratified. The debate over the ERA changed when passage appeared imminent as conservatives and religious fundamentalists launched a grassroots campaign aimed at all things deemed to be unnatural and immoral. Phyllis Schafly, founder of Stop ERA, portrayed the amendment as a threat to family values and traditional relationships between men and women. She saw women not as equals to men, but as a gendered class that enjoyed certain protections and differential treatment. When it seemed apparent that the ERA would not meet the 1979 deadline for ratification, supporters gained an extension from Congress until June 30, 1982. No other proposed amendment has ever received an extension. The exception did not help the ERA, and it died. The loss reflected the new challenges that faced feminism, specifically the rise of the New Right. Feminists moved on to other issues, such as reproductive rights.

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The Third Wave In the 1980s, the feminist movement shifted into the third wave as the daughters of second-wave activists came of age. Also identified as part of the post-feminist era, these women were more moderate than many of the second-wave activists and wary of being perceived as man-hating lesbians. They were prone to making statements such as, “I’m not a feminist but . . . ” The third wave grew up with the advances achieved by the second wave. They were accustomed to women in the workforce, had always enjoyed equal educational opportunities, and took for granted that they were the equals of men. They supported gender equality, planned to work after marriage, and expected men to play an equal part in family life. Many did not see the need for a movement and could not see a commonality with other women. The third wave of feminism lacked a clear identity. It tended to focus on narrow issues, such as date rape and sexual harassment through such grassroots organizations as Take Back the Night marches.

Conclusion Feminists of the second wave wanted a movement that embraced them and changed the world. When change did not occur—now—many felt betrayed. Feminists of all stripes were likely to turn on one another because of the damage they had experienced in the larger society and the disappointment that they felt when they discovered that feminism was not going to make their lives as decent or fulfilled as they had hoped. Women often could not live up to the high expectations that feminism encouraged. The entrance of women into the workforce also left many women with less time for activism. By the 1980s, many feminists dropped out of feminist organizations and either abandoned efforts to effect social change or joined groups that focused on narrow concerns such as reproductive freedom. —Caryn E. Neumann See also all entries under Women’s Movement (1870s); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968).

Further Reading Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: A Contemporary History. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Evans, Sara. The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vantage, 1980. Flammang, Janet A. Women’s Political Voice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s) Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. Hartmann, Susan M. From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Henold, Mary J. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999. Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Levine, Susan. Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.

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Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) The Equal Rights Amendment, popularly known as the ERA, sought to declare unconstitutional all laws that discriminated against women. But stiff opposition to the proposal, some of it coming from women themselves, undermined the effort. The idea for an Equal Rights Amendment had its origins in the 19th century. Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott convened a women’s conference in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. They issued a declaration calling for equal rights and the right to vote. But neither Anthony nor Mott lived to see either idea enacted into law. The 20th century saw a renewed effort by women to win the vote, propelled by two organizations; the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul. It was Paul’s movement that seemed to have the most influence over politicians, and by 1920 Congress and the states had agreed on the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Not content with simple voting rights, Paul and the National Woman’s Party went one step further. In 1923, she proposed an Equal Rights Amendment, which said that men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and

Women hold signs protesting against the ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment outside the White House, February 1977. (Library of Congress)

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every place subject to its jurisdiction. The idea stalled, however, blocked in part by some women who feared passage of such an amendment would undo labor laws that had protected women from exploitive treatment. During World War II, Paul rewrote the amendment to provide that equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. But progress remained stymied by labor leaders still intent on a double standard in the workplace and by social conservatives who perceived equal rights for women as a threat to the status quo. The decade of the 1960s, with its emphasis on civil rights for African Americans, proved to be the right climate for women to once again take up the cause of equal rights on their own behalf. Tying their fortunes with the civil rights movement, and now joined finally by organized labor, they posed a formidable coalition that convinced politicians that now was the time to act. The Equal Rights Amendment cleared the Congress in 1972, and headed out to the states for ratification. It was immediately ratified by 22 of the necessary 38 states. But over the next three years, only 12 states fell into line.

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Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford at the National Women's Conference in Houston on November 19, 1977. The event is considered by many historians to be a milestone in the feminist movement. The bipartisan attendance at the conference, and the presence of women like Carter and Ford, lent credibility to the movement. With such mainstream support, it became less of a stigma to be considered a feminist. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s)

Opposition to the ERA came from all sides. Some women claimed it would eliminate their right to be supported by their husbands, and might even expose them to combat. Social conservatives argued the ERA would serve to strengthen abortion laws and efforts to legalize homosexual and lesbian activities. Critics of big government warned that the federal government would use the ERA to extend its power over the states. In spite of the opposition, ERA supporters managed to put Indiana into the “yes” column in 1977, bringing the number of states supporting ratification to 35. But the amendment was still three states short, and despite an extension, which lengthened the customary time period from seven to 10 years, the ERA remained stalled at 35 when time expired on June 30, 1982. It remains to this day unfinished business. —John Morello

Further Reading Huckabee, David. Equal Rights Amendment: Ratification Issues. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 1996. Mansbridge, Jane. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Roe v. Wade (1973) Roe v. Wade was a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of a woman’s right to an abortion. The decision was a major development in the feminist movement, as it signaled the right of women to exercise more personal freedom, and to have that freedom protected by law. The case began in 1970, when Norma McCorvey, a woman in Texas who claimed she had been raped, sought an abortion. At the time, abortion was illegal in Texas, but McCorvey was seeking an injunction, or an exemption to the statute. Although a U.S. district court in Texas sympathized with her plight, it refused to set aside the law. The case arrived before the Supreme Court on appeal in October 1972, with McCorvey, now only identified as Jane Roe, as the plaintiff, suing Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, as the defendant. Lawyers for the state of Texas argued that the state law banning abortion was clear, and what McCorvey was asking for was illegal, while lawyers for McCorvey argued that it was a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy at any time of her choosing. The Supreme Court’s decision would be a repudiation of Texas law, yet a limited victory for women’s rights. Voting 7–2 and handing down its decision in January 1973, the Supreme Court sided with McCorvey. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion, while

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Justice Byron White and Chief Justice Warren Burger issued the dissenting opinion. Speaking for the majority, Blackmun argued that most antiabortion laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided, among other things, equal protection under the law, the right to due process, and the right to privacy. The ruling overturned state and federal antiabortion laws. However, the Court repudiated claims by women that they were entitled to an abortion at any time during pregnancy, holding that once the fetus reached a stage of viability, anywhere between 24 and 28 weeks, an abortion could be conducted only if the mother’s health was in jeopardy. Roe v. Wade has been hailed by many women as a red letter day for the feminist movement, as it established the right of women to exercise more personal freedom and guaranteed that freedom would be protected by the federal government. It also angered those who argued the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds by legislating from the bench and weighing in on social issues that were none of its business. Still, more than 30 years on, Roe v. Wade remains a landmark decision. —John Morello

Further Reading Garrow, David. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Weddington, Sarah. A Question of Choice. New York: Putnam, 1992.

Steinem, Gloria (1934–) Gloria Steinem, a journalist, is one of the most prominent leaders of the women’s liberation movement. In 1971, she founded and served as the first editor of Ms. magazine, a publication that helped to popularize feminism by reaching women who would not have picked up a movement newsletter or newspaper. Steinem came to feminism a bit later than many of her movement peers. Born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, to Leo Steinem and Ruth Nuneville Steinem, she is the granddaughter of Pauline Steinem. Steinem earned a BA from Smith College in 1956 and then accepted a fellowship to India partly to evade her fiance´. Returning to the United States, she became a journalist and gained considerable notice for going undercover as Bunny Marie in a 1963 expose´ of the Playboy Clubs. Steinem spent the 1960s opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the United Farm Workers, and working as a contributing editor to Glamour magazine. In 1969, as a political columnist for New York magazine, she attended a New York City abortion speak-out organized by the Redstockings. The experience proved

Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s) Gloria Steinem (1934–) is an American feminist, journalist, and spokeswoman for women's rights. She founded Ms. magazine in 1972 when this photo was taken. (Library of Congress)

to be awakening. Steinem later related that a light bulb clicked on, and she realized that she was a feminist. The experiences of losing assignments to less-experienced male colleagues, the jokes about frigid wives and dumb blondes, and all the other humiliations associated with being a woman suddenly made sense. She realized that she was not alone. Other writers, including Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe, warned Steinem that taking up the cudgel for women’s rights would compromise her reputation and handicap her career. She ignored them to devote the remainder of her life to writing, lecturing, and campaigning for women’s rights. After founding Ms. magazine, Steinem spent nearly two decades as its editor before stepping down in 1987 to serve as contributing editor. Steinem cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 and cofounded the Ms. Foundation for Women in 1972. Steinem spent 30 years on the board of the Women’s Action Alliance (now the Feminist Majority Fund) with the aim of electing women to political office. Active in the pro-choice movement since 1969, she served several terms as president of Voters for Choice after her initial 1979 election. The media appointed Steinem as a leader of the feminist movement in the early 1970s, though less photogenic women, such as Betty Friedan, had stronger feminist credentials. Steinem did have a flair for turning a phrase, famously noting that

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a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. She is also credited with coining “reproductive freedom” during a national abortion debate in 1972. As the face of the women’s movement, Steinem has received considerable abuse. Noting that the second feminist wave is about social equality and that consciousness cannot be changed without a backlash, she argues that feminism is not responsible for the breakdown of the family. To Steinem, feminism is about women refusing to become victims. —Caryn E. Neumann

Further Reading Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000. Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Attica Prison Riot (1971) During September 9–13, 1971, the inmates at the Attica State Penitentiary near Buffalo, New York, revolted against the prison authorities who kept them contained in substandard, overcrowded cell blocks and did not recognize even their most basic human rights. The maximum-security prison was operating at over 40 percent above its stated capacity. Inmates were allowed only one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper per month. Other factors motivated the inmates as well. Racial tensions had long been building between the all-white prison officials and the predominantly black and Puerto Rican prison population. The racial tensions that had permeated the nation for so long had an impact on the situation at Attica. Inmates saw the riots that had swept through America’s cities during the prior decade. When a seemingly typical prison yard incident took place, the simmering mixture of factors exploded. On September 9, 1971, a scuffle took place between two prisoners, not an unusual occurrence in a prison setting. The chain reaction of events that followed would turn that seemingly minor incident into a major revolt. Rumors spread among the inmates that the inmates were isolated and tortured by the guards. Sporadic confrontations between inmates and guards began to escalate. By the next day, these minor skirmishes combined to become a revolt when over 1,000 inmates left their cells, overpowered the guards, armed themselves with chains, pipes, and baseball bats, and took over the prison’s nerve center. State police arrived, charged with retaking the prison and restoring order, but by that time, the inmates had set several buildings ablaze and had taken 40 prison officials hostage. What made the Attica Riot more than just a typical prison riot were the demands that the inmates made. Rather than seeking to leave the prison, they sought what many other revolts throughout history had sought. They wanted better living conditions in the prison, which they argued would only improve if the prison’s warden were removed and the federal government took over operation of the prison. The warden, the inmates argued, ran a racist regime that systematically brutalized the inmates. Often, the deaths of inmates at the hands of guards were disregarded, and little or no action was taken. They saw their own situation as emblematic of the situation faced by inmates nationwide, and viewed their demands as setting an example for actions that could be taken to insure changes in other facilities.

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For the next three days, a stalemate ensued, with inmates talking past state officials who were in no mind to compromise. By Sunday, the inmates called on New York governor (and three-time presidential hopeful and future vice president) Nelson Rockefeller to come to the prison and take a direct role in negotiations about the issues that concerned the inmates. Largely blaming him for the conditions that led to the uprising, inmates demanded that the governor meet with them face to face to avert catastrophe. Outside observers in the press as well as state government officials such as Commissioner of Correctional Services Russell Oswald agreed. However, Rockefeller would not come to the meeting. With no progress being made toward a solution, Rockefeller made a momentous decision on Monday morning. He authorized the state police and the National Guard to retake the prison by force, and the operation began with tear gas being fired into the prison yard at 9:46 a.m. After everyone in the yard was incapacitated, officers opened fire with pistols, rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns, firing blindly through the heavy clouds of tear gas. Although Rockefeller had been told that bloodshed would be avoided, as the attack transpired, it became apparent that the toll was going to be devastating. Ten hostages and 29 inmates were killed. The treatment of the inmates did not improve when the assault was concluded. Guards forced inmates to crawl naked back to their cells, beating them with nightsticks as they went. In the press, state officials claimed that all of the hostages had been killed by the inmates, most of them from having their throats slit, and that the bullets found in them were from so-called zip guns that the inmates had fashioned. It quickly came to light that this was completely untrue; the inmates had no such zip guns, nor firearms of any kind, and thus all of the bullets were from state officials’ guns. Further, the coroner revealed that none of the hostages were killed by having their throats slit; rather, all were killed by state officials’ bullets. The coroner who revealed the true nature of the killings, Dr. John Edlund, faced character assassination and harassment by the state police to such a degree that he eventually moved out of New York state. Governor Rockefeller turned the investigation of the incident over to the very same state police, and, as a result, no troopers, park police, National Guardsmen, or corrections officials were charged with any crimes. Over 60 inmates were charged, but very few were convicted, and those who had pleaded guilty were pardoned by Rockefeller’s successor, Hugh Carey, in 1976. The trials over the Attica Riots lasted from 1974 until 2000. A number of prison officials were found liable in a civil trial that finally concluded 23 years after it was filed, when inmate Frank Smith (who, in the aftermath of the riot, was forced to lie naked on a table with a football balanced on his chest for the entire afternoon, being told that he would be castrated if the football fell) received a $4 million

Attica Prison Riot (1971)

settlement. A class-action suit filed resulted in an $8 million verdict against the state in 2000, to be paid to the 1,280 men who endured the attack. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Benjamin, Gerald, and Rappaport, Stephen P. “Attica and Prison Reform.” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 31, no. 3 (1974): 200–213. Dippel, Stewart A. “The Attica Muse: Lessons from Prison.” History Teacher 26, no. 1 (1992): 61–70. Light, Stephen C. “The Attica Litigation.” Crime, Law, and Social Change. 23, no. 3 (September 1995): 215–34. Starr, Roger. “Prisons, Politics, and the Attica Report.” Commentary 55, no. 3 (1973): 31–37. Weiss, Robert P. “The Order of Attica.” Social Justice 18, no. 3 (1991): 35–47. Wicker, Tom. A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. New York: Quadrangle, 1975.

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Cruel and Unusual Punishment One of the main claims that the inmates involved with the Attica Prison Riot made was that they had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Protection against this, of course, is one of the most basic constitutional rights, guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment. However, the issue of the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners raises an additional set of issues. The ways that people who are convicted of crimes are punished by state and local authorities is not prescribed by the federal government, and such authorities have long had considerable latitude in deciding how those convicted of capital crimes are dealt with. The U.S. Supreme Court has, for much of its history, consciously steered clear of cases involving the ways that such inmates have been executed. The treatment of inmates in prisons, on the other hand, has received considerable attention by the Supreme Court. The inmates at Attica argued that the situation of their incarceration, including excessive overcrowding, wide use of solitary confinement, and other incidents of prison officials taking liberties with the inmates, constituted cruel and unusual punishment. It could even be argued that the Attica riot was one of the events that brought the treatment of inmates to the public’s attention, spurring additional lawsuits, many filed by the inmates themselves, that have resulted in improvements in the treatment of prisoners, as most of this jurisprudence took place in the decades after the riots at Attica. Within three years of the riot, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Wolff v. McConnell (1974). The decision stated that although inmates were denied some rights as a part of their imprisonment, they were still protected by many of the liberties guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. They had the right to marry and to appear at hearings where the terms of their imprisonment were discussed, among other rights. The law governing the treatment of inmates, in most cases, distinguishes between punishments that are a part of the everyday life in a prison setting, and punishments that result from misconduct on the part of the inmates. The main Supreme Court decision in this matter, Hudson v. McMillian, decided in 1992 while the Attica civil suits were still active, stated that mistreatment of inmates on a day-to-day basis that resulted from “deliberate indifference” could be said to be cruel and unusual punishment. By that definition, the conditions at Attica certainly qualified. When discussing the disciplining of inmates for their actions (such as the incidents that occurred in the aftermath of the retaking of Attica by state officials), the Hudson decision stated that if the punishment demonstrated “malice and sadism,” then it, too, was cruel and unusual punishment. On this count, the treatment of the Attica rioters qualifies as well.

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The Attica rioters saw themselves as setting a pattern that inmates nationwide could follow, and many began to challenge the treatment they received, including issues such as overcrowding, excessive punishment, and poor living conditions. Attica became the inspiration for inmates nationwide, and a symbol of the intolerable situations faced by inmates. However, social conditions in the United States hindered reform efforts, as states struggled to keep up with the ever-expanding prison population. The construction of new prisons could not keep up with a prison population that grew 88 percent over the course of the decade following the Attica riot. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Bonta, James, and Paul Gendreau. “Reexamining the Cruel and Unusual Punishment of Prison Life.” Law and Human Behavior 14, no. 4 (August 1990): 347–372. Light, Stephen C. “The Attica Litigation.” Crime, Law, and Social Change. 23, no. 3 (September 1995): 215–34. Wicker, Tom. A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. New York: Quadrangle, 1975.

Rockefeller, Nelson A. (1908–1979) The governor of the state of New York during the Attica Prison Riot and later the vice president during Gerald Ford’s administration, Nelson Rockefeller came to politics with a sense of noblesse oblige that pervaded his liberal Republican sensibilities. Born to one of the wealthiest and best-known families in American history, Rockefeller was born on the same date as the grandfather who built the family’s fortune, John D. Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller climbed the political ladder during the 1940s and 1950s, holding posts in the State Department, serving as chairman of the International Development Advisory Board on aid to underdeveloped countries, undersecretary of the Department of Heath, Education and Welfare, and as an assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1958, Rockefeller defeated the incumbent, W. Averell Harriman, in the race for the governorship of New York. Reelected to four terms, Rockefeller’s governorship is best remembered for the role that he both did not play and finally did play in the drama that played out at Attica State Penitentiary in 1971. Known for his liberal leanings despite his Republican Party affiliation, the inmates at Attica thought that Rockefeller might be sympathetic to their desire for less overcrowding, better living conditions, and an end to the racist

Attica Prison Riot (1971)

administration of warden Vincent Mancusi. However, the timing of the riot was not propitious, as the more conservative wing of the Republican Party was ascending, and Rockefeller and those like him were forced to run on law-and-order platforms if they wanted to save their jobs. Needing to take a tough line with the inmates, Rockefeller refused their demands that he come to the prison and directly negotiate for the release of the hostages. His refusal to come to the prison, instead sending lower-level representatives, caused the prisoners to harden their stance, refusing to release the hostages. By September 13, 1971, Rockefeller had decided to authorize the state police to retake the prison and end the riot, allowing them to use whatever force necessary to restore order. At 9:46 a.m. on Tuesday, the operation began, and by the end of the day, 10 hostages and 29 inmates were dead. After authorizing the operation, Rockefeller again distanced himself from what was happening at Attica, not paying any attention to the recrimination that was being doled out on to many of the inmates by the restored prison authorities. The political gamble that Rockefeller took at Attica did pay dividends for him, as his “tough” stance made him a more acceptable candidate to conservative Republicans. Three years after the revolt, Rockefeller would be chosen by the new president, Gerald Ford, who had ascended from the vice presidency when Richard Nixon resigned, serving for two years before retiring from political life in 1976. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Bleecker. Samuel E. The Politics of Architecture: A Perspective on Nelson A. Rockefeller. New York: The Rutledge Press, 1981. Kramer, Michael S., and Sam Roberts. “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President of Anything!” An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller. New York: Basic Books. 1976. Persico, Joseph E. The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Wicker, Tom. A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. New York: Quadrangle, 1975.

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Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) The year 1972 was a watershed for the Red Power movement in the United States. The American Indian Movement (AIM) had been gaining visibility through earlier protests such as the occupation of the replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day 1970. Also that year, the Richard Nixon administration had approved the return of Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. However, most of the issues important to American Indian activists, such as the restoration of Indian lands taken by the United States and the honoring of rights guaranteed by treaties signed by the federal government and American Indian tribal governments were still unaddressed. AIM leaders, such as Robert Burnett, Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and Russell Means, decided to take action, planning a nationwide protest caravan that would go through Indian Country, gaining support, until it arrived in Washington, D.C., shortly before that year’s presidential election. The media attention gained by the caravan, which AIM leaders coined the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” would hopefully be a platform from which they could call public attention to the unfairness with which the federal government had treated Indian people, in much the same way that African Americans had with the 1963 March on Washington. Discontent was rampant throughout Indian Country, and support for the planned caravan spread. The shooting death of Alcatraz occupation leader Richard Oakes that September only fueled the movement (Deloria 1974, 46). In October 1972, three caravans began to make their way across the country, starting in Seattle, San Francisco, and Riverside, and stopping at many reservations and urban areas along the way that had large Indian populations. The central point of the protest was to be the presentation of a “20-Point Position Paper,” written by AIM leader Henry L. Adams, that detailed what Vine Deloria Jr. called “a new framework for considering the status of Indian tribes and the nature of their federal relationship” (Deloria 1974, 47). The three caravans converged on October 23 in Minneapolis, Minnesota—which was home to the movement and many of its leaders—to draft the statement before continuing together to Washington. By the time they arrived in the nation’s capitol in early November, a week before the presidential election, their number had grown to nearly 1,000, much more than organizers had planned for.

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Dennis Banks (left) and preacher Carl McEntire during the 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties” occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Bettmann/ Corbis)

The Position Paper called for radical alterations to the relationship between American Indian nations and the federal government. First on its list of demands was a restoration of the treaty relationship that had existed between Indian nations and the federal government from colonial times until the passage of the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871. Among its other demands were the establishment of a treaty commission to oversee the new treaties, the establishment of a commission to review earlier treaties and violations of those treaties by the federal government, judicial recognition of the right of Indian nations to interpret the meanings of treaties for themselves, the restoration of a 110-million-acre land base for American Indian people, restoration of all rights taken away from certain tribes during the “termination” era of the 1950s–1960s (when federal policy was to end the trust relationship between the federal government and the tribes), replacement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs with an Office of Federal Indian Relations and Community Reconstruction, protection of American Indian religious freedom, and numerous initiatives aimed at creating economic and educational opportunities for Indian people (American Indian Movement 1972).

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On the evening of November 2, 1972, the caravan arrived in Washington. AIM leaders had two immediate goals: first, to present the “20-Point Position Paper” to Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or other high-level Nixon administration officials; and second, to find housing for the nearly 1,000 Indian protesters who had made their way to Washington. The next morning, AIM leaders arrived at the BIA headquarters to meet with officials and present their demands. AIM leaders met with BIA commissioner Louis R. Bruce, but as the day went on, they became increasingly frustrated by the intransigence of the federal officials and their unwillingness to help the protesters find adequate accommodations. As Suzan Shown Harjo recalls, “It was the end of the workday for Washington bureaucrats and few BIA employees remained in the building after 4:30 p.m. TBT [Trail of Broken Treaties] negotiators accepted the federal offer to move from the BIA to the Labor Department, but no one clued in the General Services Administration (GSA) officers, who had orders to clear the building at 5:00 p.m.” (Harjo 2002). GSA officers began to attempt to remove the AIM protesters from the BIA headquarters. AIM leaders decided that it would be better both to house the protesters and to gain the media spotlight if they occupied the headquarters building, beginning a sixday standoff with federal officials. Police surrounded the building, which was only six blocks from the White House, with snipers. Henry L. Adams, who had written the Position Paper, was appointed lead negotiator, and the Position Paper became the list of demands protesters wanted met to end the occupation. Threats of an armed assault and the detonation of explosives were made by federal officials attempting to force the protesters into surrender, but to no effect. Some AIM leaders, like Russell Means, wanted to destroy the BIA headquarters, but cooler heads prevailed just barely, literally stomping out the fuses to Molotov cocktails that had already been lit. Although federal officials showed restraint (largely because a violent altercation in the days before an election was not a good idea), President Richard Nixon felt nothing but antipathy toward the protesters. Years later, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman recalled that Nixon’s only comment regarding the protest was “Get those goddamn Indians out of town” (Harjo 2002). By November 8, the protest began to run out of steam. It officially came to an end when Nixon administration officials agreed to create a commission to look into the demands stated in the “20-Point Position Paper,” promised not to charge any of the protesters with any crimes associated with the protest, and paid the expenses for the protesters to return home. With the crisis averted and a landslide victory for President Nixon, in January 1973, the administration issued its response to the Position Paper, in which it merely sung the praises of BIA and administration officials in dealing with Indians and denying the central part of the Position Paper—the demand for a restoration of the treaty relationship.

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Although ordinary protesters were not prosecuted, the FBI added AIM leaders to their list of possible subversive protest leaders, a decision that would have dramatic ramifications with the occupation and violence that took place the following year at the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. —Steven L. Danver See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1973); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971); Wounded Knee II (1973).

Further Reading American Indian Movement. “Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper: An Indian Manifesto.” October 31, 1972. Copy available at the American Indian Movement website, http://www.aimovement.org/archives/index.html (accessed April 1, 2010). Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. New York: Dell Publishing, 1974. Grossman, Mark. The Native American Rights Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 1996. Harjo, Suzan Shown. “Trail of Broken Treaties: A 30th Anniversary Memory.” Indian Country Today, November 1, 2002.

American Indian Movement (AIM) Probably the single group most responsible for Indian rights protests in the 1970s was the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1968, a group of Indians living in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area decided that they had had enough of discrimination and poverty. They formed AIM as an organization to coordinate protests nationwide. Some of the movement’s leaders were former inmates in the Minnesota prison system and knew well the dark side of the law. They were accustomed to police brutality and discrimination, and were determined to stop the harassment of Indians. As their fame spread, they began to travel to conferences to find out what other groups around the nation were doing. But their investigations revealed that, for the most part, tribal leaders were concerned with their own status in the eyes of federal officials and not with the welfare of their people. This only caused the AIM leaders to become more determined to make a difference. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, AIM declared the day a “national day of mourning” and seized control of the Mayflower replica in Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts. There was some political progress that year, though. President Nixon formally brought the policy of terminating the relationship between tribes and the federal government to an end. Announcing a new federal policy of Indian self-determination without termination of federal services, he also signed a bill recognizing the return of Blue Lake, a holy site, to the Taos Pueblo Indians. The year 1972 was the time for the Indian to gain the nation’s spotlight. The government, fearful of the quickened pace of Indian discontent, created its own organization, called the National Tribal Chairman’s Association, as a rubber stamp to give “Indian approval” to government policies. Their public statements consisted mainly of paranoid reactions to the protests staged by the American Indian Movement. AIM held a protest that year that they called the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” AIM leaders started with a few vehicles in San Francisco, driving across the country with the goal of calling attention to the long history of the U.S. government’s breaking of treaties with Indian tribes. By the time the caravan reached Washington, D.C., it had crossed countless reservations along the way. As people on the reservations learned of AIM’s mission, many vehicles joined the caravan. By the time they arrived in Washington, the line of cars was four miles long. However, the caravan was only the first of AIM’s goals. AIM leaders wrote a position paper on Indian rights with the goal of giving it to President Richard M. Nixon. What began as a simple protest intensified after a meeting with BIA officials. The attitude of government officials toward their grievances led AIM to occupy the BIA headquarters for six days. Because it was only two days before the presidential election that year, the administration negotiated an end of the occupation rather than

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conducting a military assault. But once the election was over, Nixon wasted no time in formally rejecting all 20 points of the AIM position paper. The occupation, however, did succeed in bringing Indian rights to the national agenda. AIM has continued to advocate for Indian rights since their heyday in the early 1970s. Though their efforts have become more localized, their views on the federal government’s inadequate response to questions of Indian rights has been no less strident. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Crow Dog, Mary, and Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld, 1990. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. New York: Dell Publishing, 1974. Means, Russell, and Marvin J. Wolf. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. New York: Macmillan, 1996.

Indian Treaties The United States began concluding treaties with Indian nations almost immediately after declaring its independence, a policy begun by colonies acting as agents for the British Empire. By the early 19th century, the U.S. government made it clear that the Indian treaties were not agreements between sovereign nations, but between the United States and, according to Chief Justice John Marshall, “domestic dependent nations.” With the passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887, Congress finally repudiated Indian sovereignty, bringing the treaty era to an official end. Throughout the treaty era, Americans and Indians used treaties to achieve multiple and often contradictory ends: to protect and acquire land, to initiate and end hostilities, to destroy and preserve tribal and national identities, and to affirm or deny political, cultural, and social power. Typically, however, as in the case of the Treaty of Fort Greenville concluded between the United States and some of the tribes of the Old Northwest, treaties were part of the ongoing process of western expansion. Settlers, prospectors, and land speculators inevitably provoked conflict. The U.S. Army followed in their wake to punish the offending Indians, and when total victory and removal of the Indians proved either too difficult or too costly, the United States concluded treaties to secure the peace and to consolidate territorial gains. Among the first American politicians to recognize the power that treaties had in separating Indians from their land, Andrew Jackson used his power as a treaty commissioner to negotiate settlements with Creek Indians: the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson that gave individual Indians title to land while stripping the tribes of vast,

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communally held territories. From 1814 to 1824, in a series of treaties with the southern Indians, whites took over most of the Indian lands remaining in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson also proved the ephemeral nature of treaties as president of the United States: in some 90 treaties concluded during his eight years in office, the United States compelled Indians to move west of the Mississippi. Over 60,000 Indians vacated some 25 million acres of land. On the Great Plains, the powerful Dakotas compelled the United States to turn to treaty making as it slowly incorporated the Louisiana Purchase and the territory won during the 1848 Mexican-American War. Explorer Zebulon Pike signed the first treaty with the Dakota in 1805, securing the site of Fort Snelling along the Mississippi River. In the 1851 Traverse des Sioux Treaty, the United States gained all Dakota land in Minnesota and restricted the Indians to two reservations along the Minnesota River. The 1862 Minnesota Uprising resulted in part from Indian resentment over the 1851 treaty. The series of conflicts initiated in 1862 ended when the Dakotas, together with the Arapaho, signed the Fort Laramie Treaty in April 1868 and agreed to back out of Nebraska and Kansas, leaving the territories to the settlers who inhabited the prairies during the previous decade. In this treaty, the United States promised the Indians supplies, secure possession of their remaining lands, and the abandonment of military forts along the Powder and Bighorn rivers. This would be the last major treaty of the 19th century, however, when an economic downturn in the 1870s spurred incursions into the rich Black Hills, leading to a series of wars ultimately settled by the attempt to eliminate tribal sovereignty embodied by the General Allotment Act. —Gerald Ronning

Further Reading Fixico, Donald L. Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts and Sovereignty. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Red Power The rise of the African American civil rights movement during the 1950s did not go without notice in Indian Country. Although some of the issues concerned were quite different (although they shared the common ground of economic justice), the tactics used by the civil rights movement, namely nonviolent disobedience and gaining exposure through the national media, inspired a new generation of American Indian youth to take action. The “Red Power” movement era is usually defined

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as starting with the formation of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961, and the so-called fish-ins in the Pacific Northwest, through the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) Longest Walk demonstration in 1978. As the 1950s drew to a close, the twin federal policies of the termination of the trust relationship with Indian tribes and the relocation of Indian people to American urban centers had begun to mobilize a new generation of Indian leadership. The suppression of Indian religions, languages, and cultures, and the powerlessness of tribal governments in the face of termination, along with a general sense of discontent at the economic hopelessness of reservation life and the cultural displacement of urban life made young American Indians look for a way to take action. The civil rights movement showed many that civil disobedience and protest were effective tactics, and the Indian youth of the 1960s began to look for the best ways to get their cause before the American public. In 1961, a conference was held in Chicago that resulted in the founding of the NIYC, which sought to correct the idea that the only way for American Indians to succeed in the modern world was to accommodate to white American culture. Rather, the NIYC called on Indians to celebrate and preserve their own cultural traditions while working to direct public attention to the federal government’s long history of not honoring the terms of treaties that it had signed with American Indian tribes. Throughout the early 1960s, the NIYC concentrated on the fishing rights of tribes in the Pacific Northwest as illustrative of the disregard with which the federal government viewed treaties. Public attention followed, with the involvement of sympathetic celebrities such as Marlon Brando, who was arrested at a 1964 fish-in. The last two years of the decade brought about two momentous events in the Red Power movement: the founding of AIM in 1968 and the takeover and occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. Although the Alcatraz occupation was not officially an AIM action, it showed that a sustained, high-profile action could get the public’s attention, and formed a model used by groups like AIM over the rest of the Red Power era. The Alcatraz takeover inspired later occupations, such as AIM’s occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., at the end of their 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties caravan, as well as countless other similar actions. Although the Trail of Broken Treaties was but one action in the long history of the Red Power movement, it certainly received heavy press coverage and was instrumental in bringing the nascent movement to the public consciousness. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Johnson, Troy R., Duane Champagne, and Joane Nagel, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Wounded Knee II (1973) On February 27, 1973, approximately 250 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO), and their supporters occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The occupation was the culmination of months of conflict between the activists and tribal chairman Dick Wilson, whom they accused of being corrupt, nepotistic, and despotic. AIM leaders first came to the area in early February, after the murder of an Oglala Lakota by a white man. Relatives of the murdered man asked AIM to help them seek justice, and after a protest in nearby Custer, South Dakota, Wilson became concerned that he would be AIM’s next target. With the help of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the United States marshals, Wilson fortified his headquarters, further aggravating his opponents. At the same time, the anti-Wilson members of the tribal government began impeachment proceedings against the chairman. When Wilson survived the impeachment, his opponents invited AIM to come to the reservation to protest his administration. AIM leader Russell Means was a member of the Pine Ridge tribe and had been present on the reservation during the impeachment hearings. After the invitation from the tribe members, Dennis Banks and others joined Means at Pine Ridge, where they met with OSCRO and traditional tribal chiefs. On February 27, Wilson’s opponents gathered at a meeting hall in the town of Calico. In private meetings, the chiefs advised the activists to hold their protest at Wounded Knee. Not wanting to reveal the plan to any potential Wilson informants, Means announced to the crowd that the meeting was to move to a larger hall in Porcupine, and they formed a caravan to move across the reservation. Along the way, however, the caravan stopped at Wounded Knee, where a small group of AIM members had already begun to seize the town’s trading post and churches. Within hours, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the BIA, and the U.S. marshals set up roadblocks around the town. By February 28, the federal presence had expanded to approximately 250 officers using army-provided armed personnel carriers (APC), and military jets began flying reconnaissance. Soon after, military advisors from the Pentagon arrived. As their presence violated federal law, they remained dressed in civilian clothes at all times. Inside Wounded Knee, occupants formed a security team led by those who

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had served in Vietnam. They began fortifying the village with trenches and bunkers. The occupiers soon realized that they were overmatched and outgunned. One of AIM’s veterans had an AK-47 assault rifle that he had brought home from Vietnam, but otherwise, they were armed mostly with hunting rifles and shotguns. In contrast, the federal officers had automatic weapons, over 100,000 rounds of ammunition, grenade launchers, and tear gas, in addition to APCs and helicopters. Not long after the siege began, the protesters provided the government with a list of demands. The occupiers wanted the Senate to hold hearings on Indian treaties, to investigate operations at the BIA, and to inspect conditions on South Dakota’s reservations. The document listing these stipulations also stated that the protesters had the support of eight Oglala chiefs and medicine men. Within two days, government negotiators were on the scene. On March 1, South Dakota’s U.S. senators, James Abourezk and George McGovern, visited Wounded Knee to check on hostages that the FBI reported AIM had taken. Although the hostages, all permanent residents of Wounded Knee, probably were taken as prisoners at the beginning of the siege, they informed the senators that they were staying on their own accord to watch their property and to help ensure that the government did not kill the protesters. Shortly following the senators’ visit, negotiations began between the occupiers and officials representing the Justice Department, who had primary responsibility for brokering a solution to the siege. On March 4, the two sides met in a canvass tepee between Wounded Knee and the federal roadblocks. Talks soon broke down over the issue of amnesty, which federal negotiators would not grant. However, the National Council of Churches was able to bargain a cease-fire, and on March 10, the Justice Department took down their roadblocks. Although many of the Pine Ridge Oglalas returned home, Indians from the across the country filed into the village and rejuvenated the occupation. On March 11, those inside Wounded Knee proclaimed themselves the Independent Oglala Nation. The roadblocks went back up. Just beyond the federal perimeter, Dick Wilson, who had become a minor figure in the drama, established his own roadblocks using his private police force, commonly called the “goon squad” by its critics. Wilson’s men turned the slur into an acronym standing for “Guardians of the Oglala Nation” (GOON) and used the name with pride. Those inside Wounded Knee faced increased hardship after the reestablishment of the roadblocks. Food and medical supplies were more difficult to obtain. In defiance of a court order, the GOON roadblocks prevented supplies from entering Wounded Knee. The occupiers relied upon provisions brought in on foot at night, and in one incident, supporters organized an airlift. Although firefights had occurred since the beginning, violence also intensified in the second phase of the siege. In addition to gunfire from Indians and federal officers, local whites came

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to Wounded Knee at night and fired at both sides, hoping to provoke governmental action against the Indians. By late March, the gunfights had become so frequent and so intense that the government warned reporters that they could not longer guarantee their safety. In the first four weeks of the siege, both sides suffered minor wounds. Then, on March 26, U.S. marshal Lloyd Grimm was paralyzed in a firefight. In April, North Carolina Cherokee Frank Clearwater and Pine Ridge Oglala Buddy Lamont were killed by gunfire while inside Wounded Knee. Following Lamont’s funeral on May 6, the protesters and federal negotiators finalized an agreement to end the siege. On May 8, after 71 days at Wounded Knee, the Indians disarmed. Those AIM leaders still present were arrested. Although the Oglala leaders did get their meeting with officials in Washington, nothing came of their talks. The most significant benefit of the occupation was increased awareness of AIM and Indian issues in general. The siege was widely covered by the national media, and Wounded Knee became a cause ce´ le`bre. Wounded Knee drew more attention than any other AIM protest. Leftist activists from around the country voiced their support for AIM, and some even traveled to South Dakota to join the occupation. Federal officers arrested hundreds of supporters bringing supplies to Wounded Knee. Yet, the protest also reduced the productivity of the organization. For more than a year after the end of the siege, AIM leaders and resources were tied up in trials stemming from the occupation. Although eventually thrown out because of FBI tampering, the court cases distracted AIM from activism and contributed to the group’s growing ineffectiveness in the mid-1970s. —Jacob F. Lee See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763); Flight of the Nez Perce´ (1877); Wounded Knee I (1890); Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1971); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972).

Further Reading Lyman, Stanley David. Wounded Knee 1973: A Personal Account. Edited by Floyd A. O’Neil, June K. Lyman, and Susan McKay. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement. New York: Viking, 1983. Sayer, John William. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996.

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Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Beginning in the late 1960s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relinquished much of the control it had previously held over tribal governments on American Indian reservations and began to emphasize Indian self-determination, particularly in supporting officials chosen in reservation elections. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, BIA superintendent Stanley D. Lyman followed this policy and backed elected tribal chairman Dick Wilson, despite his frequent and obvious abuses of power. Lyman also approved Wilson’s resolutions banning the American Indian Movement (AIM) from Pine Ridge. In addition, the bureau funded Wilson’s auxiliary police force, commonly called the “GOON Squad,” created to suppress AIM activity on the reservation. When, in February 1973, the tribal council impeached the chairman, Wilson requested that federal agents come to Pine Ridge to defend against what Wilson predicted would be an AIM invasion of the reservation. U.S. marshals and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents soon arrived on the reservation, fortified the BIA office in the town of Pine Ridge with sandbags and machine guns, and began training BIA police in anti-demonstration tactics. Opposed to both Wilson and the federal presence, anti-Wilson residents of Pine Ridge formed the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO). OSCRO invited AIM to the reservation after the impeachment proceedings failed and Lyman refused to take action on their complaints about Wilson. Four days after the end of the Wilson’s hearing, AIM, OSCRO, and other anti-Wilson Lakotas began their occupation of Wounded Knee and demanded a federal investigation into BIA corruption. Throughout the siege at Wounded Knee, BIA police were active as armed participants. On the first day, BIA officers followed AIM members and supporters to Wounded Knee and were among the first to establish roadblocks around the town. BIA police assisted GOONs, often providing them with supplies. Despite orders from a federal judge to allow food and medicine into Wounded Knee, Wilson’s police maintained roadblocks beyond the perimeters established by federal agents and prevented those provisions from getting to the activists. These vigilante roadblocks defied the court, but Lyman made arrangements to supply them with food and equipment. Despite the large BIA presence at Wounded Knee, the bureau had little participation in the siege-ending negotiations, which were conducted primarily by the Justice Department. The BIA continued to oppose AIM activism on Pine Ridge for years after Wounded Knee. Until 1976, when Wilson left office, BIA police worked with the GOON Squad to intimidate, assault, and kill AIM members and supporters. Some BIA officers even moonlighted as GOON Squad members. GOON/BIA

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violence, including the murder or attempted murder of leading activists, decimated AIM and reduced its effectiveness. —Jacob F. Lee

Further Reading Castile, George Pierre. To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960–1975. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Lyman, Stanley David. Wounded Knee 1973: A Personal Account. Edited by Floyd A. O’Neil, June K. Lyman, and Susan McKay. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Reinhardt, Akin D. Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) In November 1972, after the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building in Washington, D.C., the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classified AIM and its leaders as extremists. The bureau targeted AIM in a campaign intended to undermine the organization’s effectiveness. Although the investigation of AIM came after the official end of the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the bureau’s tactics were not unlike those they had used against similar groups in the late 1960s. Common strategies included infiltration, spreading disinformation, and according to some, murdering leading activists. FBI agents first arrived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in February 1973, after BIA officials requested assistance in preventing civil disturbances stemming from the reservation’s internal political upheaval. On February 27, FBI agents helped set up roadblocks outside Wounded Knee, and over 150 agents took part in the siege. AIM members believed that agents also provided automatic rifles to antiAIM reservation police. Additionally, FBI action extended well beyond the reservation. Under federal law, the FBI could arrest anyone suspected of crossing state lines to engage in civil disorder, and agents across the country detained numerous people transporting loads of food, medicine, and other supplies to Wounded Knee. After the siege ended in May 1973, the bureau worked diligently to gain convictions of the activists who had occupied Wounded Knee. However, in 1974, a federal court threw out most of the charges against the activists because of FBI misconduct. According to the court, the FBI withheld and altered files, elicited perjury from witnesses, and had placed an informant among the legal defense team. Following the Wounded Knee occupation and the subsequent trials, the FBI continued its anti-AIM activities and maintained a presence on Pine Ridge

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Reservation. Agents disrupted the organization through constant surveillance and frequent arrests, and infiltrators worked from within to discredit the movement. The knowledge that informants had infiltrated AIM fueled dissension and distrust within the group. By the mid-1970s, many AIM leaders were in jail or had gone into hiding. AIM distrust of each other as well as law enforcement led to increased violence on Pine Ridge. In February 1976, AIM member Anna Mae Aquash was found dead on Pine Ridge. Although many at the time believed that she was killed by government agents, in the 2000s, federal convictions indicated that she was killed by AIM members who suspected her of being an FBI informant. Many activists feared they would be assassinated, and at least 69 AIM supporters were killed on Pine Ridge between 1973 and 1976. Despite heavy federal presence, few of the deaths were ever fully investigated. —Jacob F. Lee

Further Reading Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988. Cunningham, David. There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Powers, Richard Gid. Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI. New York: Free Press, 2004.

Pine Ridge Reservation Established in 1889 after the division of the Great Sioux Reservation created by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, Pine Ridge Reservation is an Oglala Lakota reservation located in southwestern South Dakota. In 1890, Pine Ridge was the scene of one of the worst Indian massacres in United States history. Beginning in 1889, members of tribes across the plains adopted the Ghost Dance religion, which promised, among other things, the return of the near-extinct bison and the disappearance of all non-Indians. Army officials and Indian agents, worried about the Ghost Dance, worked to curb its spread. In December 1890, reservation police killed Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull while attempting to arrest him and created a panic among other Lakotas, including Miniconjou leader Big Foot. Big Foot and his followers left their reservation in central South Dakota and headed toward Pine Ridge, where they hoped to find safety. On December 28, the U.S. 7th Cavalry surrounded Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee. The following morning, the soldiers disarmed the Lakotas, and when a firearm went off accidentally, they

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opened fire on the unarmed Indians. Of the 350 men, women, and children who followed Big Foot, approximately two-thirds were killed. Wounded Knee instantly became a symbol of federal mistreatment of Indians. In the 20th century, Pine Ridge continued to be turbulent, particularly in regard to tribal politics. Matters came to a head in the early 1970s, when Dick Wilson was elected tribal chairman. Wilson was the target of frequent complaints of nepotism, corruption, and intimidation. In 1973, dissatisfaction with Wilson led to a series of demonstrations, and when an impeachment hearing failed, the anti-Wilson faction invited members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) to come to the reservation. Pine Ridge’s traditional tribal leaders, knowing the site’s symbolic power, advised the AIM and its supporters to occupy Wounded Knee as a protest against Wilson. Hostilities between Wilson’s followers and AIM supporters continued after the end of the siege at Wounded Knee. Until 1976, when Wilson’s tenure as chairman ended, Pine Ridge was a virtual police state as Wilson’s private police force killed, assaulted, and threatened Wilson’s critics. In the last three years of Wilson’s administration, Pine Ridge had a higher murder rate than either Detroit or Washington, D.C., two cities often cited as the “murder capital” of the United States during that time. One notable incident of reservation violence was the case of AIM member Leonard Peltier, who was convicted for the 1975 murders of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on Pine Ridge. Whether he was responsible for their deaths or whether he was framed because of his involvement of AIM was never determined to the satisfaction of many on the reservation. —Jacob F. Lee

Further Reading Frazier, Ian. On the Rez. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Reinhardt, Akim D. Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007.

Wilson, Dick (1934–1990) Born in 1934, Richard “Dick” Wilson served as tribal chairman of the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1972 to 1976. A former plumber, Wilson had previously served on the tribal council as a representative of the town of Pine Ridge. During his campaign for chairman, he wore his hair long, symbolizing his sympathy with traditional Oglala values, and even supported American Indian Movement (AIM) activism. However, by his April 1972 inauguration, Wilson wore a crew-cut

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hairstyle, and his actions soon alienated many full-blood tribal members. Allegations of corruption and nepotism tainted the Wilson administration, and Wilson’s autocratic tendencies angered many Oglalas. In late 1972, Wilson also began to publicly oppose AIM, following its occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office in Washington, D.C. Wilson specifically targeted AIM leader and Pine Ridge tribe member Russell Means, who had announced that he would oppose Wilson in 1974’s tribal chairman election. In November 1972, at Wilson’s urging, the tribal government passed legislation to prevent AIM, particularly Means, from operating on the reservation. Wilson also vowed to cut off Means’s braids should the AIM leader come to Pine Ridge and hung a reward poster in his office that offered $1,000 for Means’s pickled body. Moreover, Wilson created the GOON Squad, a private police force intended to suppress AIM and its supporters. After being impeached in February 1973, Wilson repeatedly delayed the hearings and spread baseless rumors that AIM planned to invade Pine Ridge. To defend against the imagined AIM intentions, Wilson requested that federal agents come to the reservation to back the tribal government. The federal presence further infuriated anti-Wilson Oglalas. Wilson survived the impeachment and immediately led the council to pass more resolutions targeting AIM. Four days later, the siege at Wounded Knee began. Wilson was soon relegated to a minor role in the affair. Although the protest originated as a statement against Wilson, it quickly expanded in scope as more federal agencies became involved. Wilson had little involvement in the negotiations that eventually ended the siege. Instead, he and his GOONs harassed those who came to Pine Ridge to support AIM. They maintained roadblocks outside the perimeters established by federal officers and, in defiance of a federal court order, prevented food, medical supplies and other materials from entering Wounded Knee. Following the occupation, Dick Wilson and his GOON Squad continued to target his opponents. Between 1973 and 1976, when Wilson left office, the GOONs murdered, assaulted, and intimidated AIM members and supporters. Despite the controversy surrounding Wilson, he was reelected as tribal chairman in 1974, possibly because of election fraud but also because Russell Means and a traditional tribal leader split the votes of Wilson’s opponents. Wilson died in 1990 on the Pine Ridge Reservation. —Jacob F. Lee

Further Reading Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement. New York: Viking, 1983. Reinhardt, Akim D. Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007.

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Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981) The Sagebrush Rebellion was a political and legal movement originating in the western United States that aimed to transfer or “return” title to the public lands from federal control to the states. Critics claimed that the plan was concocted by greedy westerners tied to big money who were intent on privatizing the public domain. The idea to transfer the public lands from governmental to private or state control has been an ongoing issue in the West long before “sagebrush rebels” came onto the scene. Although most western states signed over to the federal government their right to the public domain as a condition for statehood, westerners have long protested federal ownership of the public lands. Various attempts at a large-scale transfer failed in the 1920s and 1940s, which was due in part to the columnist and historian Bernard DeVoto’s scathing criticisms in articles published in Harper’s magazine. For more than a decade, antigovernment sentiment festered in the West in the wake of passage of environmental regulations governing the use of the nation’s public lands and resources. Westerners felt particularly threatened by passage in 1976 of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which virtually reversed the long-standing policy of disposal and stated that the public domain would remain public in perpetuity. The first salvo in the Sagebrush Rebellion came in 1979 when the Nevada legislature passed Assembly Bill 413 and laid claim to Nevada’s right to own and manage 49 million acres of the public lands within its borders. In reality, it was a meaningless act, since the federal government did not intend to cede ownership of the land and Nevada had no authority to seize it, but it symbolically represented the anger many westerners felt toward an overbearing federal presence in the West. Elsewhere in the West, the movement spread like brushfire among congressional delegates, state legislatures, and county governments. During that same two-year period, western politicians attempted to push through several pieces of legislation on the national and state level to transfer federal lands to western states. Congressional delegates from all 11 western states in the continental United States actively promoted themselves as sagebrush rebels. In

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1979 and again in 1981, Utah senator Orrin Hatch led the way in introducing a major piece of legislation that called for the “return” and “rightful title” of public lands in the West to the states. If it was clear where the West’s congressional delegates stood on the issue, less obvious was the response of western governors who were considerably more cautious in supporting sagebrush legislation. Some, like Utah’s Scott Matheson, signed a sagebrush bill passed by the state legislature. However, Matheson understood it would be a nonissue until the courts ruled in favor of the states. Other governors, notably Richard Lamm of Colorado and Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, adamantly opposed the idea of a transfer and refused to sign supportive legislation. The hesitancy of the governors to support a transfer reflected a division among their constituency; polls taken in the Rocky Mountain states showed that support for the movement was one-third of those surveyed in 1979 and a slight majority in 1981. Some claimed the term “rebellion” was a misnomer because the movement operated within legal and constitutional bounds. Although no heads rolled, it was perhaps bloody rhetorically, since some rebels spoke of a “second American Revolution” and of environmentalists as “selfish,” “radical,” “dandelion pickers,” and “a cult of toadstool worshippers.” In rural areas, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) personnel and environmentalists faced threats of violence. On July 4, 1980, county commissioners in Grand County, Utah, organized a protest centered around the bulldozing of a road on federal land earmarked for wilderness study that about 250 people attended. For their part, opponents of the movement, determined to tarnish the image of the rebellion and its proponents, launched an aggressive offensive of their own. Organizations like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and other groups organized calling lists, established anti-rebellion committees, and labeled the movement a “land grab” and “sagebrush ripoff.” Two events marked the height of the rebellion in late 1980 and early 1981: the conference of the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights (LASER) held in Salt Lake City and attended by about 500 “rebels,” and the election of Ronald Reagan and the nomination of James Watt as secretary of the interior. For a time, sagebrush rebels had great designs for a revolution in the West, never more so than when the president-elect declared, “I am a sagebrush rebel.” Yet, despite the media attention and support among some members of the national Republican Party, the movement did not have much of a chance. Rebels never did agree on a coherent strategy, or even whether the movement was about a land transfer or simply a government more responsive to western concerns. Although several western states passed “sagebrush” legislation, these had no bite, and Congress never seriously considered passing national legislation transferring ownership of the public lands to the states. In the end, the new secretary of the interior pulled the plug on a

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transfer when he announced that the Sagebrush Rebellion had been won. Many sagebrush rebels, like James Watt, no longer saw the urgency in wresting the public lands from the federal government now that rebels ran the show. The Sagebrush Rebellion effectively died in 1981, but the discontent underlying the movement continues to be felt especially in the rural West, where public land issues are particularly acute. —Jedediah S. Rogers See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Boston Tea Party (1773); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Battle of Athens (1946); World Trade Organization Protests (1999); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Cawley, R. McGreggor. Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993. Graf, William L. Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1990. Lamm, Richard D., and Michael McCarthy. The Angry West: A Vulnerable Land and Its Future. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Shanks, Bernard. This Land Is Your Land: The Struggle to Save America’s Public Lands. New York: Random House, 1984.

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Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA), sometimes known as the Bureau of Land Management’s “Organic Act,” defined the mission of the BLM and established guidelines for the management of the public lands in perpetuity. For most of the 200 years prior to the passage of FLPMA, the federal government pursued an aggressive policy of disposal. The General Land Office, the predecessor of the BLM created in 1812, disposed over one billion acres of public lands over a 134-year period under federal land laws—and sometimes famously did so with incompetence, corruption, and the predisposition to development over conservation. The move to retain land in public trust began with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and forest reserves under the General Land Reform Act of 1891. The federal government also retained lands perceived to have little or no value, which could not be disposed to states or private ownership. As it had done in national parks and forest lands, Congress took a major step toward providing administrative oversight of the range lands when, in 1934, it placed the range lands in grazing districts under the management of the Grazing Service. In 1946, the Grazing Service and GLO combined to form the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior. In its first two decades, the BLM managed the public lands much like its predecessor: with a single-minded devotion to the economic use of the land’s resources. In the postwar era, however, a new land ethic began to emerge that placed value on the public lands beyond their economic uses. FLMPA, passed by Congress on October 21, 1976 (Public Law 94-579), in response to recommendations of the Public Land Law Review Commission, reflected the new emphasis on balancing resource development with conservation and preservation. Essentially, the act established guidelines and policies for management of the public lands—and provided the teeth to enforce them. Notably, it stated that the public lands would be managed by the federal government in perpetuity, unless “it is determined that disposal of a particular parcel will serve the national interest.” The management of the public lands would be based on principles of sustained yield, multiple use, and conservation “in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values.” The act called for periodic inventorying of the public lands and resources, planning coordination with other state and federal planning activities,

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and the role of Congress and the secretary of the interior in the designation of public lands for specific purposes or administration of public land statutes. It also established the PILT system (payment in lieu of taxes), which gave states money they would have received in taxes had they owned the land. FLPMA is probably the single most hated federal land law in the West. Even today, many westerners refer to it with disdain and, with the environmental movement, the event that heightened conflicts between traditional resource developers and environmentalists on the public lands. Conversely, others consider the act a landmark legislation that has shifted the management of the public lands— particularly those managed by the BLM—more in line with the prevailing values and attitudes of the American people. —Jedediah S. Rogers

Further Reading Muhn, J., and H. R. Stuart. Opportunity and Challenge: The Story of BLM. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988. Public Land Law Review Commission. One Third of the Nation’s Land. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Office of the Solicitor. Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, As Amended. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001.

Public Lands The public lands, or public domain, are lands held in common by the federal government for the benefit of the American people. The United States owns and manages about a third of the nation’s landmass, and more than 90 percent is found in the 11 western states and Alaska. The percentage of public lands in the continental western states is highest in Nevada, where 86 percent is owned by the government, not including Indian tribal lands. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) manage the vast majority of these lands—40 percent, or 258 million acres, by the BLM alone. Not included in the federal public lands system are about 45 million acres of “school trust” lands owned and managed by the states. The current size and administration of public lands in the United States developed piecemeal, since the original colonies ceded their western territories to the new federal government beginning in 1780. The Land Ordinance of 1785 developed a uniform survey of lands into a grid system known as townships, which could then be parceled and sold. The problem was that although rectangular surveys may

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have worked in the low-lying, wooded East, they were ill suited in the more heterogeneous West. Likewise, federal land policies of disposal oft times neglected the physical realities of the region. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of “free” land to settlers willing to try their hand at farming, but the acreage was hardly enough to create productive, self-sustaining farming in the arid West. Since the nation’s founding, the government has disposed of over a billion acres of public lands, primarily in the eastern United States. The government also disposed millions of acres in the West, but there, where the lands were less fertile and more hostile to settlement, millions of acres remained in public ownership, either because settlers found them undesirable or because the government set them aside for protection. Congress created national parks, but the Antiquities Act of 1906 gave the president executive power to set aside national monuments without congressional approval. Established in 1916, the National Park Service manages the parks and the majority of the nation’s monuments. The USFS, created in 1902, is in charge of the nation’s forested lands, and the BLM, the successor to the General Land Office, manages the nation’s range lands. The Wilderness Act of 1964 gives Congress the authority to set aside “roadless” areas that would be managed “in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use as wilderness.” In 1976, after nearly 200 years of policies designed to dispose of the public lands, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which virtually reversed the long-standing policy of disposal and stated that the public domain would remain public in perpetuity. People past and present value the public lands for wealth, work, spiritual renewal, and play. Because different people value the public lands for different reasons, questions will continue to be raised about how government can best negotiate competing demands for resources and accommodate priorities and allocations based on changing societal values and needs. —Rolando Avila

Further Reading Carstensen, Vernon, ed. The Public Domain: Studies in the History of the Public Domain. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963. McKinney, Matthew, and William Harmon. The Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004.

Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004) Republican president Ronald Wilson Reagan (1981–1989) was an optimist with a great faith in the American spirit of freedom. Reagan believed that America’s best days were still ahead if the federal government would reduce

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restrictions on states, businesses, and the environment. A couple of weeks after Reagan’s presidential election in 1980, the League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights (LASER) sponsored a three-day conference intended to drum up support for the Sagebrush Rebellion, and President-elect Reagan sent a telegram to the conference announcing his willingness to find a “Sagebrush solution.” The Sagebrush Rebels wanted states to take over federally owned land within their boarders and utilize it for their own benefit. The Rebels, who had been active since 1975, reveled in Reagan, their new ally. John L. Harmer, lieutenant governor of California under Reagan and the head of LASER, told reporters that Reagan’s endorsement meant that he was now sure to get better results. While the rebels rejoiced, environmentalists trembled when they heard the news. They feared the worst. They believed that federally protected western lands in 12 states were in danger of being destroyed. However, Reagan failed to see a cause for alarm. After all, he thought that he had left a good record on the environment as governor of California. In fact, Reagan considered himself a conservationist. He loved the outdoors. In spite of his age, his favorite activities were to clear brush, chop firewood, and go horseback riding on his 688-acre ranch. Reagan did not, however, consider himself a preservationist. He believed that nature was there to be used for the benefit of people now living. Reagan knew that, even though many people supported environmental causes, most people set a higher priority on jobs and economic growth. He was convinced that his resounding election and reelection gave him the peoples’ mandate for the development of the sagebrush lands. In other words, Reagan supported the use of land more than he supported the rebels. For example, in 1982, Reagan angered rebels when he proposed selling 35 million acres of sagebrush land to the highest bidder to raise money to reduce the national debt. While critics accused Reagan of being naı¨ve about environmental issues, he accused environmentalists of being elitists who cared more about trees and animals than human life and American progress. He refused to set any limits, even environmental, on America’s future. He ignored warnings of environmental doom, because he believed that, if people were just allowed to be free, American innovation would solve any problems that would arise. Throughout his administration, Reagan was able to defuse the movement for state ownership of federal lands by significantly reducing federal government restrictions and allowing the use of these and other public lands for private oil drilling, timber, grazing, and mining. —Rolando Avila

Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981)

Further Reading Cawley, R. McGreggor. Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion & Environmental Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Short, C. Brant. Ronald Reagan and the Public Lands: America’s Conservation Debates, 1979–1984. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989.

Watt, James G. (1938–) When Ronald Reagan staged his successful 1980 presidential campaign, he built his candidacy on both conservative, small-government politics and an image as a rough-and-tumble Western cowboy—the model of individualism. These two aspects of his campaign gave heart to the Sagebrush Rebels, raising hopes that their goal of ending federal ownership over Western lands had found an ally. When Reagan won the election, his first steps seemed to indicate support for the rebels’ agenda. He appointed two people with known affiliations and sympathies for the Rebels to high positions: Anne Gorsuch Burford to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and perhaps his most controversial appointment: James G. Watt to become secretary of the interior. Watt had long been a supporter of the Sagebrush Rebellion, having built a career as a staunch supporter of Western development. In 1969, he became deputy assistant secretary of water and power development at the Department of the Interior (DOI), and in 1976, he started his own group, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, to lend legal assistance to those attempting to assert individual or state ownership over federal lands in the West, mostly oil, timber, and mineral development companies. In 1980, when Watt became secretary of the interior, it was clear that although he might not be able to change large, long-standing federal policies that favored environmental protection, he would be able to interpret federal statutes and rules in a much more sympathetic way toward those advocating for greater Western development. Environmentalists did not take Watt’s appointment lying down. Noting the conflict of interest inherent in placing a pro-development advocate at the head of the segment of the federal government changed with protecting the environment, groups such as the Sierra Club and others started a “Dump Watt” petition drive aimed at ousting the new secretary. Watt responded by slashing funds for programs that protected endangered species. The mission of the DOI changed from protection and conservation of resources to fast-tracking the expansion of development of federal lands, with Watt going so far as to suggest the opening of all federal lands to resource extraction leases by the year 2000.

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In the end, it was Watt’s inability to control what he said that forced him to resign in 1983. After his characterization of a Senate advisory panel as consisting of “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple,” pressure mounted on the Reagan administration to do something about Watt, with the Senate even drafting a resolution calling for his firing. Although George W. Bush appointed Watt prote´ge´ Gale Norton to head the DOI, Watt’s tenure as secretary has to be seen as a temporary interruption in the momentum supporting greater environmental protection. —Steven L. Danver

Further Reading Bratton, S. P. “The Ecotheology of James Watt.” Environmental Ethics 5 (Fall 1983): 225–236. Cawley, R. McGreggor, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Two events triggered the combination of uprising, protests, indiscriminate violence, and generalized looting that struck Los Angeles between April 29 and May 4, 1992. One was the beating and arrest of Rodney King on March 2, 1991. The other was the trial of four of the 20 or so police officers present. Like all real-life incidents, the arrest and trial were more complex than any viewpoint in the political debate surrounding them. King was driving under the influence of alcohol at least 80 miles per hour, ignored direction to pull over, and led police on a chase. Few have questioned that there were grounds for a traffic stop, or an arrest. A portion of the stop was recorded on videotape by a man who lived about 90 feet away. Almost everyone who saw the tape—civilians, news reporters, police supervisors in and out of Los Angeles—found the beating viewed on tape reprehensible and unjustified. The four officers charged with criminal misconduct testified that the tape only showed part of what they had to deal with. By all accounts, King was intoxicated, but there is little testimony that he was violent. He danced around, rolled on the ground, did not respond quickly to orders. State patrol officer Melanie Singer, who initiated the chase, testified at the trial that she was shocked by the way Los Angeles city officers, after joining the chase when King left the freeway, beat King into submission. Stacey Koon, the L.A. police sergeant who took charge, said he was professionally disgusted that Singer drew her pistol, when initially demanding that King lie down on the ground. Koon considered that dangerous and unnecessary. The largest number of baton blows directed at King came from Officer Laurence Powell, who at the beginning of his shift had failed a test for proper delivery of power strokes. By all accounts, he did a lot of damage to King without securing compliance. While Powell says he responded in fear for his life when King charged at him, King testified that he ran toward Powell with his hands up, to show he had no gun. Most of the tape showed King lying on the ground, apparently dodging blows from the baton and occasional kicks. King himself testified that he wondered, “What did I do to deserve this?” and that when it ended, he “felt like a crushed can.” All officers denied racial bias in their treatment of King. King’s attorney, Steven Lerman, initially agreed, saying the beating was an extreme example of the use of

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People examine the smoldering aftermath of the Los Angeles Riots in South Central Los Angeles. (Ted Soqui/Corbis)

force after a high-speed chase. Later examination of Powell’s police communications raised some question. He had described intervention in a large party as “right out of Gorillas in the Mist,” to which another officer replied “Let me guess who be the parties.” Koon, however, was liked and respected by African American officers, and there was no evidence of racial bias by Powell’s trainee, Timothy Wind. Theodore Briseno, the fourth officer charged, had been suspended in 1987 for using force on a handcuffed child abuse suspect, but was critical of the treatment of King even before it was known that the beating had been taped. The jury arrived at one conclusion; almost everyone else, on the street or in public office, expected another. Nobody in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992, was prepared for all four police officers facing criminal charges in the beating of Rodney King to walk out with no convictions. The police department was not prepared for it; neither were the bitterly divided ethnic communities in Los Angeles, civil rights and community organizations, the news media, the state of California, or the public across the United States. Everyone had seen a videotape of police beating King on March 2, 1991, played on TV over and over, for a year before the trial. Everyone expected at least some officers would be convicted of at least some charges. The trial had been moved to suburban Simi Valley, but even there, many people expected convictions.

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When the news came that Koon, Wind, and Briseno had been found not guilty on all charges, while the jury had been unable to agree on a verdict for one charge against Powell, the response was unorganized, spontaneous, and outraged. Initial police response was disorganized and, in many respects, nonexistent. Two immediate centers of loud, angry, but relatively peaceful protests drew ethnically diverse crowds, gathering spontaneously on April 29: the site at Hansen Dam Park where King had been beaten and arrested, and the Parker Center, downtown police headquarters. Protesters at Parker Center introduced the slogan “No Justice, No Peace” for which the entire uprising is remembered. Eventually, someone set fire to a kiosk, motivating police to move their line pushing protesters away. Some moved west toward City Hall and the Los Angeles Times building, breaking windows along the way; others set fire to palm trees along the Hollywood freeway. The same evening, over 2,000 people came to a protest meeting at First African Methodist Episcopal Church. All these protests were soon submerged in news of more lurid and violent events in South Central, Hoover Connection, Compton, and Pico-Union. Along Normandie Avenue, honking horns up and down the street, shouting outside a police station, gave rise to incidents of men with baseball bats smashing windows of passing cars, then crowds on corners throwing rocks. A little after 4:00 p.m., at Florence and Dalton, several men walked out of a corner store with bottles of beer, swinging one at the head of the storeowner trying to stop them, remarking, “This is for Rodney King.” Responding to reports of motorists attacked and officers needing backup at the corner of Florence and Normandie, 30 to 35 officers faced a rock-throwing crowd of more than 200, when police lieutenant Michael Moulin ordered evacuation of the area. Several officers said afterward that they disagreed with the order. The police department’s Metropolitan division, the usual backup for a situation out of control, had 233 officers, 76 of them off duty at 6:00 p.m. Of the remaining 157, 46 were in the San Fernando Valley, far from the scene, and another 29 were at the Parker Center downtown. This left 82 for deployment in South Central. No contingency plans had been made for any outbreak. Police chief Daryl Gates spent the evening at a fundraiser advocating a “no” vote on Proposition F, a ballot measure to reform the police department. Nobody in any police chain of command took initiative to block off either streets becoming dangerous for motorists or freeway exits; the state highway patrol belatedly blocked some exits. Outside Los Angeles, the iconic image of the uprising was another videotape: several young men at the corner of Florence and Normandie, pulling Reginald Denny from the cab of his concrete truck and beating him with fists, kicks, and a cinderblock until he was rescued by four residents in the area. That video was taken from a news helicopter overhead, where Bob and Marika Tur urgently

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observed that there was no police presence anywhere nearby. Many others pulled out of cars and beaten at the same corner were Asian or Latino, rescued by African American residents of the area. A large portion of those throwing rocks and beating motorists in the area were flashing gang signs. Sixty percent of residents in the area owned their own homes, but some 40,000 teens aged 16–19 were out of school and out of work. The next three days were not marked by political protest nor acts of rage, but by looting in areas where police presence had been withdrawn or was stretched thin. More than half the residents in the affected areas were Latino, as were a majority of the looters; most of those young single men only recently arrived in the city. Rodney King was not the issue after the first hours on April 29; a white and a Latino looter, attempting to rob a grocery store, told the African American owner, “F—Rodney King.” The owner, with a .357 Magnum, wounded the white robber, who was carrying a rifle. A few business owners defended their premises. Richard Ree, owner of California Market, armed family and employees and held off looters on April 30. Art Washington, who had a pest control business on Western Avenue at 20th Street, held off would-be looters, shouting “I worked for that. Don’t burn down none of my business. I worked too hard for this! You call this black power?” Looters did invade and torch the Watts Labor Community Action Center, built after the 1965 Watts riots. Four thousand California National Guard troops, 4,500 federal troops, including 1,500 marines, and 1,000 federal law enforcement officers, were sent into Los Angeles to restore a semblance of peace. A curfew imposed on May 1 was lifted the night of May 4. There were 54 confirmed deaths—26 African American, 14 Latino, nine white, and two Asian, with three bodies too badly burned for identification. At least 2,328 were treated for injuries, 862 structures damaged by fire, with a total of $900 million in property damage. Among the first three killed were Dwight (Fishman) Taylor, an African American fish cutter; Matthew Haines, a white mechanic; and Elbert Wilkins, a black stereo shop owner. Taylor was shot by unknown assailants while walking to a store near his job at All Seas Fish Market. Wilkins was hit by bullets from a passing car, talking to friends near his business. Haines was on his way to rescue an African American family friend who worried about violence in her neighborhood, when he was dragged off his motorcycle and shot at point-blank range by a mob in Long Beach. Haines’s father told a Los Angeles TV station “if this had been a declared war, my son would have signed up” on the same side as the people who shot him. One of the jurors in the trial of the police officers said, “I can’t believe all this is a reaction to what we did.” Mayor Tom Bradley announced, with evident anger, “Today, the jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes was not a

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crime.” The jury had spent the trial in a quiet courtroom, pouring over details of each police officer’s testimony. To most people on the street, that was not the point. Everyone in the poorer areas of the city knew of someone mistreated by police, from outright shooting to being handled roughly after a traffic stop. So did many African Americans from prosperous neighborhoods, and more than a few Latinos. Generally, charges against officers involved had been dismissed for lack of convincing evidence, while the city paid between $3.7 million and $13 million a year in civil damages. This time, the police had been caught on tape; everyone expected that for once, they would be convicted. The death of Latasha Harlins, a high school student with ambitions to become a prosecuting attorney, added to the sense of injustice and futility. She had been shot in the back of the head by the checkout clerk in a corner store, where the security camera showed that Soon Ja Du initiated a confrontation, mistakenly thinking Harlins intended to steal a bottle of orange juice. Harlins had walked away from the conflict, without the orange juice, when she was shot. A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter, but on November 11, 1991, Judge Joyce Ann Karlin imposed five years probation, suggesting that Du did not mean to kill Harlins, contradicting the jury’s verdict. Dallas, Texas, police chief William Rathburn, a former L.A. assistant chief, had publicly called the beating of King “gross criminal misconduct.” LAPD officer Tom Sullivan said “This isn’t just a case of excessive force. It’s a case of mass stupidity.” By March 10, 1992, 86 percent of those contacted for a Los Angeles Times poll had seen the tape, and 92 percent thought excessive force had been used. In mid-April, 81 percent in another survey believed the four officers to be guilty of criminal assault. Since jury selection generally excludes anyone with a wellformed opinion on guilt or innocence, the jury would inevitably have been drawn from the small minority disposed to think the police may have acted appropriately. —Charles Rosenberg See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967).

Further Reading Cannon, Lou. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. New York: Times Books, 1997. Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing and Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Jacobs, Ronald N. Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 1998. Koon, Stacey C. Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Washington, DC: Regnery Gareway, 1992. Los Angeles Times staff. Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles before and after the Rodney King Case. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1992.

Denny, Reginald (1953–) Until April 29, 1992, Reginald Denny, a 33-year-old truck driver for Transit Mixed Concrete, was unknown to the world at large or the media. He was driving an 18-wheeler down Normandie Avenue, on his way to make a routine delivery, when he ran into one of the more violent responses to the news that four Los Angeles police officers had been acquitted on all charges in the widely publicized beating of Rodney King. Denny had not even heard of the verdict, and he did not represent the police, but his truck was a convenient target for inchoate rage. The fact that he had the pale complexion referred to in American history as “white,” as did all four police officers on trial, while King, and the members of the spontaneous mob forming where Normandie crossed Florence, had the dark complexion of African descent, undoubtedly contributed to make him a target. Another African American man watched a live report on TV of several men pulling Denny out of his truck, throwing a cinderblock at his head, kicking and beating him. Bobby Green, 29 years old and a fellow trucker, raced to the scene, where he found three others responding to help Denny: Lei Yuille; T. J. Murphy, a 30-year-old, unemployed aerospace engineer; and Terri Barnett, a nutrition counselor. None of them knew Denny, or anyone in the mob attacking him. Together, they got Denny back in his truck, and drove him to a hospital. Denny went out of his way to heal the wounds of the uprising in which he was nearly killed. During a break in his testimony at the trial of Damian Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson, two of his assailants, Denny warmly embraced Georgianna Williams, Damian’s mother, who had told a reporter after her son’s arrest that she wanted to invite Denny over for dinner. Denny also greeted Watson’s parents, Joyce and Henry Watson, who told him “God bless you.” After the trial, Denny said that Watson, convicted of a misdemeanor, had “been through quite enough” sitting in jail for 17 months awaiting trial. Denny pointedly reminded reporters that most of his rescuers, as well as the doctors who treated him, were African American. On another occasion, Denny appeared on the Phil Donahue show to meet and shake hands with Watson. Denny’s skull was fractured in 91 places, inflicting brain damage that required years of therapy. His speech was impaired, as was his ability to walk. He filed a suit against the City of Los Angeles, but it failed, like that of other drivers beaten by the same mob. Ward McConnell, an assistant city attorney, explained that

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“There’s just no duty on the part of the government to provide police protection, or any particular degree of police protection,” which would provide a legal basis for civil damages. Denny moved to Arizona in 1993, where he became an independent mechanic repairing boat motors. He has declined requests for interviews and other media contact. Friends reported that his recovery was slow, but steady, and by 2007, he was able to start driving again. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing and Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 1998. Los Angeles Times staff. Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles before and after the Rodney King Case. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1992.

King, Rodney (1965–) Rodney Glen King, known to family and friends by his middle name, was born April 4, 1965, in Sacramento, California, moving with his parents to Los Angeles County. He played baseball in school, but his greatest passion was fishing with his father. From the time he was in fourth grade, he worked alongside his father, who had contracts to clean buildings at night. In junior high school, Glen King had his own cleaning contracts. Since the work was largely 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., he often came to school after four hours’ sleep. He was remembered by teachers as barely able to read, with a shaky memory, and a soft-spoken student. In a city known for violent, ruthless, and well-armed gang federations, family and friends considered him meek and gentle. Like his father, he had a problem with alcoholism, and his aunt Angela said he had a stubborn streak if provoked. He dropped out of John Muir High School six months before graduation, taking a construction job. Joining the Plasterers and Laborers Union, he took enriched construction classes at Pasadena City College, and married in 1984. He separated from his wife in 1987, after an uncontested battery charge, and remarried in 1988. In 1989, King was convicted of an impulsive second-degree robbery of a corner store, which did not accept food stamps. He originally intended to buy a package of bubble gum. His probation officer wrote that the danger King posed to the community was not that he would steal and rob, but that he had an explosive temper. A model prisoner, King was paroled in 1990, obtaining a construction

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job at Dodger Stadium, where he was punctual and well liked. He continued to drink, which was a violation of his parole conditions, his favorite brand being Olde English 800. On March 2, 1991, King was watching a basketball game at a friend’s home, and drinking. After the game ended, they took a drive with a third man who had been watching the game. King drove at speeds estimated to be over 80 miles per hour on the freeway, passing a state highway patrol car. He later recalled that when the patrol turned its lights on, signaling for him to pull over, he was afraid that an arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol would send him back to prison on a parole violation, and he had a sense that if he kept driving, the problem would go away. Instead, it became one of the most high-profile police brutality cases of the 20th century. King eventually stopped near Hansen Dam Park, in the Lake View Terrace area. He had inconsistent and fragmentary memories of what happened next—being both intoxicated and subjected to repeated baton blows that left him feeling “like a crushed can.” King suffered a broken cheekbone, fractures on the right side of his face, a lacerated forehead, and a fracture of his right leg, from approximately 56 distinct baton blows. King eventually won a $3.8 million damage claim against the city. When protest against acquittal of the police officers who beat him degenerated into random killing and looting, King emerged to call for peace, pointing with evident emotion to the widely publicized death of a security guard, and asking “Can we get along?” —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Cannon, Lou. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. New York: Times Books, 1997. Koon, Stacey C. Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Washington, DC: Regnery Gareway, 1992. Los Angeles Times staff. Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles before and after the Rodney King Case. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1992.

Los Angeles Police Department Up to 1991, when four Los Angeles police officers were caught on videotape beating Rodney King, the city’s police had a history ranging from extreme corruption to models of civic reform and modern methods. The department hired an African American officer in 1886, sharply restricted opportunities for dark-skinned

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officers in the 1920s, and opened a strictly segregated “black watch” in 1940, when two African American officers qualified for the rank of lieutenant—which would have put them in position to supervise “white” officers. In 1922–1923, the police chief was Louis Oakes, a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan who protected gambling and bootlegging operations, while fixing parking tickets was standard procedure. He was replaced by August Vollmer, a criminology professor from the University of California at Berkeley. Vollmer emphasized police education and enlightened enforcement policies, personally led a raid against gamblers protected by corrupt city officers, and ordered another raid against bootleggers protected by corrupt federal officers. He was forced out after a year. Civil service protection for police chiefs, intended to protect the department from political manipulation, left the chief accountable to nobody, including the mayor and city council. During World War II, many experienced officers enlisted in the armed forces; to replace them, educational and psychological standards were lowered, putting “badge-happy,” inexperienced men in uniform. During that time, brutality replaced corruption as the most common complaint against the police. In 1949, a major general from the Marine Corps, William Worton, was hired as chief. In his 13-month tenure, he adopted the military command approach he was familiar with, which gave the force some appearance of an occupying army, de-emphasizing attention to the social setting in which it worked, which Vollmer had initiated. Worton instituted an Internal Affairs Division to handle complaints, which most officers preferred to an outside civilian review process. From the 1890s to the 1950s, and again in the 1990s, the number of officers was kept relatively small to keep taxes low, while funding telephones, call boxes, substations, bicycles, motorcycles, helicopters, and other technology to stretch the efficiency of a “thin blue line” of police on duty. In 1978, community policing was ended on the ground that it spread officers too thinly over too large an area. Residents of high crime areas like South Central Los Angeles were supportive of police, voting for ballot measures to fund more officers and equipment, which were voted down in wealthier communities. However, it was commonly understood that young black men doing nothing illegal were likely to find themselves stopped on suspicion and treated roughly, as were off-duty nonwhite police officers, state senators, business owners, professionals, and retired baseball players, sometimes with young children in their car. Young African American men, innocent of any crime, routinely complained of being stopped by police and “proned”—ordered to lie flat on the ground. Operation Hammer, initiated in 1988, took hundreds of gang members off the street, but it also increased the rate of teens who simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time being roughed up, provoking simmering resentment. Cliff Russ, of the Police Protective League, summarized the climate with the observation “I don’t think Rodney King was

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beaten because of his race. But I also don’t think what happened to King would have happened to a white man from Encino.” —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Cannon, Lou. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. New York: Times Books, 1997. Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing and Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jacobs, Ronald N. Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 1998. Koon, Stacey C. Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Washington, DC: Regnery Gareway, 1992. Los Angeles Times staff. Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles before and after the Rodney King Case. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1992.

Williams, Damian Monroe (1973–) Four individuals among the band of young men attacking truck driver Reginald Denny at the corner of Florence and Normandie, April 29, 1992, were identified from news videotape of the attack, arrested, and indicted. The one facing the most serious charges was Damian Monroe Williams, born March 17, 1973, who had appeared on video news footage throwing a cinderblock at Denny’s head, then doing a football-style victory dance. Henry Keith Watson went to trial with him, while Gary Williams offered a guilty plea, and Antoine Miller was granted a separate trial. A jury found Damian Williams not guilty of attempted murder, assault and aggravated mayhem, convicting him of simple mayhem and four misdemeanors. Williams served four years of a 10-year sentence before being paroled. Watson was convicted of a single misdemeanor assault charge. News coverage and court records identify Williams as a member of the 71 Hustlers, a street gang that acted as a feeder into the Eight Trey Gangster Crips. He had eight juvenile arrests for theft and burglary, but had never been convicted. Friends recalled Williams as generous to young children and devoted in caring for an older brother who had been badly beaten in a robbery. Among his friends were people classified as “white,” but on the day the verdicts were announced, he was prominent in a mob attacking anyone “white”—or, for that matter, Latino or

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Asian—as instant revenge for the acquittal of the four officers charged with the beating of Rodney King. Williams was a high school football star, before dropping out of 10th grade. He tried out for the Los Angeles Mustangs, a semipro football team, the previous year, but had missed practice often and been dropped from the roster. He was a father at age 16. From testimony collected after the events, Williams may have been motivated to take a more active role by the taunts of a young woman at an earlier incident at Florence and Halldale. Police intervened when a youth with a bat began breaking windows on passing cars, and Williams’s half brother, Mark Jackson, was among those arrested. Watching as Williams did nothing to prevent it, a girl called him “pussy.” He was convicted in 2003 of the second-degree murder of Grover Tinner, at a house in the 1700 block of West Gage Avenue, which police said was “used by people selling and using narcotics.” After initially reporting that Williams had fired a fatal shot at Tinner—an account challenged by Tinner’s sister—Williams was charged along with Tyrone David Killingsworth, who, according to the indictment, actually pulled the trigger. Between his arrest in July 2001 and his indictment in September, a coalition of community and religious leaders demanded Williams’s release, saying he was being targeted by police because of his earlier involvement in the Reginald Denny case. Killingsworth was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 110 years, plus 20 years on another charge. Williams was convicted on the grounds that he participated in a crime that resulted in a homicide. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, plus 21 for a stolen firearm. As of 2007, he was confined at the Pelican Bay State Prison. —Charles Rosenberg

Further Reading Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing and Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jacobs, Ronald N. Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery (1992) Reproduced below is the initial progress report of the task force of cabinet undersecretaries and other federal officials appointed by President George H. W. Bush to assess how the federal government could best assist the recovery process in Los Angeles in the first weeks following the 1992 riots. Released barely two weeks after the end of the riots, this report mainly describes conditions in the riot zone immediately after the disorders ended and the first steps taken by federal, state, and local officials to begin the economic recovery of the affected areas.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE: David T. Kearns, Co-chairman Deputy Secretary U.S. Department of Education Washington, D.C. Alfred DelliBovi, Co-chairman Deputy Secretary U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Washington, D.C. Robert E. Grady Deputy Director-designate Office of Management and Budget Executive Office of the President Washington, D.C. Delbert Spurlock Deputy Secretary U.S. Department of Labor Washington, D.C. Arnold Tompkins Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Washington, D.C. Robert S. Mueller, III. Assistant Attorney General Criminal Division U.S. Department of Justice Washington, D.C. Oscar Wright Regional Administrator Small Business Administration San Francisco, California Linda Peterson Regional Administrator Office of Personnel Management Los Angeles, California

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Jay Lefkowitz Office of Cabinet Affairs The White House Washington, D.C. Anna S. Kondratas Director President’s Commission on Urban Families Washington, D.C. Ann M. Veneman Deputy Secretary U.S. Department of Agriculture Washington, D.C. Rockwell Schnabel Deputy Secretary U.S. Department of Commerce Washington, D.C. Anthony Lopez Associate Director Federal Emergency Management Agency Washington, D.C. Joseph Lira Director Minority Business Development Agency U. S. Department of Commerce Washington, D.C. William Medigovich Federal Coordinating Officer Federal Emergency Management Agency Los Angeles, California Earl Fields Chairman Federal Executive Board Long Beach, California Gretchen Pagel Office of National Service The White House Washington, D.C.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery May 12, 1992 The President The White House Dear Mr. President: On Monday, May 4, 1992, in response to the civil unrest in the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, California, you directed that a task force of Cabinet Deputy Secretaries and other key Federal officials be sent immediately to Los Angeles to assist in the recovery process. Attached is a progress report on what that task force has accomplished in the past eight days. We hope that our efforts to date have assisted in easing the effects of this tragedy, and in ensuring the prompt delivery of Federal, state, county, and city services. We have been struck in conducting our work by the genuine desire for prompt recovery, and by the cooperative spirit that has sprung from the ashes of the Los Angeles fires. The work of this task force is ongoing and will continue. We will report again to you in the weeks and months ahead. While our work has been focused on process and implementation issues, we would be pleased to give you and your Cabinet impressions and input as you develop programs and legislation to assist large urban centers. Thank you for the opportunity to serve in this important mission. Respectfully, Alfred A. DelliBovi Co-chairman David T. Kearns Co-chairman

Progress Report of The Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery I. Overview and Highlights On Monday, May 4th, the President established a task force of Cabinet Deputies and other—key Federal officials to assist in the recovery of Los Angeles. The purpose of the task force was limited and straightforward: to knock down barriers to the speedy delivery of services to the citizens of greater Los Angeles who suffered as a result of the disturbances there, and to bring quickly to the area those Federal resources and programs which could help address the immediate problems facing the affected area.

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) The Federal role represented by the task force was not to supplant state and local efforts to rebuild Los Angeles, but rather to ensure a coordinated response and to make the Federal government a helpful partner—assisting in every way possible the state, county, and city governments, and the private sector, in rebuilding their community. Examples of the work accomplished by the task force include: • Assisting in the establishment of 7 Disaster Application Centers (DACS) to provide “one-stop shopping” for residents and businesses in need of disaster assistance and Federal, state, or local services. As demand for the services grew, the task force helped arrange for a mobile facility to expand the space available at one DAC and for the opening of an eighth DAC in an area in need. • Removing roadblocks to the provision of FEMA and SBA assistance to those who suffered fire or looting losses due to the disturbance. • Cutting red tape and providing special assistance to small businesses in the provision of SBA disaster loans. The task force brought in minority business specialists to help small businesses prepare loan applications and IRS personnel to assist in the prompt recovery of tax returns. The task force helped create a special expedited process at the Treasury Department for clearing SBA loan checks, and removed a hurdle for very small businesses by creating a much simplified test of the requirement that they seek credit elsewhere before applying to the SBA. • Responding to the language problem which naturally arises in a diverse community such as Los Angeles. The task force helped arrange for the hiring of about 60 bilingual aides to assist applicants. When a shortage of Spanish-speaking assistants arose, ten were hired on the same day. • Helping to speed the delivery of a full array of Federal services to the Los Angeles area, including rental assistance for those who were displaced from their homes, unemployment assistance for those who lost their jobs, food for those in areas with shortages, emergency funds for those who did not receive Social Security checks, and crisis counseling for those affected by the disturbance. On Monday, May 11th, three days after the opening of the application centers, FEMA mailed the first disaster housing assistance checks to applicants.

II. The Mission of the Task Force One might think of the Federal response to the civil unrest that occurred in Los Angeles as encompassing three phases. One phase was the restoration of peace and the rule of law in the immediate term. A second phase is the provision of necessary assistance and services to those who suffered losses or disruption of services as a result of the disturbance. A third phase is the crafting of a long-term policy strategy for addressing the underlying problems facing urban America. The work of this task force has been focused on the second phase. The task force did not participate in or direct any law enforcement activities, although in the aftermath of the disturbance, the task force leadership has worked closely with Robert Mueller, the

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, and with Governor Wilson to coordinate appropriately with law enforcement. Nor is the task force a policy-making body. This task force has sought to work with the state, county, and city governments, as well as private sector and non-profit entities, in speeding the delivery of services to the people of Los Angeles. The task force worked to bring quickly to the Los Angeles area those programs which the Federal government can deliver right now, under existing statutory authority and using existing funds, to help those victimized by the violence. Most importantly, the mission of the task force has been to knock down any extraneous barriers to the efficient delivery of services to the people of Los Angeles city and county. Too often, the processes and paperwork of the Federal government are a source of frustration to citizens who confront them. The goal of this task force was to ease that frustration in every way possible—and to deliver assistance to the people who need it in record time.

III. The Process Meeting Schedule: Upon arrival in Los Angeles on Monday night May 4th, members of the task force met with Governor Pete Wilson and his staff. Governor Wilson also met with the full task force on Tuesday morning May 5th to offer his assessment of the situation. At that meeting, he designated the State of California’s Director of Emergency Services, Richard Andrews, as liaison with the task force. Also on Tuesday morning, task force representatives met with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Deputy Mayor Linda Griego. Bradley appointed Deputy Mayor Griego as liaison and she met with the full task force on Tuesday to identify specific problems the city had encountered that could be addressed by task force actions. The task force coordinated by telephone on Tuesday with Los Angeles County Chief Administrative officer Richard Dixon, who designated Sheriff’s Lieutenant Ben Nottingham as the County’s liaison with the task force. On Wednesday, May 6th, representatives of the task force met with the Chairman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Deane Dana, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, Supervisor Michael Antonovich, Mr. Dixon, and other representatives of the county. On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 5th, the task force met with Mr. Peter Ueberroth, who had been appointed by Mayor Bradley and Governor Wilson to chair Rebuild L.A., a long-term effort to promote recovery by encouraging private sector investment in affected areas of greater Los Angeles. On Friday, May 8th, at the invitation of its President, Councilman John Ferraro, representatives of the task force presented a briefing to the Los Angeles City Council, and subsequently met with various members of the Council. Throughout the week, members of the task force took the opportunity to meet with members of the community, including the mayors of Compton, Inglewood, Long Beach, and Linwood, City of Los Angeles Superintendent of Schools Bill Anton, Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Stuart Godholt, President of the Los Angeles Urban League John Mack, various members of the clergy, representatives of the police and

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) firefighting forces, and affected businessmen and women. In addition, members of the task force toured affected areas and neighborhoods at various times throughout the week. The task force briefed the President on two occasions: upon his arrival in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, May 6th, and again on Thursday evening, May 7th. Also in attendance at one or both of these briefings was Governor Wilson, Mayor Bradley, U.S. Senator John Seymour, Supervisor Dana, Councilman Ferraro, Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, and Administrator of the Small Business Administration Patricia Saiki. Coordination Mechanisms: The task force has coordinated its activities closely with the state, county, and city governments. Since Tuesday, May 5th, senior task force representatives have participated in a daily conference call with officials of the state, city, county, the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This conference call has made possible an immediate, coordinated response, on a daily basis, to problems that are occurring in the field. This daily conference call will continue for the foreseeable future. For the past week in Los Angeles, the task force met at the beginning and at the end of each working day.

IV. Assessment of the Situation in Los Angeles While the greater Los Angeles community sustained significant damage as a result of the rioting, the task force was impressed by the pervasive signs of hope that have arisen in the wake of this tragedy. Every member of the task force was struck by the genuine desire, at every level of government and throughout the community, to cooperate in working toward the quick recovery of Los Angeles. The nature of the damage which resulted from the thousands of fires set during the rioting was different from that sustained in Watts, Detroit, and other riots iq the 1960s. While the damage was extensive and indeed staggering, relatively few residences were burned: HUD estimates that approximately 250–300 families lost their homes as a result of fires related to the disturbance. The principal physical damage sustained during the rioting was the destruction and/or looting of several thousand businesses. Preliminary estimates by city and county building and safety experts are that 5,000 structures in the greater Los Angeles area were either damaged or destroyed. The businesses housed in these structures provided essential services to the citizens of South Central, Crenshaw, Koreatown, Compton, Inglewood, Long Beach and other areas of greater Los Angeles. The task force believes that an urgent priority is to encourage re-investment in these neighborhoods. Because many of the businesses which were destroyed or looted were small, familyowned businesses, without the staff or facilities for extensive recordkeeping, the task force recognized that these businesses might encounter special difficulties in completing the paperwork necessary to apply for SBA disaster loans and FEMA disaster assistance.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Further, given the emotionally charged nature of the disaster and the attendant tensions in the community, the task force was eager to minimize any additional frustration which might result from delays in processing and receiving disaster assistance. Two key objectives of the task force were therefore to assist in the application process and to streamline the approval process for these types of assistance. The record-keeping problems of small business had the potential to be exacerbated by language barriers in the culturally diverse community of Los Angeles. The languages spoken by affected business owners ranged from English to Korean to Spanish to Persian to Armenian to Thai to Mandarin Chinese. Throughout the week, the task force worked to surmount this barrier by marshalling the resources necessary to provide effective translation services.

V. Disaster Assistance On Saturday, May 2nd, in response to a request from Governor Wilson on that same date, the President declared that a major disaster exists in the County and City of Los Angeles. This declaration made Federal disaster-related funding available for individuals, businesses and local governments who had suffered as a result of the civil disturbance. Specifically, as a result of the President’s declaration, SBA is making available direct, low-interest loans to homeowners, renters, businesses and non-profit organizations who suffered losses. These include physical disaster loans to help rebuild and replace uninsured property, and economic industry loans to provide small businesses with the working capital to replace inventory and otherwise resume normal operations. FEMA is providing temporary housing and grants to individuals and families whose homes and property were damaged in the disaster, and who cannot qualify for SBA loans. In addition, FEMA provides grants to local governments to cover the costs of repairing public buildings and facilities and the overtime salaries of state and local workers who had to respond to the disaster. This SBA and FEMA assistance constitutes the lion’s share of the Federal assistance made available to respond to urgent, short-term recovery needs. In the past, the application and approval process for these programs has been the source of some frustration. The task force was and is committed to removing any unnecessary bureaucratic barriers to the efficient functioning of this process. The specific goal of the task force is to provide this FEMA and SBA assistance in record time. To aid in the task of minimizing confusion for a local population already under stress, the task force worked with the state, county, and city governments to establish centers that would provide all key services under one roof. Under this “one stop shopping” approach, a citizen could find information on and make application for SBA loans; FEMA grants; emergency food, clothing, shelter, and medical assistance; individual and family grants; tax assistance; and crisis counseling—all at one location. On Friday, May 8th, seven Disaster Application Centers (DACS) were opened throughout the affected areas of greater Los Angeles to provide this “one-stop shopping” service. One measure of the success of the task force is this: on Monday, May llth,

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) three days after the opening of the application centers, FEMA mailed its first disaster housing assistance checks to victims of the disturbance. Breaking Down Language Barriers: The task force recognized that language differences could constitute an important barrier to the efficient delivery of services in such a culturally diverse community as Los Angeles. As a result, FEMA, SBA, and the task force worked to tap a range of resources to provide sufficient numbers of linguistic specialists in the DACS. FEMA and SBA enlisted the services of Korean-speaking assistants to aid the many KoreanAmerican business owners affected by the disaster. On Friday, May 8th, it became clear that a shortage of Spanish-speaking assistants existed at the Ardmore DAC site. FEMA redeployed several assistants to that site, and hired ten additional Spanish speaking aides that day. In total, approximately 60 bilingual aides have been hired to date to ease the language problem. In order to minimize the time between the actual disaster and the receipt of disaster assistance, the task force took several actions to reduce red tape and assist applicants. Speeding Delivery of SBA Disaster Assistance Loans: Many of the businesses affected by the rioting were small businesses without extensive records. In order to receive disaster assistance loans, businesses must furnish tax returns from the past three years; an itemized list of losses; proof of operation of a business at a particular location, such as a copy of a deed, lease, or mortgage; a brief history of the business; and financial statements for the past three years. For many of the businesses in the affected areas of Los Angeles, it is difficult to meet these requirements. To help such applicants, the task force: • Arranged for the placement of specialists from the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) in each of the DACS. These specialists are providing technical assistance to businesses in preparing such required items as the business history and the profit and loss statements from the past three years. MBDA arranged to have its services provided in several languages. • Arranged for the placement of representatives of the IRS in each of the DACS, to speed the process of recovering tax returns from IRS headquarters in those cases in which the applicants’ copiesof the tax returns are missing or destroyed. In addition, the task force worked with the IRS headquarters in Washington to ensure that expedited treatment is given to any request to retrieve tax returns in cases related to the situation in Los Angeles. Another requirement of the SBA for disaster loan applicants is that they demonstrate that they sought and were unable to secure credit elsewhere. In the case of many of the small businesses in South Central and other affected areas of Los Angeles, it is safe to assume—in that availability of credit was a major difficulty for

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) them even prior to the disturbance -that they would be unable to secure such credit. In response, the task force: • Developed through SBA a, simplified “credit elsewhere” test. This is a major time saver in the application process, which for thousands of businesses will cut weeks from the time it takes to receive an SBA disaster loan. The length of time required to process SBA disaster loan applications and actually provide checks to affected businesses has been a source of frustration in past disasters. To reduce that frustration, the task force: • Established a special expedited process with the U.S. Treasury Department to speed approval of check writing for the Small Business Administration. Delivering FEMA Assistance Fairly and Efficiently: The city and state governments expressed concern that, due to the wording of the disaster declaration, FEMA and SBA might be in the position of providing disaster assistance to those who had suffered losses or damage due-to fire, but not to those who had suffered losses or damage due to looting. The task force: • Worked with FEMA to clarify the interpretation of the President’s disaster declaration. Under the clarification, FEMA declared that, “ ’Fires during a period of civil unrest’ means all fire-related damages or hardships which occurred during the major disaster.” (emphasis added) Further, FEMA stated that “where it is not feasible to differentiate among the causes of civil unrest . . . or where it appears that damages or hardships may be in any way the effect of fires or fire-related circumstances, all damage is considered to be related to fires.” This interpretation should allow agencies to provide assistance to all those who suffered damages as a result of the civil disturbance. Creating Additional DACs: The task force has sought to be flexible in accommodating the demand for assistance in the community and to reduce undue waiting time in the DACS. When indications of long waiting times at the Ardmore Recreation Center DAC in Koreatown arose on Friday, May 8th, the task force: • Worked with FEMA and the state government to move a mobile DAC to the site, expanding the available space by 720 square feet. When the need for additional application facilities in the Crenshaw area was identified during the first weekend of operations of the DACS, the task force: • Worked to establish a new DAC site at 4030 Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. This new DAC was opened at 10:00 am on Monday, May 11th. The task force is prepared to remain flexible as new demand for disaster recovery services arises.

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VI. Assistance Provided by Other Federal Agencies In addition to FEMA and SBA, other Federal agencies have worked to provide quickly a range of other services and types of assistance in response to the disturbance in Los Angeles. Some examples follow. Agriculture: In response to spot shortages of food in certain neighborhoods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sent over 27,000 boxes of cereal, over 58,000 cans of infant formula, over 1,500 six-pound boxes of nonfat dry milk, and other foodstuffs to Los Angeles area food banks. A USDA survey revealed that private sector donations to food banks soared in the wake of Los Angeles disturbance, and that distribution outlets in the area had been increased, thanks to the participation of churches and other non-profit institutions in the community. The USDA survey revealed that there was no marked increase in food stamp demand in the wake of the disturbance. Nevertheless new requests from individuals affected by the disturbances will be put on a special fast track. Because several outlets authorized to accept food stamps were closed or destroyed, red tape was cut so that new food stamp authorization applications from retail outlets are being processed in one day. At least fifty stores authorized to receive vouchers in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program were closed or destroyed. In response, USDA issued instructions to allow WIC coupons to be valid at any authorized vendor. Commerce: The Department of Commerce has provided both business and economic development assistance in the wake of the Los Angeles disturbance. In addition to placing its representatives in the DACs to assist in the preparation of applications by small minority businesses, the minority Business Development Agency (MDBA) operates two Minority Business Development Centers in the Los Angeles areas. The Commerce Department is in the process of making available approximately $25 million in Economic Development Administration (EDA) funds to assist in the recovery process. Six to ten million dollars will be made available to the county and city governments for bridge loans to businesses to be used for purposes such as cleanup, demolition, and restoration of inventory, machinery and equipment, or building structures. Another $2 to 3 million is expected to be provided to Rebuild LA, chaired by Peter Ueberroth, to help set up and operate this non-profit organization, whose mission is to assist in the economic recovery of greater Los Angeles by attracting job-creating private sector investment. Approximately $1 to 2 million is expected to be provided to the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, to help reinvigorate international to6rism to the Los Angeles area. This is the second largest industry in the area, employing 360,000 southern Californians, eighty percent of whom are minorities.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Finally, EDA is discussing $5.5 million in defense adjustment grants for Los Angeles County, to assist areas where defense contracts were terminated. Some of these grants could be used for seed capital for technology companies which are spinoffs from defenserelated companies. Education: The Department of Education is taking steps to speed the availability ofapproximately $1.2 billion in formula grants to the State of California, and to work with the state to optimize the suballocation of these grants in order to address conditions related to the disturbances. Education is working with college student aid administrators to allow them to use “special condition” procedures in the Pell Grant program to take into account any loss of family income due to the disturbances. In addition, a special desk has been set up at Education’s Federal Student Aid Information Center to handle inquiries from Los Angeles students on how to apply for student aid or how to reflect loss of assets or income due to the disturbances in the application. This desk will be serviced by an “800” phone number. Health and Human Services: Within 24 hours of the disturbance, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) HHS, through the Social Security Administration, ’ ordered the use of emergency check-writing authority to make payments of up to $200 for those elderly poor or low income, disabled children whose Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks were not received as a result of the disturbance. HHS also put in place procedures to speed the replacement of any welfare or disability check lost as a result of the disturbance. HHS dispatched experts from the National Institute of Mental Health to assess mental health assistance needs and requirements. Mental health and crisis counseling is available in the DACS. Epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control were brought in to investigate the health effects of the disturbance-including those related to environmental safety (chemical and biohazards), health control (sanitation and clean water), and other questions. Housing and Urban Development: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) immediately made available Section 8 rental assistance vouchers to those families who have been displaced by fires related to the disturbance. HUD is also making available 32 HUD-owned homes, with a dollar value of $2.3 million, for use in the affected areas. These homes will be leased to the city for one dollar per month. HUD issued a new rule this past week to provide priority contracting for businesses that are at least 51 percent resident owned. This means that a higher proportion of contracts for work performed for HUD will go to businesses which are representative of the area in which the work is to be performed.

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) On Wednesday, May 6th, HUD announced that it will approve requests to allow the early release of over $92 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to the city and County of Los Angeles that were scheduled to be released on July 1st. On Thursday, May 7th, HUD signed an interagency memorandum of understanding with the Department of Labor to better coordinate Labor’s job training efforts with HUD’s HOPE and other public housing initiatives. On Friday, May 8th, HUD announced the availability of $1.5 million in Technical Assistance program grants for low- and moderate-income young people (between the ages of 14 and 21) to help them acquire the skills and knowledge they need to start and operate successful small businesses. The Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) has made available to HUD a list of properties available in the affected area of Los Angeles. HUD has been working to match these properties to local needs, and leases could be signed later this week. Labor: The Department of Labor provided $2 million in emergency grants to hire and pay the wages of workers who were dislocated as a result of the disturbance. Labor also launched a demonstration project to Use unemployment insurance benefit payments to support entrepreneurship efforts by unemployment insurance claimants. Labor also provided about $2 million for several types of training assistance. One grant would establish “one-stop shopping” skill centers to provide vocational training and employment-related assistance to affected areas. Another would finance an expansion of a program operated by the Community Youth Gang Services which allows area youth to participate in community service projects as an alternative to incarceration. A third would finance youth apprenticeship model programs for African-American and Hispanic males. And a fourth would provide training funds to supplement local economic development efforts. Office of Personnel Management: The Director of the Office of Personnel Management authorized the conduct of a special Combined Federal Campaign effort among Federal employees in the Los Angeles area to help generate contributions to non-profit organizations involved in the recovery effort. OPM has also taken steps in the past week to increase job opportunities and to provide job counseling and stress counseling in the Los Angeles area.

VII. Continuation of the Work of the Task Force The work of the task force will continue beyond the efforts of this first week. The task force is committed to implementing fully the President’s directive to work with the state, county, and city, and with the private sector, to ensure the swift delivery of needed assistance and services to the people of Los Angeles. The task force has established a structure and a set of processes to see that this directive is carried out in the weeks and months ahead. With the return of most Deputy Secretaries to Washington, the conference calls with State, county, city, and on-site Federal representatives are nevertheless continuing.

Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Deputy Secretary DelliBovi has returned to Los Angeles this week. Deputy Secretary Schnabel will arrive later in the week. The task force co-chairs, Deputy Secretaries Kearns and DelliBovi, plan to continue alternate visits to Los Angeles for as long as such visits are helpful. Each of the agencies represented on the task force has stationed a representative to remain in Los Angeles. Some of these representatives will be moved to the site of the current Federal/State/Local coordinating office in Pasadena to ensure maximum coordination. The task force co-chairmen are now in the process of identifying a task force leader to lead the task force in Los Angeles on a day-to-day basis. This leader will report regularly to the co-chairmen. In six weeks, the task force has agreed to reconvene in Los Angeles to assess the state of the recovery effort, to meet again with state, local, and private sector officials, and to determine what additional actions are necessary. The task force will work diligently to support state, county, city, and private sector efforts to help Los Angeles recover, and to make sure that the Federal government is a constructive partner in that recovery.

VIII. Conclusion Throughout greater Los Angeles, members of the task force witnessed inspiring signs of hope in the wake of the tragic violence. Store owners whose shops had been looted only days earlier rushed to replace inventory, placed plywood over their shattered windows, and proudly painted “Open for Business” in bold letters on their newly installed plywood facades. Volunteers poured into the affected areas from all over the city—indeed from all over the country. Mayor Bradley estimated that 50,000 volunteers had assisted in the cleanup of Los Angeles in the days following the disturbances. On one street corner in South Central, against a backdrop of a burned out shopping center, a man opened a flower stand, in one first small step of hope and recovery. One firefighters who had served 27 years earlier in combating the fires of Watts, predicted and observed “a much quicker recovery” than that which followed the Watts disturbances, because, he said, of “the total commitment to cleanup and recovery on the part of the local people.” From the ashes of this recovery, the members of the task force found blossoming a springtime of hope. Its most important feature was a near-consensus on the types of measures that are needed not only to restore Los Angeles but to make its neighborhoods stronger than they were before this incident happened. While there is much about which to be encouraged, the task force found that this is a very tough situation. It is estimated that unemployment in the affected area prior to the disturbance was far higher than the national average, perhaps more than triple the national rate. Mayor Bradley estimates that many thousands of jobs were lost as a result of the disturbance—some permanently.

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Los Angeles Uprising (1992) Virtually everyone the task force spoke to believed that private sector investment in these neighborhoods, investment which can create jobs in the community, was the most urgent priority. Virtually everyone the task force spoke to believed that residents of these affected areas must be given a greater equity stake in success—the opportunity to accumulate assets without penalty-from the welfare system, the opportunity to own and manage their own homes, the opportunity to live in neighborhoods free from crime and drugs. What the Federal government can provide is incentives to encourage investment that will create jobs and build local assets. The members of the task force believe that in this emergent consensus lie the seeds of a truly complete recovery for Los Angeles, and for all of America’s cities. Source: Los Angeles—A City in Stress Web site http://isd.usc.edu/~anthonya/la.htm (accessed August 2010).

World Trade Organization Protests (1999) The protests that took place on November 30, 1999, to coincide with the first day of the new millennial round of trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference of 1999 became known as the “Battle of Seattle.” It saw at least 40,000 protesters—mainly Americans, but also some from other countries—being involved in street protests, some violent, outside the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. The concept of the protest was because there would be large numbers of world leaders meeting at Seattle, and the impact that the decisions they would make, were capable of major changes in the world economic scene. This led to a large number of separate groups planning protests, although many came together in the Direct Action Network. The aim was to highlight the problems facing many poor countries as a result of globalization. Essentially, the protest would involve a mass march against the Washington State Convention and Trade Center where the finance ministers and commerce secretaries of the member states of the WTO would be meeting. It was the first American gathering of the WTO and the agenda of the ministers, secretaries, other politicians and delegates were planning to discuss ways in which rules and regulations around the world could be changed to allow for a free flow of trade around the world, heralding, they expected, an unprecedented rise in global trade in the 21st century. The talks were scheduled to last from November 30, until December 3. The demonstrators were determined to push for various issues to be discussed. For the most part, they opposed globalization, which would lead to an erosion of cultures in many countries around the world, and worse working conditions as a part of the “race to the bottom,” which would see countries competing against each other to offer lower wages than their competitors to get a share of the manufacturing industry trade. The people involved in the demonstrations came from a range of groups, including consumer lobbying organizations, farmers, feminists, and human rights activists, as well as environmentalists, trade unionists, and anarchists—the latter coming together to form the Direct Action Network. The Direct Action Network was involved in a planned series of demonstrations and actions, which started at

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Protesters picket outside the World Trade Organization Summit demonstration in Seattle, February 22, 2002. (Christopher J. Morris/Corbis)

dawn on November 30. This involved some of their members taking control of parts of the city as the main demonstration made for the Paramount Theater, where the opening ceremony was scheduled to take place. The demonstrations were so large that the police were unable to control them, and it was not long before access to the Paramount Theater was blocked. Initially, the authorities managed to have the opening ceremony delayed for an hour, hoping to be able to clear the streets of demonstrators. However, a number of demonstrators turned violent, while others chained themselves to railings and concrete blocks. The opening ceremony was delayed as police wearing full body armor charged the demonstrators, firing tear gas, from 10:00 a.m. The police had started planning for the WTO Ministerial Meeting for nine months, but their plans were soon in tatters. When the police recognized that they could not clear the demonstrators from around the Paramount Theater, they advised all WTO delegates to remain in their hotels, which were cordoned off by the police, and it was decided to cancel the opening ceremony. By this time, demonstrators had turned their fury on symbols of U.S. capitalism such as McDonalds, Warner Brothers, Planet Hollywood, Starbucks, and Bank of America. The conference finally started with a plenary session at 2:00 p.m., at the Seattle Convention Center, and the demonstrators headed there and engaged in many

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“battles” with the police, hurling missiles, and setting fire to garbage bins. By 3:00 p.m., the police had used up their entire stock of pepper spray, and the U.S. government wanted the police to take greater action to ensure that the WTO would not be forced to cancel the meeting altogether—which seriously looked like a possibility. The surprise for the police was not just the number of demonstrators and their ferocity, but also that they were so well prepared, with a clear plan of action, and many of them wearing disguises to prevent being identified, and some also wearing gas masks. The Clinton administration put pressure on the mayor of Seattle, Paul Schell, who in turn contacted the state’s governor, Gary Locke, and asked him to send in the National Guard backed with state troopers. Locke agreed, and at 4:30 p.m., a state of emergency was declared. Then it was announced that a curfew for downtown Seattle would be enforced from 7:00 p.m. until 7:30 a.m.—the first curfew in the city since World War II. Furthermore, there was a ban on people who were not from the police carrying gas masks in downtown Seattle. The first day of the “Battle of Seattle” ended with two WTO delegates and about 30 others hospitalized with injuries, and 68 protesters arrested. On the second day, December 1, the police were better prepared. With all protests banned in central Seattle, police on horseback and in armored vehicles fired tear gas and rubber bullets to drive back the demonstrators, some 504 of them being arrested. However, on that second day, the WTO delegates were able to meet and discuss some of the issues they had been planning to conduct. It was not long before the focus of the press began to turn to allegations of heavy-handed actions by the police. It soon became apparent that some shopkeepers and others not connected with the demonstration had been tear gassed, and some of them had been arrested. There were claims that people held in custody by the police were being beaten up, and indeed the Seattle police chief Norm Stamper would retire a week later, largely as a result of these complaints. At the same time, it became clear that many of the WTO delegates had not been able to conduct the negotiations that had been planned, and the WTO meeting in Seattle had been successfully disrupted. In addition to Stamper’s resigning as police chief, Schell lost the mayorial election in 2001 to Greg Nickels. It was claimed that the damage to businesses in Seattle was around $20 million, with the costs incurred by the local authorities being $9 million ($3 million more than they had budgeted for). After many legal challenges and court battles, many demonstrators who had been arrested successfully fought their detention, with many paid compensation. It also set the scene for subsequent protests at WTO meetings elsewhere in the world. —Justin Corfield

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World Trade Organization Protests (1999) See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1972); Boston Tea Party (1773); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Battle of Athens (1946); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); Day without an Immigrant (2006).

Further Reading Grady, Patrick, and Macmillan, Kathleen. Seattle and Beyond: The WTO Millennium Round. Toronto: Global Economics Ltd., 1999. Schott, Jeffrey J. ed. The WTO after Seattle. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2000. Solnit, David, Rebecca Solnit, and Anuradha Mittal. The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. Edinburgh, UK: AK Press Inc., 2008. Thomas, Janet. The Battle in Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2000. Wallach, Lori, and Nader, Ralph. The WTO: Five Years of Reasons to Resist Corporate Globalization. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000.

Direct Action Network The Direct Action Network brought together a number of active anarchist organizations, protesters, and many others pursuing a range of causes to form a single organization that sought to demonstrate against globalization in general, and the World Trade Organization in particular. The organization has also been involved in other demonstrations that coincide with meetings of world leaders, and has inspired similar groups in other countries. The people who formed the Direct Action Network first came together in February 1999, having taken some inspiration from the demonstrations held against the APEC Summit meeting held in Vancouver in November 1997. Certainly, the people who planned the demonstrations against the WTO were involved for similar reasons. This was because they saw the actions which the ministers at the meeting in 1999 hoped to achieve—i.e., an increase in free trade, rather than improving the economy through the economic concept of comparative advantages, would see some third-world governments were reducing wages and working conditions to encourage manufacturers to use their countries in preference to others. This led to the targeting of companies that were seen to represent U.S. commercial imperialism. Most of the members of the Direct Action Network were from the United States, although because of its location, many Canadian supporters became involved in the planning and the demonstrations held in Seattle in 1999. The detailed planning took place throughout June and July, with plans for mass nonviolent direct action in a coordinated fashion to prevent the WTO gathering from taking place. Many of the meetings were held at Portland, with many of the early activists coming from San Francisco, and only later did people from Seattle become involved. One of the major problems was to get large numbers of people to participate. To this end, the Direct Action Network embarked on a major advertising campaign and rallied potential protesters from supportive groups as well as students. The Internet was also used, as was the journal Earth First! The organizers were conscious of the need for large numbers, and also tight discipline to ensure that the group would take control of the streets and hold them against any concerted police plans. Subsequently, some members of the Direct Action Network demonstrated at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia on July 29, 2000, and at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles two weeks later. They also helped organize protests at the inauguration of George W. Bush in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2001. However, it was not long before tensions within the Direct

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Action Network caused splits, although they did come together on February 2, 2002, for the protests against the World Economic Forum that was meeting in New York City. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Solnit, David, Rebecca Solnit, and Anuradha Mittal. The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. Edinburgh, UK: AK Press Inc., 2008. Thomas, Janet. The Battle in Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2000.

Economic Justice The concept of economic justice—which was one of the central points made by the protesters in the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999—involved designing a world economic system by which poorer countries would be able to develop without threats to their economies or culture in the “race to the bottom” by which governments lowered wages and working conditions to attract foreign investment. The WTO, meanwhile, was at the forefront of promoting the economic law of comparative advantage, by which countries would concentrate on whatever type of industry in which they had a comparative advantage—whether it was cheaper access to resources, power, or lower labor costs. The idealistic viewpoint of those urging for “economic justice” was that people in third-world countries should be able to grow their crops or run their businesses without having to cut their costs back to the extent that workers were forced to live in poverty, or to work in unsafe workplace conditions. Much of this stemmed from research showing that much of the cost of an item such as coffee was incurred by the companies’ marketing and distributing the product in Western countries, and that the actual amount of money paid to the growers was relatively low. On the one hand, this could be resolved by paying more money to the producers, but on the other hand, a large number of new products started to appear on the market in Western countries, often sold through charity outlets or delicatessens, and later through some supermarket chains. Many of these items are branded as “fair trade” products. Although the “fair trade” movement started in the 1940s, it was only in the 1990s that the products became commonplace in shops throughout Western Europe and North America. As these “fair trade” items start to become more common, there has been a great focus by demonstrators, such as those at Seattle,

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on large multinational chains such as McDonalds and Starbucks. The former was widely criticized and was the subject of attacks during the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and elsewhere, especially in France—there leading to the rise of Jose´ Bove´, although this arguably had more to do with French nationalism than any concept of “economic justice” for third-world producers. McDonalds and most other companies subjected to attacks have sought to change their image. They have embarked on programs to reduce the use of polystyrene (in the case of McDonalds), and many leading retailers have agreements with suppliers that the workers in their factories and workshops have good working conditions and are paid a good wage appropriate to the cost of living in the country in which they are employed. These reactions to protests, resulting from the increasing awareness of the buying public, led to a greater degree of “economic justice,” although many people also argued that much work remained to be done in this field. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Bove´, Jose´, with Francois Dufour. The World Is Not For Sale: Farmers Against Junkfood. London: Verso, 2001. Nicholls, A., and C. Opal. Fair Trade: Market-Driven Ethical Consumption. London: Sage Publications, 2004.

Globalization The system of trade around the world had become common in ancient times for luxury items, and also for some commodities such as tin from Cornwall, needed in the Mediterranean for the making of bronze. However, this increased rapidly during the early modern period in Europe, and with the Industrial Revolution, manufactured goods were being made in one country and sold extensively elsewhere. With Great Britain leading the way through its manufacturing industry, the lower costs of factory production resulted in widespread unemployment from British artisans, and later those from other countries as the goods started to be sold around the world. With cheaper transport during the later part of the 19th century, and then especially after World War II, international trade increased rapidly as businesses took advantage of the relatively low cost of some inputs, such as labor or power, in some countries. Many saw this as the law of comparative advantage, an economic theory by which goods were made in the country where they could be manufactured at the lowest cost, and this was viewed—by these businesses—as beneficial

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to the world economy. The reduction in costs was seen as allowing people to have more money to spend on other goods, and this in turn could stimulate other parts of the economy, as well as providing employment for many people in third-world countries. The result has certainly been the building of large factories, especially garment factories, in some countries such as China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Fiji, where labor costs are much lower than in Western countries. By contrast, there was also a rise during the 1990s of anti-globalization protesters who saw the problem as reducing the wages in many countries that were already poor. This became known as the “race to the bottom,” whereby the competition would be able to reduce wages, working conditions, and safety standards to enable goods to be produced as cheaply as possible. News about industrial accidents, fires, and, in the case of China, allegations about the use of prison labor have been particularly well covered in the Western media. The effect of all of this has also seen the erosion of much of the work for low-skilled laborers in Western countries, often leading to long-term unemployment for many of them. Although the “race to the bottom” was seen by economists and some political commentators as the most important negative side effect of globalization, many of the demonstrators at Seattle and in protests at other WTO meetings, tended to focus on the problems facing countries that had tried to resist cultural imperialism. Globalization was seen to erode the cultures of many countries, causing increased demand for western goods. This led to many anti-globalization protesters focusing on the symbols of Western cultural imperialism, such as McDonalds, and CocaCola. It later saw many demonstrators turning their attention on particular companies that were accused of exploiting third-world workers such as Nike, although in the case of that company, it has shown that its workers are paid well in Indonesia compared to those working in other similar factories in the same country. —Justin Corfield

Further Reading Glyn, Andrew. Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mander, Jerry, and Edward Goldsmith. The Case against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. Murray, Warwick E. Geographies of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2006. Osterhammel, Jurgen, and Niels Petersson. Globalization: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Day without an Immigrant (2006) When students and workers walked out on May 1, 2006, in support of immigrant rights, many businesses took notice. Between one million and 1.1 million people left their jobs for Dia Sin Inmigrantes, “A Day without Immigrants,” a show of immigrant strength intended to show legislators how much economic impact immigrants have. The intent was to deter those seeking to tighten immigration, build a wall along a third of the U.S.-Mexican border, and make illegal aliens felons. In the back story of the May 1 demonstration, Michael Chertoff’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began a roundup of over 10,000 illegal aliens and their employers in early April. The House had earlier passed a bill with just those provisions, but the bill stalled in the Senate, primarily over Democratic demands for some route to citizenship, what Republicans read as amnesty. Democrats did not like the felon provision or the fence, and the president, George W. Bush, wanted a guest worker provision. Illegal immigrant workers were estimated at 7.2 million, or 4.9 percent of the labor force. In farm work, undocumented immigrants were 24 percent of the workforce, and they were 14 percent of construction workers. Fox News referred to them as “illegal immigrants and their allies” in its coverage. Fox estimated the number of illegal immigrants at 11 million. The demonstrations and walkouts took place in New York; Washington; Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; San Francisco, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The boycott included school, work, and shopping. Some who worked bought nothing. Some protested on lunch breaks or after work. Also on the agenda were picnics, human chains, and candlelight vigils. Chicago’s demonstration had by various estimates 300,000 to 400,000 participants, and predominantly Hispanic schools in the city had attendance drops of 10 to 33 percent. The walkout was greater in the upper grades; school district officials estimated that 70–90 percent of students at predominantly Hispanic high schools were absent. Demonstrators carried American and Mexican flags and signs that

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read, “We build your homes,” as well as “We’re not terrorists.” Police were expecting no violence, having worked with organizers, and no riot gear was issued. As well as the 300,000 to 400,000 who turned out at Chicago, additional rallies drew protesters in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Denver, and Houston as well as 50 smaller cities, even in South Dakota and Connecticut. The day was truly a national event. In New York City, a human chain to symbolize the day the immigration bill passed the House, December 16, 2005, occurred at 12:16. Eight chains involved 12,000 people. In Los Angeles, about 200,000 people marched to City Hall, and 400,000 turned out for an evening march. The marchers were peaceful and cheerful. More than 72,000 6th to 12th graders skipped school. San Francisco’s march of 55,000 included drums, Mexican and American flags, and a chant of “We are united.” Businesses in the predominantly Mexican Mission neighborhood closed for the event. Other protests occurred in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina had attracted immigrant labor and construction businesses shut down for the day. Atlanta, Houston, Denver and other cities had relatively small demonstrations. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Hispanic, doubted the efficacy of the march. Richardson thought the protesters were sending the wrong message: “come to America to work, yet they’re not working.” His preference was for lobbying of Congress. The hardest-hit industries were construction and nursery work. In Houston, some companies reported that closing cost them $10,000. In Long Beach, California, where 100 lunch trucks normally lined up outside California United Terminals, only three or four appeared. Food processing companies also felt the impact. Tyson Foods had to close a dozen plants and reduced staff at others. Perdue Farms closed eight of its 14 plants. Goya Foods delivered only in Florida. Georgia’s Gold Kist poultry processor reported 400 of its 16,000 mostly Latin American immigrant workers absent. Even McDonald’s experienced short staffing. Workers who stayed on the job either could not afford to miss the pay or feared they would be fired. They included a fish processor and a park worker. Hormel reported that its eight plants in Minnesota were operating normally. In Washington, D.C., where the mood of the Congress was decidedly antiimmigrant, a Hispanic-American coalition held a press conference to indicate that the protesters were not representative of all Hispanics, particularly those who made it legally. The anti-rally group in D.C., was called “You Don’t Speak for Me.” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, organizer of the anti-rally group, said, “As the demands of illegal aliens and their supporters become ever more shrilled and outrageous, the silent majority of Americans are remaining silent no longer. We are proud and delighted that will give a voice to the millions of hard-working, law-abiding Hispanic Americans

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whose views are too often misrepresented.” Meanwhile a demonstration at Washington’s Malcolm X Park attracted hundreds of protesters, and some restaurants and shops closed. Other opponents were vocal in Colorado and Arizona. Houston, with 37 percent of its two million people being Hispanic, appeared to be turning away from support of immigrants. The 2006 Houston Area Survey showed 50 percent supporting the 2,000-mile border fence if cost was not a factor. Also, Houstonians were over 50 percent in favor of reducing immigration for the first time since 1998. In Pensacola, Florida, retired Army colonel Jack Culberson said, “You should send all of the 13 million aliens home, then you take all of the welfare recipients who are taking a free check and make them do those jobs.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called on demonstrators to attend mass rather than protest. The Chicago rally represented Arab, Asian, black, Hispanic, and Eastern European communities as well as labor and religious organizations. They asked students and workers to get permission to leave work or school to attend the demonstration. In Mexico City, video rental stores experienced a strong demand for “A Day Without a Mexican.” The movie got credit for inspiring the May 1 immigrant demonstrations in the United States. Released in 2004, it depicted the problems that California endured on a day when Mexicans (in general Latinos) were not available. Mexican unionists, lawmakers, and activists expressed their support for the demonstrations in protest of the House’s stringent immigrant bill. Labor would hold its traditional May Day demonstrations. Mexican groups urged support of the U.S. effort through a boycott of U.S. products and businesses. The Vicente Fox administration, which was working with Bush toward immigration reform before 9/11, indicated that it would not participate, but administration officials had been meeting with immigrant advocacy groups and were abreast of the situation. The movie, by Mexican director Sergio Arau, shows California without its Latinos, a third of its work force and a fourth of the population. After a day of confusion and disorder, U.S. Border Patrol agents welcome migrants back with hugs rather than detention. The movie is a comedy. The day was not a universal success, but one goal was accomplished. It drew attention to the presence of immigrants in the United States. Participation was less clearly a success. Although over a million participated, the majority of them were in just two cities, Los Angeles and Chicago. More typical were the turnouts in Denver—75,000—and Houston, just 15,000. Congress did not pass the legislation, but it passed no immigration reform legislation, either. Attempts to duplicate the day proved ineffectual in 2007 and 2008, and a crackdown on illegal immigrants accelerated in the waning months of the Bush administration. —John H. Barnhill

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Day without an Immigrant (2006) See also all entries under Stamp Act Protests (1765); Boston Massacre (1770); Regulator Movement (1771); Pine Tree Riot (1772); Boston Tea Party (1773); Shays’ Rebellion (1787); Whiskey Rebellion (1794); Brooks-Baxter War (1874); Plan de San Diego (1915–1916); Green Corn Rebellion (1917); Zoot Suit Riots (1942); Battle of Athens (1946); Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1981); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading Cevallos, Diego. “Labour Day: Mexico Backs ‘Day without Immigrants.’ ” Oneworld, April 30, 2006. http://us.oneworld.net/node/131905 (accessed July 18, 2010). “A Day without Immigrants.” Fox News, May 1, 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/story/ 0,2933,193761,00.html (accessed July 18, 2010). Hamilton, Anita. “Day without Immigrants: Making a Statement.” Time.com, May 1, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1189899,00.html (accessed July 18, 2010). Kahn, Carrie. “Impact Varies on ‘A Day without Immigrants.’ ” NPR, March 30, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5376023 (accessed July 18, 2010). “Thousands March for Immigrant Rights: Schools, Businesses Feel Impact as Students, Workers Walk Out.” CNN.com, May 1, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/01/ immigrant.day/index.html (accessed July 18, 2010).

Undocumented Immigrants An undocumented immigrant is a person in the United States without appropriate paperwork—visa, green card, or other federal permission. They cross the borders illegally, arrive as a tourist or student and fail to leave, and establish themselves as ordinary if illegal residents. Opponents call them illegal aliens and claim that “undocumented immigrant” is a politically correct bid for sympathy. Critics say illegal immigrants mock the millions of legal immigrants who wait years to come, take 700,000 native jobs annually, cost billions in welfare and social services, increase crime, and make border enforcement impossible. Andres McKenna Polling and Research reported in 2004 that 73 percent of those surveyed defined noncitizens as “illegal aliens,” while only 25 percent preferred “undocumented workers.” As of 2002, the number of undocumented immigrants was 9.3 million, 26 percent of the foreign-born population. Sixty percent were really undocumented; 40 percent overstayed their documentation. Fifty-seven percent (5.3 million) were from Mexico, with another 23 percent from elsewhere in Latin America

The old U.S.-Mexico border fence fades into the Pacific Ocean at Border Field State Park near Tijuana, Mexico. (U.S. Army)

1133

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Day without an Immigrant (2006)

(2.2 million.) Asians comprised 10 percent, Europeans and Canadians 5 percent, and the rest of the world another 5 percent. Six states are home to nearly twothirds of undocumented immigrants, with California having 26 percent, followed by Texas at 12 percent, Florida at 10 percent, New York at 8 percent, and Illinois and New Jersey at 4 percent. From the mid-1990s, states with the most rapid growth in share of the undocumented immigrant population are those with recent immigrant population growth. The Rocky Mountains, Midwest, and Southeast are the new destinations. By some estimates, by 2002, New Jersey trailed Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina in number of undocumented aliens. About six million undocumented immigrants work, constituting 5 percent of the U.S. labor force. Undocumented men tend to be younger and less likely to be in school, retired or disabled. The 96 percent of undocumented men who work is higher than the percentages for legal immigrants or natives. Sixty-two percent of undocumented women work. Proportionately, undocumented women are more likely to have children and stay at home. The percentage for all workers is closer to 33 percent. Undocumented workers make up less than 10 percent of the 43 million low wage workers in the country. Forty-one percent of undocumented immigrants are women 18 and older, 3.2 million people. About 1.6 million children are undocumented, and 3 million have undocumented parents. Sympathizers note that undocumented workers pay into Social Security about $7 billion a year while receiving no Medicare or other Social Security benefits, in part because they return home when they retire. They paid 10 percent of the 2004 Social Security surplus. Most pay taxes. Also, immigrants use health care less than natives. Most have health insurance. Undocumented aliens are an 11-million-person market that banks, mortgage firms, credit card companies, and phone companies are seeking aggressively. They add at least $22 billion to the U.S. economy annually. Moreover, they are not terrorists. Tightening the border only increases the number who die and the cost of crossing illegally. It also forces them to stay longer once they arrive. Undocumented immigrants are half of farm laborers, a fourth of meat and poultry, dishwashers, drywall, and ceiling tile installers. They are everywhere in the United States. —John H. Barnhill

Further Reading “Burglars Are Not Uninvited House Guests. Car-Jackers Are Not Under-Rated Drivers. Bank Robbers Are Not Making Unauthorized Withdrawals. Illegal Aliens Are Not Undocumented Immigrants.” http://www.illegalaliens.us/ (accessed October 2008). Chavez, Leo Ralph. Shadowed Lives. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Federation for American Immigration Reform. “What’s Wrong with Illegal Immigration?” March 2005. http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7443 (accessed October 2008).

Day without an Immigrant (2006) League of United Latin American Citizens. “The Truth about Undocumented Immigration.” http://www.lulac.org/advocacy/issues/immigration/truth.html (accessed October 2008). Passel, Jeffrey S., Randolph Capps, and Michael E. Fix. “Undocumented Immigrants: Facts and Figures.” Urban Institute, January 12, 2004. http://www.urban.org/url.cfm ?ID=1000587 (accessed October 2008). Swain, Carol M. Debating Immigration New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

1135

List of Contributors

Gretchen A. Adams Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas

Robert J. Chandler Wells Fargo Historical Museums San Francisco, California

Rolando Avila University of Texas–Pan American Edinburg, Texas

Justin Corfield Geelong Grammar School Geelong, Australia

John H. Barnhill Independent Scholar Houston, Texas

Rory T. Cornish Winthrop University Rock Hill, South Carolina

Randal Beeman Bakersfield College Bakersfield, California

Matthew Daley Grand Valley State University Allendale, Michigan

Walter F. Bell Aurora University Aurora, Illinois

Kelton Edmonds California University of Pennsylvania California, Pennsylvania

Kevin M. Brady Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas Ron Briley Sandia Preparatory School Albuquerque, New Mexico Lorri Brown Independent Scholar Farmington, Maine John R. Burch Jr. Campbellsville University Campbellsville, Kentucky Jacqueline M. Cavalier Community College of Allegheny County Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Merrill Evans Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan Darcy R. Fryer Brearley School New York, New York Andrew Galloway St. Philip’s College San Antonio, Texas Matthew L. Harris Colorado State University Pueblo, Colorado Ralph Hartsock University of North Texas Denton, Texas

1137

1138

List of Contributors

Douglas S. Harvey Washburn University Topeka, Kansas

Caryn E. Neumann Miami University of Ohio Middletown, Ohio

Charles F. Howlett Adelphi University Garden City, New York

Dave Powell Gettysburg College Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Benjamin H. Johnson Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas

Jason Reuscher Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania

Mark S. Joy Jamestown College Jamestown, North Dakota Daniel E. Karalus Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona C. Richard King Washington State University Pullman, Washington Jacob F. Lee Filson Historical Society Louisville, Kentucky Tess Mann Independent Scholar San Diego, California Sandra K. Mathews Nebraska Wesleyan University Lincoln, Nebraska Terry M. Mays The Citadel Charleston, South Carolina Gregory Moore Notre Dame College Euclid, Ohio John Morello DeVry University Downers Grove, Illinois

Jedediah S. Rogers Bureau of Reclamation Denver, Colorado Gerald Ronning Albright College Reading, Pennsylvania Charles Rosenberg Independent Scholar Milwaukee, Wisconsin Ethan Schmidt Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas Dawn M. Sherman Independent Scholar Greenbelt, Maryland Arthur K. Steinberg Independent Scholar Salisbury, North Carolina William Sturkey Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio Paul E. Teed Saginaw Valley State University University Center, Michigan Ronald Young Canterbury School Fort Myers, Florida

Index

and the Boston Tea Party, 196 First Continental Congress, 200 and Jonathan Mayhew, 146 and the protest movement, 143 reaction to repeal of Stamp Act, 136 and Thomas Preston, 161–162 Adams, John Quincy and antiwar activism, 927 and John Adams, 158 Adams, Samuel biography, 139–140 and the Boston Tea Party, 194, 195, 196 First Continental Congress, 200 Granary Burying Ground, 159 and John Adams, 157 on Shays’ Rebellion, 215 and Stamp Act Congress, 145 and Stamp Act protests, 130, 132, 141 Addams, Jane antiwar activism, 928 and women’s movement, 480 “Address to Judiciary Committee of House of Representatives of the House of Representatives by Victoria C. Woodhull,” 494–496 “Address to the People” (Brooks-Baxter War), 546 “Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion, An” (1786), 223–224 Adelantado (economic power), 39 Admiralty Act, 130–131 Admiralty Courts colonial, 130–131, 143 protests against, 134, 141 and Stamp Act Congress, 144 trial by jury, 147 Advocate of Peace journal, 927 African Americans and the civil rights movement (1953–1968), 891–901

Abel, I. W., 996 Abernathy, Ralph, 910 Abolitionists and Harpers Ferry raid, 415, 420 and John Brown, 257–258, as moral reformers, 416, 425–426 and Nat Turner, 269 overview, 279–280 and slave system, 252 and women’s movement, 474 Abortion and Roe v. Wade, 1055–1056 Abourezk, James, 1076 Acadians, 118 “Account of the Boston Tea Party” (Hewes) (1772), 204–206 “Account of the Course of the [Homestead] Strike,” 637–640 “Account of the Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston, An” (1765), 148–150 “Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado,” 718–719 “Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards,” 634–637 Acequia (ditch), 39 Acoma Pueblo nation, 39 Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province, An (1740), 73–74 Adams, Abigail and the Boston Tea Party, 195 and women’s movement, 473 Adams, Henry, 1067, 1069 Adams, John ambassadorship, 157 biography, 157–158 on Boston Massacre crowd, 158 and Boston Massacre defense, 154, 155, 159

I-1

I-2

Index African Americans (continued) collective action, xxiii–xxiv and Detroit Riots (1967), 987–992, 993–994 disenfranchisement of, 318 and Great Migration, 757, 773–775 and Homestead Strike, 625 and Jewish Americans, 693–694 and Ku Klux Klan, 542 and Louisiana 1870 population, 537 lynching of, 775, 776 and New Orleans Riot (1866), 449–452 New York Draft Riots, 435, 438–439 and northern migration, 766 and police brutality, 880–881 and racism, 445–446 and Radical Republicans, 552 and Red Summer Riots, 765, 767–771 right to vote, 456 and Tulsa Race Riot (1921), 771, 801–804 and Watts Riots (1965), 965–971 and Zoot Suit Riot, 869, 874, 875 African American soldiers and Houston Riot, 749 overview, 753–754 Agua Dulce Creek, 298 Ahmann, Mathew, 905 Aiken Massacre, 384–385 Akeley (Ekley), Francis, 196 Akerman, Amos Tappan (attorney general), 537–538 A. L. A. Schecter Poultry Corp v. United States, 855 Alabama and civil rights movement, 895, 896, 897–898, 899 and First Missouri Compromise, 356 and SCLC, 910 Alamance, Battle of, 172, 177–178, 181, 182 Alamo, Battle of (1836), 296, 300, 303, 309 Alarm, The, 578, 585 “Albion Hall,” 857 Alcatraz Island Occupation (1969–1970) collective action, xxii, 1031–1034 and Indians of All Tribes, 1035–1036 and John Trudell, 1039–1040 and Red Power, 1074

and Richard Oakes, 1037, 1039 and the termination policy, 1038–1039 “Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father,” 1035, 1040–1042 Alema, Octabiana, 730 “Algerine Law,” 312, 313, 317 Algiers Motel Incident, The (Hersey), 990 Algonquian nation, 17 Allegheny Arsenal, 566, 569–570 Allen, Crawford, 316 Allen, Levi, 538 Allen, Phillip, 318 Allen, William, 91–93 Allentown (PA), 93 Allerton, Isaac, 2, 5 Almanza Dragoons, 105 Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), 1047, 1048 Altgeld, John Peter Haymarket Riot, 582 on Pullman Strike, 648 Altimira, Jose´, 343 Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) “Account of the Course of the Strike,” 637–640 “Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards,” 634–637 and Homestead Strike, 619–627 lockout, 631 overview, 629–630 American Academia of Arts and Science, 218 American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) Declaration of Sentiments, 415 established, 279 and Susan B. Anthony, 484 and women’s movement, 474 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 1047, 1048 American Civil Liberties Union, 929 American Civil War and antiwar activism, 927–928 and Bleeding Kansas, 347, 351 causes of, 425–427, 441–442 and conscription, 442 and Copperheads, 443 Elisha Baxter, 549 guerilla warfare, 353 and Harpers Ferry Raid, 420–421

Index Joseph Brooks, 550 Nauvoo Legion, 392 and Neal S. Dow, 366–367 and New York Draft Riots, 435 American Colonization Society, 445 American Crisis (Paine), 141 American Equal Rights Association (AERA) and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and NWSA, 487–488 and Susan B. Anthony, 484–485 and women’s movement, 477, 483 American Federation of Labor (AFL) and auto industry, 847–849, 852–853 and Boston Police Strike, 758, 761, 762 and IWW, 744 and John L. Lewis, 667 and Knights of Labor, 599 overview, 851–852 and socialism, 746 unionization, 762–763 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers, 763 American Football League, 898–899 American Friends Service Committee, 932 American Independence, 181 American Independent Party, 1009, 1023 American Indian Movement (AIM) Broken Treaties protest, 1067–1070, 1074 and Dick Wilson, 1079, 1082, 1083 and FBI, 1080–1081 and John Trudell, 1040 overview, 1071–1072 and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1082 Red Power, 1073–1074 and Wounded Knee occupation, 1075–1077 American Indian Studies Program, 1036–1037 American Indians. See Native Americans American Legion, 802 American Nurses Association (ANA), 1047, 1048 American Olympic Committee, 840 American Party. See Know-Nothing Party American Peace Society, 927 American Railway Union (ARU) overview, 651–652 Pullman Strike, 643–650, 651–652 and socialism, 746

American Republican Party formation, 373, 378 and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 American Revenue Act (1733), 127 American Revolution and Boston Massacre, 151 and nativism, 378 and Pine Tree Riot, 183 Polish soldiers, 665 and Regulator Movement, 173–174 and suspicious fires, 83 and war bonds, 228–229 William Tryon, 182 and women’s movement, 473 American Tobacco Company (ATC) and Black Patch War, 697, 698 and DTDPPA, 702–703 overview, 701–702 American War of Independence. See American Revolution American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) overview, 483–484 and women’s movement, 478, 488 479–480 American Workers Party (AWP), 848, 852–853 “Americanization,” 869, 877 Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, 933 Amherst College, 761 Amherst, Jeffrey biography, 117–118 French and Indian War, 118 Ohio River Valley, 121 and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 112, 113–114, 117, 118 smallpox epidemic, 124 Ammon, Robert, 569 Amoskeag River, 188 Amoss, David, 699 “Article by James McPartland Describing His Infiltration of the Molly Maguires, An” 467–471 An Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences in Publick Affairs (Husband), 180 Anacostia Flats Battle of, 835–836 and BEF, 831, 833

I-3

I-4

Index Anacostia Flats (continued) and Douglas MacArthur, 840 and Walter Waters, 844 Anarchism and Alexander Berkman, 626 bombings, 575, 586–587 and the Haymarket Riot, 575, 577, 585 overview, 585–586 Anarchist circular (Spies), 591–592 Ancient Order of the Hibernians (AOH), 459, 461 Anderson, William (“Bloody Bill”), 353 Andreas McKenna Polling and Research, 1133 Andros, Sir Edmund Dominion of New England, 59 Leisler’s Rebellion, 53 Andry, Manuel, 262 “Angel of the Coal Camp,” 709 Anglican Church and Arthur Dobbs, 179 and Philadelphia Election Riot, 91–93 and William Tryon, 181, 182 Anglican Communion, 95 Anglo-Powhatan War, 12 Angola, 70, 71 Anthony, Susan B. biography, 484–486 and ERA, 1053 illegal voting, 497–499 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and NWSA, 487–489, 490 “Social Purity” Speech, 501–504 and women’s movement, 477–478, 480, 483 Anthracite Board of Trade, 461 Anthracite Coal Region, 661–662 Anti-Catholicism in Colonial New York, 61, 62 and Irish immigrants, 445 and Know-Nothing Party, 373–374, 377 Leisler’s Rebellion, 53, 54, 60 and nativism, 378 Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 325 and Stamp Act protests, 132 Antietam, Battle of, 428 Anti-Imperialist League, 928–929, 933 Anti-Imperialist periodical, 929

Antiquities Act (1906), 1091 Anti-Semitism Bloody Monday, 377 Springfield Race Riot, 689, 691 Antiwar activism A Father’s Disgust, 960–961 and Chicago Riots (1968), xxiv, 1009–1017 collective action, xxiv, 925–935 and counterculture, 937–938 Green Corn Rebellion (1917), xxiv, 739–742, 743–744, 950–951 and the Moratorium, 941–942 SDS leaflet, 950–951 United States v. Spock, 957–960 Apaches in New Mexico, 29, 30, 34–35 Pima Revolt, 100 and Tohono O’odham, 106, 107 Appalachia, 797 Appeal to Reason, 746 Appomattox, Battle of, 428 Appomattox Court House, 441 Aquash, Anna Mae, 1081 Arapaho, 613 Arau, Sergio, 1131 Arbeiter-Zeitung. See Die Arbeiter-Zeitung Arbitration, 644, 647 Arce, Francisco, 335 Ariovistus D. Pardee and Company, 661 Arizona “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1131 Franciscan missionaries, 37 Plan de San Diego, 727 Pima Revolt, 99, 100, 101 Arkansas American Civil War, 551 Brooks-Baxter War, 545–547 and civil rights movement, 894, 895 WCU, 739 Arkansas Central Railroad, 546 Arkansas National Guard, 895 Arkansas Territory, 476 Army of Northern Virginia, 428 Army Topographical Engineers, 333, 337, 341 Arnold, F. W., 651 Arredondo, Joaquı´n, 308

Index Arson in colonial New York, 83 and Detroit Riots, 989 and Watts Riot, 967, 973–974 Articles of Confederation call for reworking, 237 and Shays’ Rebellion, 214 Assembly Bill 413, 1085 Atascosito road, 296, 298 Atchison (KS), 348 Atchison, David as proslavery activist, 348, 349 Topeka Constitution, 362 Athens, Battle of (1946), xxii, 883–885 Athens Water Company, 884 “Athletic clubs,” 768 Atkinson, Edward, 928 Atkinson, Theodore, 185 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 1047 Atlanta (GA) “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 Great Migration, 773 1906 race riots, 778 Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681 Atlanta Race Riot (1906) collective action, xxiv, 681–687 and economic competition, 685 and white supremacy, 686–687 Atlantic Journal, 681 Attica Prison Riot collective action, xxiii–xxiv, 1059–1061 cruel and unusual punishment, 1063–1064 Attucks, Crispus biography, 158–159 and Boston Massacre, 153, 154 Atwood, Caleb, 185 Auboyneau, John, 80, 89 Auchmuty, Robert, 154, 157 Austin, Stephen F. biography, 305–306 and Texas Revolt, 289, 291–295, 297 Australia, 189 Austro-Hungarian Empire and Eastern European immigrants, 665 and Lattimer Massacre, 663

Authorized Bible, 95 Auto Workers Union and labor movement, 847 Autobiography of Malcolm X, 908 Automobile industry and Detroit Riots, 988 and labor movement, 847 Avondale Mine disaster and Molly Maguires, 460 and unionism, 466 Ayeta, Father, 33, 42 Aztla´n, 731 Babbitt, Bruce, 1086 Baboquivari Mountains, 100, 104 Backcountry farmers American Revolution, 174 Regulator Movement, 169 and Shays’ Rebellion, 207 Bacon, Nathaniel and Bacon’s Rebellion, 3–7, 12–13, 20 biography, 3–4, 9–10 “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” 6, 22–26 “Manifesto,” 21–24 significance, 1, 7 and Susquehannock Indians, 4, 18 Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) collective action, xxii, 1–7 and Sir William Berkeley, 3 “Badlands,” 689, 693–694 Baird, General, 450–451 Baird, Eva-Lee, 933 Baker, Ella, 912 Baker, Newton military segregation, 753 and Red Summer Riots, 768 Bakke case, 899 Baldwin, James, 277 Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and Blair Mountain Battle, 793 and industrial violence, 715 and Matewan Massacre, 799–800 Paint-Creek/Cabin-Creek Strike, 797 and Sid Hatfield, 798, 799 and UMWA, 717 Baldwin, Roger, 929

I-5

I-6

Index Bale, Edward Turner, 339–340 Baltimore (MD) and Great Railroad Strikes, 563, 566, 569 Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374 Know-Nothing Riots, 374 and Plug Uglies, 373, 374, 379–380 and Rip Raps, 380–381 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Great Railroad Strikes, 563, 570 and Harpers Ferry raid, 419 Baltimore, Lord (Cecilius Calvert), 329 Bandholtz, Harry, 794 Bankruptcy law, 214 Banks, Dennis AIM leadership, 1067, 1068 and Wounded Knee Occupation, 1075 Banks, Nathan B., 449 Bannan, Benjamin, 460 Bapst, John, 370 Barbados assemble, 54 Barbee, John, 377 Barnett, Ross, 896 Barnett, Terri, 1101 Barre, Isaac, 129–130 Barrett, Edward, 579 Barry, Marion, 912 Bates, Daisy, 895 Bathurst, Robert, 70, 77 “Battle of Seattle,” 1121, 1123 Battle of Toledo, 847, 852–853 Baxter, Elisha biography, 549–550 Brooks-Baxter War, 545–547, 551–552 and Joseph Brooks, 550, 551 Bayard, Nicholas, 54, 55 Bear Flag, 336, 341 Bear Flag Republic, 336, 337, 342, 344 Bear Flag Revolt (1946), xxiv, 333–338 Bear Flaggers, 339–341, 344 Beard, Dewey, 607 Beard, William, 134–135 Beauregard, Pierre G. T., 382 Beaver, 195 Beaver Falls strike, 626 Beaver-hunting grounds, 17–18 Beckwith, George, 927

Beecher, Catherine and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and women’s movement, 474 Beecher, Henry Ward and AWSA, 483–484 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 Beekman, David, 239 Beekman, Henry, Jr., 85 Bellecourt, Clyde, 1067 “Benefit of clergy,” 253 Benevolence organizations, 473, 474, 479 Bennett, Henry, 699 Bennett, Ned, 265 Bennett, Rolla, 265 Benton, Benjamin, 374, 379–380 Benton, Thomas Hart, 341, 342 Berger, Victor, 653–654, 746 Berkeley, William Bacon’s Rebellion, 2–7, 9–10 biography, 11–13 Berkman, Alexander antiwar activism, 929 and Homestead Strike, 626 Bernard, Francis, 130 Bernhisel, John Milton, 394 Berrigan, Fathers Philip and Daniel, 931 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 677–678 Bexar. See San Antonio de Bexar Bible, Douai version, 326 Bidwell, John, 333 Big Foot and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1081, 1082 Wounded Knee Massacre, 605, 606, 607 “Big Four,” 987, 993 Big Hole, Battle of, 554 Bill of Rights (1689) Constitutional ratification, 238 and Lattimer Massacre, 663 and Stamp Act protests, 129 Bills of exchange, 229 Biracialism, 415 Birmingham (AL), 773 Birth of a Nation (film), 542, 805 Bishop, Joseph, 629 Bituminous coal, 707 Black, William Perkins, 581–582

Index “Black belt,” 347 Black codes after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 275 and New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 671 during Reconstruction, 450, 454, 456 Black Coyote, 607 Black feminism, 1044–1045 Black Hawk War (1865–1868), 392 Black Panthers and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1010, 1012 and SCLC, 911 and Stokely Carmichael, 904, as symbol, 903 “Black Patch,” 697, 702 Black Patch War (1909), xxii, 697–699, 703 Black Power (Carmichael/Hamilton), 903 Black Power movement Detroit Riot (1967), 899 and Malcolm X, 908 Newark Riot (1967), 899 and Riots, 899 and SNCC, 913 and Stokely Carmichael, 903 Black Thursday, 459 “Black Wall Street,” 801 “Blackballed,” 861 Blacklists Haymarket Riot, 575 Ludlow Massacre, 709 Pullman Strike, 645, 652 Blackmun, Harry, 1055–1056 Blackstone, William, 129, 141, 143 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 476, 477, 478 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 476, 478 Blackwell, Emily, 476, 478 Blackwell, Henry and AWSA, 483, 488, 490 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and women’s movement, 476, 478 Blair Mountain Battle (1921), xxii–xxiii, 793–795, 797–798 Bland, Giles, 4 Blatch, Harriott Stanton, 480–481, 490 Bleeding Kansas (1854), xxiv, 347–352 “Blind pig” raid, 989 Blodgett, Samuel, 184

“Bloody Act,” 172 “Bloody Monday,” 377–378 “Bloody Thursday,” 858, 861–862, 865 Bloomer, Amelia, 475 Bloomer, Dexter, 476 “Blue book” unions, 857, 862, 867. See also Waterfront Employers Union (WEU) Blue Cloud, Peter, 1035 Blue Lake, 1034, 1067, 1071 Blue Ridge Mountains, 3 Bock, Irwin, 1015–1016 “Body of the People,” 194 “Bo-hunk,” 665–666 Bolshevik Revolution, 757. See also Russian Revolution Bolt, Robert, 103 Bombing, 578, 586–587 Bonfield, John, 578 Bonus Army protests (1932) collective action, xxii, 829–834 “Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia, President Hoover’s Letter and Press Conference,” 844–846 Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), 829–834, 843 Book of Common Prayer, 95 Book of Mormon, 390, 394 Border ruffians Bleeding Kansas, 347, 349, 350, 351 jayhawkers, 354–355 and Pottawatomie Massacre, 360 Topeka Constitution, 361 Bordoise (Bordois), Nicholas, 858, 861 Boss (Royko), 1022 Boston Gazette Boston Massacre engraving, 160, 163 Crispus Attucks, 158 John Adams’ articles, 157 Thomas Preston’s letters, 161 Boston Latin School James Bowdoin, 217 Samuel Adams, 139 Boston Massacre (1770) atmosphere following, 139 collective action, xxii

I-7

I-8

Index Boston Massacre (1770) (continued) “George R. T. Hewes’ Account,” 164–166 overview, 151–156 Revere’s engraving, 151, 152, 154, 155, 160, 164 “Richard Palmes’s Account,” 166–167 trials, 154–155 Boston Police Strike (1919), collective action, xxii–xxiii, 757–759, 761 Boston Port Act, 197, 199 Boston Tea Party (1773) collective action, xxii, 191–198 George R. T.’s account of, 204–206 opposition policies, 143 and Pine Tree Riot, 187 and Samuel Adams, 140 taxation of tea, 147, 193 Boston University, 904 Boudinot, Elias, 239 Boudouin, Pierre, 217 Bouquet, Henry Ohio River Valley, 114 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 113 smallpox epidemic, 124 Bowdoin, James and Alexander Hamilton, 239–240 biography, 217–218 election defeat, 213 and Massachusetts General Court, 219 and Shays’ Rebellion, 210, 211, 212–213, 217, 221 Bowdoin College, 218 Bower Hill, 231, 232, 233 Bowie, James Battle of the Alamo, 304 Texas Revolt, 294 Boxley, George, attempted uprising, (1815), xxiii, 254, 255, 261–262 “Boxley’s Plot,” 161 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 230, 232, 244 Bradburn, Juan Davis, 290, 291 Braddock, Edward, 118 Bradford, Gamaliel, 928 Bradley, Tom, 1098–1099 Bradstreet, John, 114 Bradwell v. Illinois, 499–500 Brandeis University, 1026

Branding, 155, 157 Brando, Marlon and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1033 and Red Power, 1074 Brands, H. W., 608 Brantley, Etheldred T., 271 Brantley, Green, 538 Brazoria, 290 Breslin, Jimmy, 1057 Bridges, Alfred Renton “Harry” biography, 862–863 and Bloody Thursday, 861 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 857, 859, 865, 867 Brimm, Benjamin, 539 Brindletail Republicans, 545–546, 550 Briseno, Theodore, 1096, 1097 Britain and Boston Tea Party, 196–197 martial law, 241 and Ohio River Valley, 121 Pine Tree Riot, 183 Seven Years’ War, 118–119 Stamp Act protests, 127–137 and temperance, 371 women’s suffrage, 480–481 British Imperial, 697 Briton, Crane, 289–290 Broadsides Boston Massacre, 160, 163 colonial media, 159–160 Brock, Clarence, 750 Broken Treaties protest. See Trail of Broken Treaties protest Brooke, Edward W. and civil rights movement, 899 and Kerner Commission, 996 Brooks, Joseph biography, 550–551 Brooks-Baxter War, 545–547, 552 and Elisha Baxter, 549 Brooks, Preston, 351, 360 Brooks-Baxter War (1874), xxii, 545–548 Brooks v. Baxter, 546, 549 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 570 Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, 570, 651, 652

Index Brotherhood of Railway Conductors, 570 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 909 Brown Bess muskets, 294 Brown, Edmund G., 976–985 Brown, John antebellum slave revolts, 257–258 biography, 423–425 and Bleeding Kansas, 348–350, 351, 416 Harpers Ferry Raid, xxiii, 257–258, 415–421, 424–425 “Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution,” 430–432 Pottawatomie Massacre, 359–361, 423–424, 426 “Southern Editorial Response to the Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia,” 432–434 trial of, 420 Brown, Oliver, 417, 419 Brown, Owen (father), 423 Brown, Owen (son), 417 Brown, Sam, 941, 942 Brown, William, 158 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and civil rights movement, 893 and segregation, 678, 679, 807 Bruce, Louis R., 1069 Bryan, William Jennings nomination of, 653 antiwar activism, 928 Bryant, Roy, 894 Buchanan, James biography, 389–390 and Bear Flag Revolt, 334 and Brigham Young, 395–396 and Dorothea Dix, 486–487 and First Missouri Compromise, 357 and Harpers Ferry Raid, 419 opposition to polygamy, 393 Utah War, 383, 386 “Bucket law,” 83 Buckshots society, 466 Buda, Mario, 587 Budenz, Louis, 848 Bull, William, 70, 77 Bull Head, 605 Bull Run, First Battle of, 382

Bullion, Reverend Father, 622 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Broken Treaties protest, 1068, 1069 Dakota Uprising, 611–612 and Dick Wilson, 1083 and FBI, 1080 overview, 1079–1080 and Red Power, 1074 sit-ins, 1032 and Sitting Bull, 615 Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 604, 608–609 Wounded Knee Occupation, 1075 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) “Organic Act,” 1089 and public lands, 1090, 1091 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086 Burford, Anne Gorsuch, 1093 Burgan, Michael, 162 Burger, Warren, 1056 Burke, John, 136 Burnett, Robert, 1067 Burns, Anthony, 429 Burr, Aaron, 241–242 Burroughs, William, 1012 Burton, Mary, 80, 81, 85–86, 89 Burton, Scott, 689 Buses, integration, 895 Bush, George H. W., 1106–1120 Bush, George W. and Direct Action Network, 1125 and Gale Norton, 1094 and immigration reform, 1129, 1131 “Bushwackers,” 353, 354 Bushy Run, Battle of, 113 Butler, William, 171 Byles, Reverend Mather, 153 Byrd, Harry Flood Byrd, 894 Cadwalader, George, 326, 327 Caesar, 80, 87–88, 89, 90 Caldwell, James, 153 Calhoun, Meredith Smith, 537 Calhoun, William, 541 California admission to Union, 394 Bear Flag Revolt, 333–338 Chinese immigrants, 593, 597

I-9

I-10

Index California (continued) and Franciscan missionaries, 37, 38 Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots, 976–985 J. C. Fre´mont’s expeditions, 341–342 Plan de San Diego, 727 “Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic,” 345–346 and women’s suffrage, 480 Zoot Suit Riot, 869–875 California Gold Rush, 391 California Highway Patrol (CHIP), 965 California National Guard and Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 and Watts Riot, 966–967 and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858 Calvin, John, 57 Calvinism, 57–58 Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Royal road), 27, 33, 39 Camp Floyd, 387 Camp Furlong, 751, 753 Camp Logan, 749, 750, 753, 754 Campaign for Economic Democracy, 1025 Campanella, Roy, 897 Campbell Act, 662 Canada French and Indian War, 118 and Jeffrey Amherst, 117 and Nez Perce´’s flight, 554, 559 Sitting Bull, 615 women’s suffrage, 481 Canales, J. T., 737 Cannibals All! (Fitzhugh), 275 Cannon, George Q., 393 Cantrell, Paul Battle of Athens, 883–885 and Pat Mansfield, 887, 888–889 Capdeville, Paul, 672 Cape Breton Island, 117 Cape Fear River Port, 133 Capone, Al, 371 Caraway, Hattie, 481 Carey, Hugh, 1060 Carleton, J. H., 396–414 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) and Bakke case, 899

biography, 903–904 and Black Power, 903, 904 and SNCC, 903, 913 Carnegie, Andrew antiwar activism, 928 and Carnegie Steel Company, 630 and Henry Clay Frick, 630 and Homestead Strike, 620, 621 as “robber barons,” 571 and unionism, 634 Carnegie Institute of Technology, 631 Carnegie Steel Company “Account of the Course of the Strike,” 637–640 and Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA), 629 and Homestead Strike, 619–627 overview, 630–631 Carpetbaggers and Brooks-Baxter War, 545 and freedmen, 541 and Ku Klux Klan, 542 overview, 453–454 Carr, Patrick, 153 Carrillo, Jose´ A., 336 Carroll, Charles, 926 Carroll, John, 153 Carson, Kit, 336, 337 Carson, Moses, 336 Carter, Rosalynn, 1054 Carwardine, William, 644 Cass, Lewis and First Missouri Compromise, 357 popular sovereignty, 358 Castan˜eda, Francisco, 293 Castro, Jose´ and Bear Flag Revolt, 333–337 and Ezekiel Merritt, 340 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 Castro, Manuel, 333, 336 Cathedral of the Assumption, 377 Catholicism colonial New York, 61–62 early settlers, 329 in industrial Philadelphia, 325–327 and Jesuit order, 103–104 Maine Irish, 370, in Mexico, 733

Index in New Amsterdam, 61 and Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374 “Cato’s Rebellion,” 71 Catt, Carrie Chapman and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and women’s movement, 480, 481 Cavanaugh, Jerome, 988, 989 Cayuga Indians, 111 Cazabat, Alphonse, 538 Central Christian Advocate, 550 Central European immigrants and Homestead Strike, 620 and Lattimer Massacre, 662, 665–666 and Ludlow Massacre, 707 Central Labor Council (CLC), 848 Central Labor Union, 576 Chaffin, Tom, 335, 342 Chafin, Don, 793, 794 Chambers, Ed and Blair Mountain Battle, 793 murder of, 799, 800 Chancellorsville, Battle of, 428 Channing, William Ellery, 486–487 “Charcoal Alley,” 966, 967 Charles I (king of England) execution, 59, 187 and Sir William Berkeley, 1 Charles II (king of England) Bacon’s Rebellion, 7 beheading of, 12l colonial administration, 53 and colonial Pennsylvania, 91, 96 and Navigation Act, 142 and Rhode Island charter, 315, 317 Charles, Jaspar, 675 Charles, Robert biography, 675–676 New Orleans Race Riot, 671–673 Charleston (SC) Red Summer Riots, 765, 767–768 slave economy, 75 Stamp Act protests, 133 Stono Rebellion, 70 Vesey’s uprising, 265–266 Charter of Liberty and Privileges (NY), 53 Charterites, 312, 315–316, 317, 319 Cherokee Indians, 307

Cherry Creek (SD), 605 Chertoff, Michael, 1129 Cheslak, Mike, 661 Cheyenne, 613 Cheyenne River Reservation, 602 Chicago (IL) “Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riot” 778–782 Commission on Race Relations, 771 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129–1130, 1131 Great Migration, 773–774 Haymarket Riot, 575–583 and Ku Klux Klan, 542 McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, 590 Red Summer Riots, 768–769, 778 WPUS, 565, 573 Chicago and Great Western Railroad, Egan, 646 Chicago Daily News, 647 Chicago Eight, 1015, 1019 Chicago Evening Post, 647 Chicago Herald, 647, 648 Chicago Journal, 647 Chicago Race Riot “Cook County Coroner’s Report,” 778–782 collective action, xxiv, 1009–1017 Chicago Seven overview, 1019–1020 trial, 1015–1016, 1019–1020, 1024–1025, 1028 Chicago Tribune, 647 Chicano Movement and African Americans, xxiii and Texas Rangers, 737 Chichimeca Indians, 27 Chief Eusebio, 334 Chief Joseph biography, 558–559 and Nez Perce´’s flight, 553–555 “relocation,”560 Surrender Speech, 561 Chief Joseph the Elder, 553, 558 Chief Kayashuta, 111 Chief Looking Glass, 554 Chief Ol-loo-te-ka, 307

I-11

I-12

Index Chief Solano Bear Flag Revolt, 336 and Vallejo, 344 Chief White Bird, 554 Child custody, 473, 475–476 China, 594 Chinese Exclusion Act in New York, 369 and racism, 445, 597, 599 repeal of, 269 in Seattle, 593 Chinese immigrants overview, 597–598 in Seattle, 593 Church of England creation of, 95–96 restoration of, 91 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Brigham Young, 395 and Nauvoo Legion, 391 overview, 390–391 and polygamy, 390, 391, 392–394, 395 Church of the Brethren, 925 Church Women United (CWU), 1047, 1048 Cincinnati (OH) Great Migration, 773–774 and race riots, 777 Circuit Court Act (1769), 173 Circular letters and Samuel Adams, 139, 140 Stamp Act protests, 131, 141, 143, 144 and Townshend Act, 204 Citizenship Bradwell v. Illinois, 499–500 Chinese immigrants, 593 and civil rights movement, 892 Civil Federation of Chicago, 646–647 Civil Rights Act (1875), 891 Civil Rights Act (1964) excerpts from, 915–924 and Feminist Movement, 1049 and March on Washington, 909 and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 passage of, 898–899 and segregation, 807

and SNCC, 912 Civil Rights Act (1968) and March on Washington, 910 and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 Civil rights activities Attica Prison Riot, xxiii–xxiv, 1059–1061 “Day without an Immigrant” protests (2006), xxiii–xxiv, 1129–1132 Detroit Riots (1967), xxiii–xxiv, 987–992 Los Angeles Uprising (1992), xxiii–xxiv, 1095–1099 Plan de San Diego (1915), xxiii, 727–732, 734 Watts Riots (1965), xxiii–xxiv, 965–971 women, xxiii, 473–482, 1043–1050 Zoot Suit Riot (1942), xxiii, 869–875, 879–880 Civil Rights Bill (1991), 900 Civil rights movement (1953–1968) history of, 891–901 as model movement, xxiii Civilian Conservation Corps, 833 Claiborne, William C. C. and Charles Deslondes’s Uprising, 262–263 martial law, 241–242 Clansman, The (Dixon), 805 Clark, Ramsey, 1015 Clark, George A., 550 Clark, Hugh, 325 Clark, Kenneth Bancroft, 893 Clark, Mamie Phipps, 893 Clarke (Clark), Fred, 672, 673 Clarke, George, 79 Clarke, Septima, 896 Clay, Henry, 327 Clayton, Powell, 545, 546, 550, 551–552 Clayton Antitrust Act and AFL, 851 and unionizing, 763 Cleage, Albert, 988 Clearwater, Frank, 1077 Clemente, Esteban, 30, 43 Cleveland, Grover on Pullman Strike, 647, 648, 652 Seattle Riot, 594 Cleveland (OH), 773–774 Clifford, Nathan, 366

Index Clinton, Bill, 1123 Coahuila, Diego Ortiz Parilla, 106 Coahuila, 291, 292 Coal and Iron Police, 661 Coal mining in Appalachia, 797 and Blair Mountain Battle, 793–794 and Ludlow Massacre, 707–711 and Molly Maguires, 459, 460–461 in Pennsylvania, 465–466 and UMWA, 716–717 and unionism, 466–467 Coastal planters, 169 Cochran, Jacob, 392 Cochran, William, 244 Code Pink, 932–933 Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill,” 604, 615 Coercive Acts (Intolerable Acts), 197, 199–200 Coffin, William Sloan, 957–960 Colfax, Schuyler, 537 Colfax Massacre (1873), xxiv, 537–539 Collective bargaining, 854 College, the Market, and the Court, The (Dall), 476 Collins, Judy, 1016 Collinsworth, George M., 293 Colonial tradition American Revolution, 83, 173–174, 192, 228–229 Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), 1–7 Boston Massacre (1770), xxii, 151–156 Boston Tea Party (1773), 140, 143, 147, 187, 191–198 collective action, xxii Pine Tree Riot (1772), 183–185, 187 Regulator Movement (1771), 169–175 Stamp Act Protests (1765), 127–137 Colonial Virginia House of Burgesses, 13–15 indentured servants, 15–16 tobacco, 19–20 Colonization Laws (1573), 39 Colorado coal production, 713 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1131 Ludlow Massacre, 707–710

Plan de San Diego, 727 women’s suffrage, 479 Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) Ludlow Massacre, 707, 708–710 overview, 713–714 and UMWA, 717 Colorado National Guard, 707, 710 Columbia (SC), 174 Columbus (OH), 773–774 Colville Indian Reservation, 559 Comanches, 34 Combahee River Collective, 1046 Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration, 994 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), 1048 Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, 930–931 Committee for Non Violent Action, 930–931 Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and UMWA, 715, 717. See also Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “Commune,” 565 Communism and BEF, 832, 833 and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 864 Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), 857, 867 Commutation fees and conscription, 442 and New York Draft Riots, 435, 440 Compromise of 1850 and civil rights, 891 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 275 and popular sovereignty, 358 and State of Deseret, 394 Compromise of 1876, 677 Compromise of 1877, 479 Comstock Law, 496 “Concentration camps,” 730 “Conductors,” 283 Confederate States of America (Confederacy) and American Civil War, 441 and conscription, 442 establishment of, 426 and guerilla warfare, 353 and Robert E. Lee, 428

I-13

I-14

Index Confederation Army, 228, 233 Confederation on the Rhine, 331 Conference of Concerned Democrats, 942 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron), 276–277, 280–281 Congregationalism, 58 Congregationalist Church, 474, 475, 476 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and AFL, 763, 851 and auto industry, 849 and Harry Bridges, 859, 863 and John L. Lewis, 667 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and civil rights movement, 896 and Jim Crow Laws, 678 and March on Washington, 909 and SNCC, 912 and Stokely Carmichael, 903 “Congressional Debate on Women’s Suffrage,” 491–493 Congressional Party, 480 Conkey’s Tavern, 210, 221 Conley, Arthur, 578, 579 Connecticut and Coercive Acts, 197 Dominion of New England, 59 earliest intergovernmental assemble, 54 and Shays’ Rebellion, 213 Conners, T. J., Homestead Strike, 625 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 898, 911 “Conscience Whigs,” 927 Conscientious objectors, 929 Conscription and American Civil War, 441, 442–443 and New York Draft Riots, 435, 440, 443 Conscription Act (1917) Green Corn Rebellion, 739, 740 overview, 743–744 Constitution of 1843 (RI), 313 Constitutional Convention (1787) and Shays’ Rebellion, 214 and slavery issue, 279 Consultation divided approach, 295 and Sam Houston, 307 and Stephen Austin, 306 and Texas Revolt, 291, 292, 293

“Contemporary Account of Nat Turners Revolt, A” 286–288 Continental Army and Alexander Hamilton, 239 Daniel Shays service in, 207, 210, 211, 220–221 and Pine Tree Rioters, 185 Continental Congress and Coercive Acts, 197 overview, 200–201 and Regulator Movement, 174 Robert Morris, 229 and Samuel Adams, 140 Continuation of the Impartial Relation, A (Husband), 180 Contraception, 533–536 Conway, Henry, 135 Conyers, Congressman John, 989 Cook, George William, 785–789 “Cook County Coroner’s Report Regarding the 1919 Chicago Race Riot” (1920), 778–782 Cooke, Jay, 563 Cooke, Philip St. George, 386 Coolidge, Calvin and BEF, 830 biography, 761–762 and Boston Police Strike, 757, 758, 759, 761 and veterans’ rights, 841–842 “Coolie” population, 593 Copley, John Singleton and the Boston Tea Party, 195 painter, 154 Copperheads and American Civil War, 441 and antiwar activism, 927 and New York Draft Riots, 436 opposition to emancipation, 443, 445 overview, 443–444 Corman, James C., 996 Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de, 27, 37, 39 Correo de Mejico, 292–293 Corruption, 169, 170 Cortina, Juan, 736 Co´s, Martin Perfecto de, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296 “Cotton Curtain,” 969

Index Cotton gin, 425 Couche’s Fort, 233 Counter Reformation, 103 Counterculture, 937 Cowie, Thomas, 336 Coxey’s Army, 740 Crazy Hawk, 607 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1033, 1039 Crisis, The, 695–696 Crockett, David, 303–304 Croghan, George, 109 Cromwell, Oliver Navigation Act, 142 and the Quakers, 91 Cromwell, Richard, 12 Cronin, Daniel, 593–594 Crook, George “Three Stars,” 604 Crooked Creek Gap, 794 Crosby, Judge Ernest, 928 Crow, 613 Cruger, John, Jr., 85 Cruger, Nicholas, 239 Cruikshank, William J. “Bill,” 539 Crump, E. H. “Boss,” 883, 887, 888 Cruzate, Domingo Jironza Petris de, 34, 35, 42 Cuba, 928 Cuffee, 80, 88 Culberson, Jack, 1121 “Cult” of domesticity, 1043–1044 Cumming, Alfred and Brigham Young, 395 Civil War, 387 Utah War, 383, 385 Cummings, P. M., 461 Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education, 893 Cunningham, William, 741 Cuny Table, 604 Currency Act, 127 Curtis, Edwin, 758 Curtis, Jennie, 644 Custer, George, 553, 602, 614, 615 Cygon, Steve, 853 Czech immigrants, 665

Daily News, 436 Dakota Nation and Dakota Uprising, 611–613 Indian treaties, 1073 Dakota Uprising (1862), 611–613 Daley, Richard J. and Abbie Hoffman, 1026 biography, 1021–1022 and Chicago Seven, 1019 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1009, 1011, 1013, 1014–1015, 1017 and Tom Hayden, 1024 Dall, Caroline, 476 Dame, William Horne, 392 Dana, John W., 365 Dance, Henry, 294 Dark Tobacco District Planters’ Protective Association (DTDPPA) and ATC, 701 overview, 702–703 Dartmouth, 194, 195 Davis, Jefferson, 444 Davis, John W., 761 Davis, Paula Wright, 475 Davis, Rennie Chicago Eight, 1015, 1019 and Chicago Seven, 1019, 1020 and the Mobe, 1010, 1012, 1013, 1019, 1027, 1028 Davis Island Dam, 623 Day, John T. New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 671–672 and Robert Charles, 676 Day Book, The, 346 “Day without a Mexican, A” 1131 “Day without an Immigrant” protests (2006), xxiii–xxiv, 1129–1132 Days, Luke, 210, 211, 212 De facto segregation, 806–807 De jure segregation, 807 De La Beckwith, Byron, 897, 900 De la Rosa, Luis, 729, 731 De Peyster, Isaac, 85 De Revoire, Apollos, 163 “Deadwork,” 708, 709 Death in a Promised Land (Ellsworth), 803

I-15

I-16

Index Debs, Eugene V. antiwar activism, 929 and ARU, 651 biography, 652–654 and Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, 570 and IWW, 744, 745 opposition to World War I, 747 and Pullman Strike, 644, 645, 649, 657 Debt collection Depression (1783–1788), 209 Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 210, 211, 214 Debtor imprisonment, 169 Declaration of Independence and John Adams, 157 and Samuel Adams, 140 “Declaration of Pedro Naranjo” (1681), 49–51 “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” (Jefferson), 201 “Declaration of Rights and Grievances, The” (Stamp Act Congress), 144 Stamp Act protests, 134 Declaration of Rights of Women, 504–508 “Declaration of Sentiments,” 489 “Declaration of the People of Virginia” (1676), 6, 24–26 Declaratory Acts passage of, 140–141, 146 Stamp Act protests, 131, 135–136 Decree of April 6, 1830, 289, 291 Degan, Mathias J., 578 DeKlyne, Theodore W., 539 Delaware Indians Ohio River Valley, 121 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111, 112, 113, 120 “Delaware Prophet,” 109, 119–120 Deleon, Daniel, 745 Dellinger, David Chicago Eight, 1015, 1019 and Chicago Seven, 1019, 1020 and the Mobe, 1010, 1012, 1027, 1028 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 1036, 1067 Deluge Engine Company, 365 “Demagoguery,” 130 Democratic National Convention (1968), 1022–1023 Democratic National Convention (2000), 1125

Democratic Party and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681 Battle of Athens, 883, 888 Bloody Monday, 377 Brooks-Baxter War, 545–547, 549 and Chicago Riots, 1009–1013 and Chicago Seven, 1019 and Copperheads, 443 the Moratorium, 941–942 and New Orleans Riot (1866), 450 and Know-Nothing Party, 373 and popular sovereignty, 358 Rhode Island suffrage, 311 Rip Rap attacks, 380–381 slavery split, 426 and Utah War, 386–387 and white working-class men, 319 Dempsey, Hugh, 626 Denny, Reginald and Damien Monroe Williams, 1105, 1106 Los Angeles Uprising, 1097, 1101–1102 on Phil Donahue show, 1101 Denver (CO), 1129, 1130 Denver, James, 351 Department of Justice, 537, 539 Department of Labor, 1048 DePaul Law School, 1021 “Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp,” 719–726 Depression of 1783–1788, 207–208, 209, 222 “Description of Denmark Vesey (1822),” 266–267 “Description of Stono Rebellion” (1739), 76–78 Desegregation, 896–897 Deseret, 394 Deslondes, Charles antebellum slave revolts, 252, 255–256, 257 German Coast uprising (1811), xxiii, 262–263 Detroit Great Migration, 773–774 and Ku Klux Klan, 542 Detroit Free Press, 987–988, 993, 994–995 Detroit Riot (1943), 892 Detroit Riot (1967) Black Power movement, 899 collective action, xxiii–xxiv, 987–992

Index Detroit River, 112–113 DeVoto, Bernard, 1085 Dia Sin Immigrantes, 1129 Diaz del Carpio, Jose´, 100–101 Diaz, Jose, 872 Dı´az, Porfirio, 733–734 Dickenson, Susannah, 304 Dickinson, John “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” 204 Stamp Act protests, 134 Dickinson, Martin, 872 Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, 577, 581, 585 Dillard University, 673 Dinwiddie, Robert, 118 Direct Action Network, 1121–1122, 1125–1126 Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (Mayhew), 146 “Displaced homemaker,” 1046 Disqualifying Act (1787) Massachusetts General Court, 219 Shays’ Rebellion, 212–213, 217 District of Columbia. See Washington, D.C. Divorce reform, 473, 474, 477, 478 Dix, Dorothea, 486–487 Dixon, Thomas, 805 Dobbs, Arthur, 178–179, 181 “Doll test,” 893 Domestic violence, 1044 Dominion of New England colonial conglomeration, 58–59 Leisler’s Rebellion, 53 Dongan, Thomas, 61–62 Donnegan, William, 689, 690 Dorr, Sullivan, 312, 316 Dorr, Thomas Wilson biography, 316–318 and Charterites, 315 and Dorr’s Rebellion, 311, 312, 313–314, 319 “Dorrites,” 315, 317 Dorr’s Rebellion (1841), collective action, xxii, 311–314 “Dorr’s War,” 311 Dorsey, Stephen F., 546 Dostie, Anthony Paul, 450, 451, 453

Douglas, Stephen A. Bleeding Kansas, 347 and First Missouri Compromise, 357 popular sovereignty, 358–359 Douglass, Frederick abolitionist, 279, 425 and Harpers Ferry raid, 415, 417 and John Brown, 258, 423 and Susan B. Anthony, 484 and women’s movement, 475 Dow, Neal S. and Irish immigrants, 369, 370 Portland Rum Riot, 365–366 and the temperance movement, 366, 367, 371 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 459–460 Doyle, James P., 360 Doyle, John E., 578 “Draft Rioter’s letter to New York Times and Time’s response,” 447–448 Dred Scott decision and Buchanan administration, 389 and civil rights, 891 and First Missouri Compromise, 357–358 Dresel, Emil, 344 Dry, William, 133 Du, Soon Ja, 1099 Du Bois, W. E. B. anti-lynching campaigns, 776 and civil rights, 771 on black soldiers, 753 and Houston Riot, 751 and Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 and NAACP, 695 and National Afro-American League, 695 “Talented Ten,” 683 Duffy, Thomas, 461 Duke, James B., 701 Duke of York. See James II Duncan, Bob, 740 Duncan, J. K., 382 Duncan, Thomas, 85 Dunmore, Lord, 241 Dunn, John Patrick, 326–327 Dunn, Susan, 257 Dunn, William F., 604 Dura´n, Fray Andre´s, 31

I-17

I-18

Index Durrell, E. H., 450 Dustin, William, 185 Dutch fur trade, 18 Dutch immigrants, 84 Dutch Reformed Church, 61–62 Dyer, Leonidas, 782 Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, 782–789 Dynamite bombs, 586–587 Dysentery, Bacon’s death from, 7, 9 Eagler, John, 661 Earth First! 1125 East India Company and the Boston Tea Party, 193, 195, 196 and Coercive Acts (Intolerable Acts), 197 importation of tea, 147 East Louisiana Railroad Company, 679 Eastern European immigrants Lattimer Massacre, 662 Ludlow Massacre, 707 overview, 665–666 Economic justice, 1126–1127 “Economic Plan,” Alexander Hamilton, 240 Economic/political protests Athens, Battle of (1946), 883–885 Black Patch War (1909), 697–699, 703 Bonus Army protests (1932), 829–834 Brooks-Baxter War (1874), 545–548 collective action, xxii Dorr’s Rebellion (1841), 311–314, 319 Molly Maguires (1870s), 459–462 Sagebrush Rebellion (1979), 1085–1087 Shays’ Rebellion (1787), 207–216 Whiskey Rebellion (1794), 227–235, 238 World Trade Organization protests (1999), 1121–1124 Ecorse River meeting, 109 Ecuyer, Simeon and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 112 and smallpox epidemic, 124 Edict of Nantes, 58, 217 Edisto River, 70 “Editorial Response to John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia,” 432–434 Edlund, John (Attica Prison Riot), 1060 Edlund, John (Haymarket Riot), 579 Edmonds, Kelton, 913

Edmunds Act, 393 Edmunds-Tucker Act, 479 Education and Freedmen’s Bureau, 541 and women’s rights, 1044 women’s movement (1870), 473–474, 478 Edward VI (king of England), 95 Edwards, George, 993–994 Egan, John M., 646, 647 Ehrlichman, John, 1069 Eight-hour work day and Haymarket Riot, 582 union demand, 575–576, 587–588 Eighth Amendment, 1063 Eisenhower, Dwight David Anacostia Flats Battle, 835 and BEF, 833 and civil rights movement, 894 and Nelson Rockefeller, 1064 Ekirch, A. Roger, 174 El Camino Real, 296, 298 Elaine (AK), 765, 769–770 Elaine Massacre, 770 Eleanor, 195 Electric Auto-Lite Company, 847, 848, 852 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 188 and Anglican Church, 95 Ellsworth, Scott, 803 Ely, Samuel, 210 Emancipation Proclamation (1863) abolition of slavery, 280 as military necessity, 441, 445 and New York Draft Riots, 435–436 Emerson, Ralph Waldo and antiwar activism, 927 and George Luther Stearns, 429 on John Brown, 420 Employee Representative Plan (ERP), 713–714 Encomiendas (tribute), 28, 30, 39 Enforcement Act (1870), 537, 538, 539 Engerman, Stanley, 253 Engle, George, 580, 581, 582 English Civil War religious conflict, 61 and royal authority, 187 Enlightenment philosophy, 279 Enrollment Act, 442

Index Environmentalists, 1085, 1086 Episcopalian church, 95 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and feminist movement, 1045 and March on Washington, 909 Equal Pay Act, 1049 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and feminist movement, 1043, 1046, 1048, 1049 overview, 1053–1055 and women’s movement, 481–482 Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, 480 Erie Indians Ohio River Valley, 121 and Susquehannock Indians, 17 Esparza, Jose´ Enrique, 304 Espionage Act and American socialists, 746 and IWW, 741, 744, 745 Essex Junto, 926 Evans, Jodie, 932–933 Evansville (IN), race riots, 778 Evers, Medger and civil rights movement, 897 and Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 and Ku Klux Klan, 805 Ex parte Bollman and Swartwout, 242 Ex parte Milligan, 242–243 “Excepts from a New York Times Account of the New York City Draft Riots,” 446–447 “Excerpts from an Article by James McPartland Describing His Infiltration of the Molly Maguires,” 467–471 Excise tax, 227, 229–230, 231–232 “Executive Committee,” WPUS, 565, 573 Executive Order 9981, 892 Express, 346 “Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee,” 616–617 Fabian socialists, 746 Factories, 575 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 891–892 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) and eight-hour day, 588 and NIRA, 855

Fair trade movement, 1126–1127 Fallon, William, 339 “False Pretenses,” 932 Fannin, Commander James Walker, 298–299 Fanning, Edward, 171 Farmers’ Alliance, 697 Father of Texas, 305 “Father’s Disgust with Antiwar Demonstrations, A” 960–961 Faubus, Orval, 895 Faulkner, William, 231–232 Fayetteville Democrat, 545 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and AIM leaders, 1069–1070 and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1033 and Chicago Seven trial, 1016, 1020 and Dick Wilson, 1079 Wounded Knee Occupation, 1075, 1076, 1077, 1080–1081 Federal labor unions (FLUs), 847–848 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPM, 1976) overview, 1089–1090 public lands, 1091 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1085 Federal Republican, 926 Federal supremacy, 237–238 Federalism, 227 Federation for American Immigration Reform, 1130 Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions, 588, 589 Fellowship for Reconciliation antiwar activism, 930–931 and SNCC, 912 Felts, Albert and Matewan Massacre, 800 and Sid Hatfield, 798, 799 Felts, Lee and Matewan Massacre, 800 and Sid Hatfield, 798, 799 Felts, Tom and Matewan Massacre, 800 and Sid Hatfield, 799 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 1045

I-19

I-20

Index Feminist movement, 1043–1052. See also Women’s movement (1870) Ferguson, John, 679 Fessenden, William P., 366 Festival of Life, 1010, 1012, 1026 Few, James, 177 Fielden, Samuel J., 578, 580, 581, 582 Fifteenth Amendment and Reconstruction, 455, 456 and women’s movement, 477, 478, 483, 488 Figueroa, Jose´, 343 Fillmore, Millard and Know-Nothing Party, 374–375 and Rip Raps, 381 “Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot,” 808 Findlay, William, 230 Fink, Walter, 719–726 Fire Ordinance, 83 Fires colonial New York, 83–84 New York Slave Insurrection, 79–81. See also Arson First Great Awakening, 170 First Great Migration (1910–1930), 773, 907 First Infantry Armory, 577 Fischer, Adolph, 580, 581, 582 Fishman’s Pawn Shop, 689, 693 Fitch, Henry D. Bear Flag Revolt, 336 and Sonoma, 344 Fite, H. C., 741 Fitzhugh, George, 251, 275 Flanigan, Harris, 545 Flavin, Timothy, 579 Flint Sit-Down Strike, 849, 853 Florida and civil rights movement, 895 racial segregation, 677 Treaty of Paris (1763), 119. See also Spanish Florida Flowers, Eli H., 538 Floyd, John, 274 Focus Hope, 991

Fogel, Robert, 253 “Fomenters of disturbances,” 604, 605, 615 Fonda, Jane and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1033 and Tom Hayden, 1025 Foot Hood Three Statement, 951–957 Foran, Thomas, 1015, 1019 Forbes, John, 118 Ford, Betty, 1054 Ford, Gerald, 1065 Ford, Henry, 832 Ford, Henry L., 336, 337, 339 “Foreign slaves,” 262 “Forks, the,” 227, 229, 231, 234 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 805 Forstall, Lewis, 673 Forsyth, James W., 606, 607–608 Fort Anahuac and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 290, 292 Fort Bedford, 111, 113 Fort Bridget, 385 Fort Burd, 111 Fort, Charles H. and DTDPPA, 703 Statement, 703–706 Fort Detroit Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 111, 112–113, 114, 120 Pontiac’s role, 123 Fort Duquesne French and Indian War, 118 Pontiac’s role, 122 Fort Edward Augustus, 111 Fort Fayette, 234 “Fort Frick,” 621 Fort Jackson Treaty, 1072–1073 Fort James, 53, 60 Fort Laramie Treaty, 1073 Fort Le Boeuf, 111 Fort Ligonier, 111, 113 Fort Limhi, 385 Fort Lipantila´n, 298 Fort Louisbourg, 117, 118 Fort MacArthur, 871, 881

Index Fort Miamis, 110 Fort Michilimackinac, 110–111 Fort Necessity, 118 Fort Niagara, 114 Fort Oswego, 114, 123 Fort Ouiatenon, 111 Fort Pitt Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111–114, 117 smallpox epidemic, 124 Fort Presque Isle, 111 Fort Ridgley, 612 Fort Sandusky, 110 Fort Scott, 350, 351 Fort St. Joseph, 111 Fort Sumter and American Civil War, 441 fall of, 426 and Beauregard, 382 Fort Vancouver, 594 Fort Velasco and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 290 Fort Venango, 111 Fort William Henry, 122 Fort Yates, 604 Fortune, T. Thomas, 695 Fourteenth Amendment and Plessy v. Ferguson, 679 and Reconstruction, 454, 456 and women’s movement, 477, 478, 483, 488 Fowler, George, 336 Fox, George, 97 Fox, Vincente, 1131 Fox News coverage, 1129 Foy, William, 623 France and Calvinist religion, 58 expulsion of Jesuits, 103–104 Leisler’s Rebellion, 54 and Ohio River Valley, 121 and Santa Anna, 310 Seven Years’ War, 118–119 Franchise Amendment, 546 Franciscan missionaries and Pueblo Indians, 28, 29, 41 religious order, 37–38 and Tohono O’odham, 107

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, 620 Franklin, Benjamin Boston Tea Party, 194, 196 Stamp Act protests, 130 Frappolly, William, 1015–1016 Free Blacks Charterites, 316 Dorr’s Rebellion, 311, 313 Rhode Island extended suffrage, 319 Free Soilers Bleeding Kansas, 348, 349, 351 and Jayhawkers, 355 and Pottawatomie Massacre, 360 Freed, Barrt. See Hoffman, Abbott “Abbie” Freedmen’s Bureau, 541 Freedom Now Suite, 897 Freedom Riders and civil rights movement, 896 and SNCC, 912 and Stokely Carmichael, 903 Freedom Schools, 912 Freedom Summer, 903 “Freeholder’s Constitution,” 315, 317 Freeman’s Journal, 346 Freemasons, 389 Frelinghuysen, Frederick T., 491, 492–493 Fre´mont, John Charles Bear Flag Revolt, 333–337 biography, 341–343 and Brigham Young, 395–396 Republican presidential candidate, 375, 389, 426, 551 Salt Lake City surveyor, 393 French and Indian War (1754–1763) British victory, 127, 140, 142, 146 and colonial debt, 139 and Jeffrey Amherst, 117 overview, 118–119 French Revolution, 181, 234 French, Scot, 273 Freneau, Philip, 230 Frick, Henry Clay and Homestead Strike, 620–621, 624, 626, 629 lockout tactic, 631–632 Friedan, Betty, 1045 Fries’ Rebellion (1790s), 238, 240

I-21

I-22

Index Froines, John, 1015, 1019 Frye, Marquette, 965, 968 Fugitive Slave Act and Harpers Ferry Raid, 415 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 275 opposition to, 429 Fuller, Margaret, 476 Funston, Frederick, 728 Fusionists, 541 Gadsden, Christopher, 135 Gadsden Purchase, 310 Gage, Thomas Boston Massacre 151–152 and Coercive Acts, 197 martial law, 241 and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 113, 114 and royal authority, 187 and Thomas Preston, 161 Gale, Henry, 211 Gallatin, Albert, 230 Galloway, Joseph, 201 Galveston Bay, 106 Gambrill, Henry, 374, 379, 380 Gangs and nativism, 373, 374, 378–381 Zoot Suit Riot, 870 Gangs of New York, The (film), 379 Garland, Augustus H., 549 Garnet, Henry Highland, 415 Garrick (Gerrish), Edward, 152–153, 154 Garrison, William Lloyd abolitionist, 279, 425 and women’s movement, 475 Garry, Charles, 1015, 1019 Garvey, Marcus Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 907 Gary, Joseph C., 581 Gates, Daryl, 1097 Gazette (Little Rock, AR), 545, 546 Gell, Monday, 265 General Allotment Act (1887), 1072, 1073 General Assembly of Deseret, 394–395 General Land Office (GLO), 1089, 1091

General Land Reform Act (1891), 1089 General Managers Association (GMA), 645, 646, 647, 648 General Order Number 11, 353–354 Genet, Edmund, 234 Geneva, 57 Geneva Club, 80 Genocide, 5, 6 Genovese, Eugene, 252–253 George I (king of England), 187 George II, (king of England), 187 George III, (king of England) celebration of, 136 reconciliatory efforts, 141, 143 and Stamp Act protests, 131 “George R. T. Hewes’ Account of the Boston Massacre,” 164–166 Georgia and civil rights movement, 896 and SCLC, 911 slave codes, 73 German Americans, 776 German Coast, 252, 255–256, 262–263 German immigrants and anarchism, 585 in colonial Pennsylvania, 91, 92 as early settlers, 330 Fries’ Rebellion (1790s), 238 and Know-Nothing Party, 373–374, 377 and nativism, 378 in New York City, 84 and New York Draft Riots, 437 and Regulator Movement, 169 Gettysburg, 436 Battle of, 428, 437 Ghost Dance and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1081 and Sitting Bull, 615 and Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 602, 603, 604–607, 608 Ghost Shirts, 601, 606–607 GI Bill, 833–834, 842 GI Nonpartisan Ticket Battle of Athens, 883–885 and Pat Mansfield, 887 Gibbon, John, 554 Gilbert, Abigail, 220

Index Gillespie, Archibald Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 335, 340 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 Ginsberg, Allen and Chicago Seven trial, 1016 Democratic National Convention (1968), 1011–1012 “Girls local,” 643 Gladwin, Henry, 109–110 “Glass City,” 848 Glassford, Superintendent Pelham and BEF, 831, 832, 835 and Douglas MacArthur, 840 and Walter Waters, 843–844 Glenn Pool oil field, 801 Globalization overview, 1127 WTO protests, 1121 Glorious Revolution Dominion of New England, 59 Leisler’s Rebellion, 55, 61 “Go Down Moses (Let My People Go),” 282 Gold Star Mothers, 931–932 “Golden Mountain,” 593 Goldfinch, John, 152–153 Goldman, Emma antiwar activism, 929 excerpts, 522–528 Goliad. See Presidio (Goliad/La Bahia) “Goliad Massacre,” 299 Gompers, Samuel, AFL, 746, 762–763 antiwar activism, 928 and Boston Police Strike, 759, 761 “Good-Bye, My Lover,” 546 Goodhue, Grace Ann, 761 Gookin, Charles, 97 Gordon, Francis, 111 Gould, Jay as “robber barons,” 571 and Southwestern Railroad, 599 Gowen, Franklin B., 460–461, 462, 715 “Gradualists,” 695 Graham, Henry, 897 Granary Burying Ground, 159 “Grand Jury’s Final Report on Tulsa Race Riot,” 808 Grandfather clause, 456

Grandmothers against the War, 933 Grangers, 697 Grant, James, 295, 298 Grant, Ulysses S. and American Civil War, 441 and Brooks-Baxter War, 547, 549, 550, 551 and Colfax Massacre, 537 and Native American relocations, 557 “Grass Fight,” 294 Gray, Joseph E., 599 Gray, Samuel, 153 Gray, Thomas Ruffin and Nat Turner, 270–271, 273–274, 286 and Nat Turner’s “Confessions,” 276–277, 280–281 Grazing Service, 1089 Great Alamance Creek, 172, 177 Great Depression and AFL, 763 and American socialists, 746 and Anacostia Flats Battle, 835 and BEF, 830 and Mexican Americans, 869, 870, 877 and Nativism, 869, 870 overview, 836–837, 838 and veterans’ rights, 842 and women’s rights, 1043 Great Dragon Swamp, 6 “Great Emancipator,” 445 Great Lakes region, 112, 117, 120 Great Migration African Americans, 773–775 and civil rights movement, 891 post–World War I, 757 and Red Summer Riots, 765–766 Great Northern Railroad and ARU, 643, 651 and Eugene Debs, 652 and Sitting Bull, 604 Great Railroad Strike (1877), 563–568, 572–573 Great Sioux Reservation, 1081 Great Uprising (1877), 715 “Great War,” 743, 829 Greek War of Independence, 429 Greeley, Horace and Liberal Republicans, 545 and Women’s Movement, 477

I-23

I-24

Index Green, Bobbie, 1101 Green Corn Rebellion antiwar activism, 929 collective action, 739–742, 743–744 Green Corn Rebellion, The (Cunningham), 741 Green, Shields, 417 Green, William, 848 Greenleaf, Stephen, 155 Greenville, George, 127, 129, 130, 135, 143 Grew, Mary, 927 Griffith, D. W., 542, 805 Grigsby, John Bear Flag Revolt, 335–336, 337, 339 and Sonoma, 344 Grimke´, Angelina, 474 Grimke´, Sarah, 474 Grimm, Marshal Lloyd, 1077 Grivot, M., 383 Grosscup, Peter S., 648, 649 “Group System,” UMWA, 708 “Guardians of the Oglala Nation” (GOON), 1076, 1079–1080, 1083 Guemes, Juan Francisco de, Conde de Revillagigedo, 105 Guerilla war Bleeding Kansas, 349, 350, 351 John Brown, 416 Kansas and Missouri, 353–354 Guerrero, Francisco, 334 Guest worker program, 1129 Guinn v. United States, 456 Gullah community, 265 Gullah Jack, 265 Gundlach, Jacob, 344 Guthrie, Arlo, 1016 Guzma´n, Nun˜o de, 27 Gwyther, Thomas, 460 Hadley, Ozra A., 551–552 Hadnot, James West, 539 Hager, Talmadge, 908 Hahn, George Michael, 450, 453 Haight, Isaac, 392 Haight-Ashbury, 937 Haines, Matthew, 1098 Haiti. See Saint Domingue Haley, Alex, 908

Hall, Dominick, 242 Halle, Mabel, 690 Hallgren, Mauritz A., 843 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 898 Hamilton, Alexander and Albert Gallatin, 230 on Articles of Confederation, 237 biography, 239–241 and strong central government, 237 Whiskey Rebellion, 228–232, 234, 238, 241 whiskey tax, 243 Hamilton, Charles V., 903 Hamlin, Hannibal, 370 Hampshire Herald, “Letter Listing the Grievances of the Rebels” (1786), 224–225 Hampton, Wade, 262 Hancock, John and the Boston Tea Party, 196 and Daniel Shays, 215, 221 Granary Burying Ground, 159 Massachusetts General Court, 219 Shays’ Rebellion, 213 tax reduction, 223 Hansen, Jacob, 579 Hansford, Thomas, 7 Hanson, Alexander, 926 Haraszthy, Agoston, 344 “Hard coal,” 661–662 Harding, Warren and Blair Mountain Battle, 793 and Calvin Coolidge, 757, 759, 761 Harjo, Suzan Shown, 1069 Harlem Riot (1943), 892 Harlins, Latasha, 1099 Harmer, John L., 1092 Harney, William S., 383–384 Harper, Ida Husted, 486 Harpers Ferry armory raid on, 416, 417–420, 424–425 and John Brown uprising, 257–258, 415–421, 424–425 “Southern Editorial Responses,” 432–434 Harper’s Weekly on Chinese immigrants, 597 on Pullman Strike, 647 Harriman, E. H., 571 Harriman, W. Averell, 1064

Index Harrington, Michael, 943 Harris, B. H., 927 Harris, Fred, 996 Harris, Matthew L., 159 Harris, Sidney, 539 Harrison, Benjamin, 626 Harrison, Carter H., 580 Hartford Convention, 925 Hartford Female Seminary, 474 Hartigan, James, 153 Hartranft, John F., 566 Harvard College/University and Boston Police Strike, 758 and James Bowdoin, 217 and John Adams, 157 and John Wentworth, 183, 184 and Sam Brown, 941 and Samuel Adams, 139 and Thomas Wilson Dorr, 312, 316 Hastings, Daniel H., 662 Hatch, Orrin, 1085–1086 Hate That Hate Produced, The, 907 Hatfield, Albert Sidney “Sid” biography, 798–799 and Blair Mountain Battle, 793 and Matewan Massacre, 800 Hatfield-McCoy feud, 798 Hawaii, 928 Hawk, David, 941, 942 Hawkins, Coleman, 897 Hawkins, Joseph H., 305 Hayden, Tom biography, 1024 Chicago Eight, 1015, 1019 and Chicago Seven, 1019, 1020, 1024–1025 and the Mobe, 1010, 1012, 1019, 1027, 1028 Port Huron Statement, 943 Hayes, Rutherford B. and Chief Joseph, 559 and Compromise of 1876, 677 and Great Railroad Strikes, 564, 566, 569 Native American reservations, 557 Haymarket Massacre, 715 Haymarket Riot (1886), 575–583, 585–586, 588 and Knights of Labor, 599 and Mayday, 589

and unionization, 762 Haywood, William D. “Big Bill” antiwar activism, 929 and Eugene Debs, 654 and IWW, 667, 744, 745 Heard, William H., 672 Hearsey, Henry J., 671 Hearst, William Randolph, 864 Heaters and Rollers National Association, 629 Heathcote, Thomas, 643–644 Heinde, Frederick, 623 Henderson, John, 451, 453 Henderson, Judge Richard, 171 Hennessy, Chief David, 671 Henrico County plantation, 4 Henry, Knox and Battle of Athens, 884 and Pat Mansfield, 887 Henry, Patrick address to House of Burgesses, 14, 15 and Articles of Confederation, 237 First Continental Congress, 200, 201 Stamp Act Congress, 145 Stamp Act protests, 130, 141 Stamp Act Resolution (1765), 147–148 Henry VIII (king of England) 95, 188 Hermanos Penitentes, 38 Hersey, John, 990 Hett, Rene, 85 Hewes, George R. T “Account of the Boston Massacre” (1770), 164–166 “Account of the Boston Tea Party” (1772), 204–206 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 417, 429, 430 Highland Folk School, 900 Hı´jar, Jose´ Maria, 343–344 Hill, James J., 571 Hill, James P., 651 Hill, Joe, 745 Hillbillies, 698 Hillquit, Morris, 653–654 Hillsborough Superior Court, 171 Hinds, James M., 550 Hinks, Samuel, 374 “Hippies,” 937 Hispanics, 877

I-25

I-26

Index History of Woman Suffrage (Anthony/Stanton), 486 History of Women in Industry in the United States (excerpts), 516–522 HMS Glasgow, 161 HMS Huron, 113 HMS Michigan, 113 Hoar, George H., 928 Hoffman, Abbott “Abbie” biography, 1025–1027 Chicago Eight, 1015, 1016, 1019 and Chicago Seven, 1019, 1020, 1025–1027 counterculture, 937 and the Mobe, 1028 and Tom Hayden, 1024–1025 and the Yippies, 1010, 1011, 1012, 1019 Hoffman, Julius and Abbie Hoffman, 1025–1026 and Chicago Seven trial, 1015, 1016, 1019–1020 Hogarth, William, 370 Holcroft, John, 244 Hollowell, Mary Lou, 698, 699 Hollowell, Robert, 699 Holmes, John, 274 Holmes, Robert, 110 Home Guard volunteers, 594 “Home remedy,” 230 Homestead Act (1862), 1091 Homestead Strike “Account of the Course of the Strike,” 637–640 “Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards,” 634–637 collective action, 619–627 and industrial violence, 715 Hood, James, 897 Hood, Zachariah, 132 Hoover, Herbert and BEF, 832–833 and Great Depression, 836 “Letter to the District Commissioner and from his Press Conference,” 844–846 Hoover, J. Edgar and BEF, 832

and civil rights movement, 898 and Watts Riot, 968 Hoovervilles and Great Depression, 837, 839 overview, 837–839 Hopi Pueblo, 45 Hopkins, John P., 647 Horcasitas Jail, 105 Horsmanden, Daniel, 80, 81, 85 Horton, Rev. Dr., 451 Horton, Silphia, 900 Horton, Willie, 989 Hose (Holt), Sam, 675–676 Hotchkiss guns, 606 House, Anthony, 546 House of Burgesses and Bacon’s supporters, 14–15 and curtailment of rights, 13–14 establishment, 13 and Stamp Act protests, 130 Stamp Act Resolution (1765), 147–148 and Virginia elites, 15 House of Representatives and Know-Nothing members, 373 and polygamy, 393 Victoria C. Woodhull Address, 494–496 Houston, Samuel Battle of the Alamo, 303, 304 biography, 307–308 and Santa Anna, 309–310 and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 295, 296, 299–300 Houston immigration protests, 1130, 1131 Houston Riot (1917), 749–752, 753–754 Howard, George and ARU, 651 Pullman Strike, 645, 649 Howard, Oliver Otis, 554, 559 Howard, T. R. M., 893 Howard University, 903 Howe, Julia Ward and AWSA, 483, 488, 490 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and Women’s Movement, 478 Howe, Samuel Gridley and Dorothea Dix, 486–487 secret six, 417, 429, 430

Index Howell, Clark, 681 Howell, Rednap, 171 Howell, R. K., 450 Hubay, Frank, 853 Hubbard, John, 365 Hubbard, Leverett, 185 Huckabee, Mick, 552 Hudson Motor Car Company, 847, 848 Hudson v. McMillan, 1063 Hughes, John, 439 Hughson, John, 80, 81, 87–88 Huguenots, 58, 60 Humphrey, Hubert and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1022, 1023 and 1968 election, 1009, 1012, 1013, 1017 and Richard J. Daley, 1021 Hundred Years’ War, 188 Hungarian immigrants, 665 Hunt, Vita, 750 Hunter, James Battle of Alamance, 177 Regulator Movement, 171 Hurley, Patrick, 832 Huron Indians Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 110, 111, 113 and Susquehannock Indians, 17, 18 Hurtado, Al, 335 Husband, Herman and American Revolution, 174 biography, 179–181 Regulator Movement, 170, 171, 172 Hussein, Saddam, 932 Hutchinson, Thomas and the Boston Tea Party, 193–194, 195, 196, 197 “Destruction of His House” 148–150 removal of, 197 and royal authority, 187 and Stamp Act protests, 132 “I Have a Dream” speech (King), 897, 905, 909 Idaho, 479 Ide, William B. Bear Flag Revolt, 335, 336 as Bear Flagger, 339

and “Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic,” 345–346 and Sonoma, 344 Illinois Central rail cars, 649 Illinois Confederation, 123 Illinois National Guard and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1011 and Red Summer Riots, 769 Immigrant white men Charterites, 316 Dorr’s Rebellion, 311, 313 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 1129 Imperial Custom Service, 127 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (Walker), 1044–1045 Indentured servants Bacon’s Rebellion, 1, 7 Colonial Virginia, 15–16 and tobacco crops, 20 Independence movements Bear Flag Revolt (1946), 333–338 collective action, xxiv Texas Revolt (1835–1836), 297, 289–301 Independent Oglala Nation, 1076 Indian Appropriation Act (1851), 557 Indian Appropriation Act (1871), 1068 Indian land Bacon’s Rebellion, 3 and House of Burgesses, 14 and tobacco crop, 20 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 557 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, 1034 Indiana Asbury University (DePauw University), 550 Indiana Volunteers, 439 “Indians,” slave classification, 73–74 Indians of All Tribes and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1032 overview, 1035–1036 Indigo colonial South Carolina, 75 and Stono Rebellion, 69 Individualism, 318 Industrial violence, 714–716

I-27

I-28

Index Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) antiwar activism, 929 and Eugene Debs, 653–654 and Knights of Labor, 599 and mining, 667 overview, 744–745 suppression, 741, 744–745 and the WCU, 740 Industrialism, 311, 315 History of Women in Industry in the United States, 516–522 “Infamous documents,” 633 Inflation, 208, 209 Ingoldesby, Richard, 55 Inter-University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, 1028 “Interfaith dialog,” 329 Internal improvements, 441 International Harvester Company, 591 International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, 1047–1048 International Longshoreman and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU), 859, 863 International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) and Bloody Thursday, 861–862 and communism, 864 and Harry Bridges, 862–863, 865 lynchings of, 776 overview, 865–866 and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 857, 858, 859, 864, 867 International Woman Suffrage Association, 480 International Workers’ Day, 589 International Working People’s Association (IWPA) and anarchism, 585, 586 and eight-hour day, 588 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 593–594 Internet and antiwar activism, 933–934 and Direct Action Network, 1125 Interposition, 894 Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), 895, 896 Intolerable Acts, 143, 146. See also Coercive Acts.

Invalid Corps, 437 “Investigation into a New York Slave Conspiracy” (1741), 85–90 Iraq War, 925, 932–934 Ireland and Molly Maguires, 459, 460 and potato famine, 325, 329, 369 Irish immigrants and Arthur Dobbs, 178 discrimination against, 445 immigration patterns, 325–329, 463–464 and Know-Nothing Party, 373, 377 in Maine, 366, 369–370 and Molly Maguires, 460–461 and nativism, 378–379 and New York Draft Riots, 437, 438 and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 and Portland Rum Riot, 366 and Regulator Movement, 169 “Iron-clad documents,” 633 Iroquois Confederacy in the Ohio River Valley, 121 and Pennsylvania native tribes, 464 and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 114 Iroquois Indians Leisler’s Rebellion, 54 Ohio River Valley, 121 and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111, 113 and Susquehannock Indians, 17 Irwin, Godfrey, “Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado,” 718–719 Isla de Tiburo´n, Diego Ortiz Parilla, 105–106 Isleta Pueblo, 32, 33 Italian immigrants, 708 Italian Regie Tobacco Company and ATC, 702 Black Patch War, 697 Iturbide, Augustin de, 309 Jack, Patrick C., 290 Jack, Spencer H., 290 Jack, William, 290 Jackson, Andrew Indian treaties, 1072–1073 martial law, 242 and Samuel Houston, 307

Index Jackson, Barbara, 993 Jackson, Harry, 864 Jackson, Jesse, 911 Jackson, Mahalia, 897 Jackson, Maynard, 899 Jacksonboro (Jacksonborough), 70 Jacquette, Tommy, 965 James, Frank, 354 James, Jessie, 354 James, Joe, 689 James, William, 928 James I (king of England), 19 James II (king of England) Calvinist opposition, 58 Dominion of New England, 58–59 and Leisler’s Rebellion, 53 Jamestown Bacon imprisoned, 5 burning of, 6, 9, 10 recapture of, 7 Japan, 841 Japanese immigrants, 708 Jarrett, John, 629 Jay, John, 231 Jayhawkers Bleeding Kansas, 350, 351 and guerilla warfare, 353 overview, 354–355 Jefferson, Thomas election of, 238 First Continental Congress, 200, 201 House of Burgesses, 15 on Shays’ Rebellion, 215 on slavery, 256–257, 274 “tree of liberty” quote, xxi Jenkins, Charles, 437 Jenkins, Esau, 896 Jenkins, Herbert, 996 Jenks, Amelia, 476 Jennings, Ranger N. A., 737 Jennison, Charles Bleeding Kansas, 350 Jayhawkers, 345, 355 Jesuits Catholic order, 103–104 and Diego Ortiz Parilla, 106 Pima Revolt, 100, 103, 104

and Tohono O’odham, 107 Jewish Americans and African Americans, 693–694 in New Amsterdam, 61 Jim Crow laws and Atlanta Race Riot, 682, 685 and civil rights movement, 891 and Houston Riot, 749, 750, 753 New Orleans Race Riot, 671 overview, 676–678 Plessy v. Ferguson, 679 in Texas, 754 “John Brown’s Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution,” 430–432 Johnson, Abraham, 185 Johnson, Absalom, 253 Johnson, Andrew and New Orleans Riot (1866), 450–451 and Reconstruction, 454 Johnson, Dean, 1013–1014 Johnson, Hinton, 907 Johnson, Hugh S., 854 Johnson, James, 951–953, 956–957 Johnson, Lyndon B. and antiwar activism, 931 and civil rights legislation, 898, 900, 909, 910, 912 and Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration, 994 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1009, 1022, 1023 and Detroit Riots, 989 and the Kerner Commission, 973, 995, 996 and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 Johnson, Robert, 230 Johnson, William, 109, 111, 113, 114 Johnston, Albert Sidney Civil War, 387 Utah War, 384, 385, 386, 387 Johnston Riot Act (1771) and Battle of Alamance, 177 provisions, 171–172 Jones, Anson, 308 Jones, Mary Harris “Mother” and Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, 717 and IWW, 744 and Ludlow Massacre, 708, 709

I-29

I-30

Index Jones, Samuel (Bleeding Kansas), 349 Jones, Samuel “Golden Rule” (antiwar movement), 928 Jordan, David Starr, 928 Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man), 27, 33 Josephson, Matthew, 571 Journal of Occurrences (Samuel Adams), 139 Juet, Robert, 84 Jumonville Affair, 143 Jurich, Steve, 661 Jury trial Admiralty Courts, 147 colonial protests, 131, 134 and slave contradictions, 256 Stamp Act Congress, 144 Justice Act, 197, 199 Kagi, John, 419 Kane, Thomas L., 385 Kanner, Isadore, 689, 693–694 Kansas Territory “Bleeding Kansas,” 347–351 guerilla warfare, 353–354 and Jayhawkers, 354 and John Brown, 423–424 statehood, 363 Topeka Constitution, 361–363 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) Bleeding Kansas, 347 and Jayhawkers, 354 and popular sovereignty, 358–359 Karlin, Judge Joyce Ann, 1099 Kars, Marjoleine, 174 Kavanagh, Edward, 370 Kearney, Stephen Watts, 48, 342 Kehoe, John, 459, 461 Keliher, Sylvester and ARU, 651 on Pullman Strike, 649 Keller, A. C., 579 Kelley, Florence, 480 Kellogg, William Pitt, 538, 539 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 761–762 Kelsey, Andrew, 339–340, 344 Kelsey, Ben, 339–340, 344 Kelsey, Sam, 335, 339–340, 344

Kennedy, John A., 437 Kennedy, John F. and civil rights movement, 896, 897, 908–909 and CSW, 1048 Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi, 913–915 and SCLC, 911 Kennedy, Robert F. assassination of, 1009, 1023 and civil rights movement, 896 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1022, 1023 Kenny, Kevin, 461 Kenrick, Francis, 325, 326, 329–330 Kensington (PA), 325, 326 Kent State, 938–940 Kentucky Black Patch War, 697–699, 702 Bloody Monday, 377 and Whiskey Rebellion, 230 Kentucky long rifles, 294 Kerner, Otto, 973–997, 995–996 Kesey, Ken, 937 Kessell, John L., 29 Keteltass, Abraham, 85 Khaki Shirts, 844 “Kick back,” 857, 862 Kicking Bear, 602, 603, 608 Killingsworth, Tyrone David, 1106 Kilroy, Matthew Boston Massacre, 153 manslaughter conviction, 155, 157 King, Amon B., 298 King, Howard, 993 King, John H., 578 King, Martin Luther, Jr. antiwar activism, 931 assassination, 899, 903–904, 906, 1009 biography, 904–906 and civil rights movement, 895, 897, 898 and Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 and Malcolm X, 907 March on Washington, 905, 909 and the Mobe, 1028 Nobel Prize, 898, 931 and Richard Daley, 1011, 1021

Index and SCLC, 910 and Stokely Carmichael, 903 King, Rodney Glen biography, 1102–1103 and Los Angeles Uprising, 1095, 1096 King, Samuel Ward and Charterites, 315–316 and Dorr’s Rebellion, 312, 313 and Thomas Wilson Dorr, 317–318 King, W. H., 736 King, William Mckenzie, 710 King James Bible, 95 “King of the Mollies,” 459 King Philip’s War, 1, 2 Kino, Eusebio, 107 Kirkpatrick, James, 233 Kiva, 29, 30 Klamath Lake, 334 Knight, William T., 335, 340 Knights of Labor and AFL, 851 and Chinese exclusion, 598, 599 and Homestead Strike, 626 and industrial violence, 715 overview, 598–600 and Seattle Riot, 593–594 and UMWA, 716 and unionization, 762 Knights of the Golden Circle, 927 Know-Nothing Party Bloody Monday, 377 and Maine, 370 and Neal S. Dow, 366 nativism, 378 and Plug Uglies, 379 and Rip Raps, 380–381 and vigilance committees, 381–382 and Wompanoag gang, 380 Know-Nothing Riot (1866), 373–375 Knox, Henry, 215 Knox, Hugh, 239 Knox, Philander C., 22, 623 Koon, Stacey, 1095, 1096, 1097 Korean immigrants, 970 Krause, Allison, 939

Ku Klux Klan and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 684, 685 and Brooks-Baxter War, 545 and early guerilla warfare, 354 and Jim Crow Laws, 677 and Joseph Brooks, 550 and lynching, 775 in “New South,” 541 overview, 542–543, 805–806 post–World War I, 757 in rural Oklahoma, 741 Ku Klux Klan Act, 538, 539, 805 Kucher, Joseph, 579 Kuklos (“circle”), 805 Kunstler, William, 1015, 1019 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 255 La Bufa silver mine, 27 La Nueva Me´xico, 27 La Salineta, 42 Labor unions Blair Mountain, Battle of, 793–795, 797–798 and Boston Police Strike, 757–759, 761 Great Railroad Strikes, 563–568, 572–573 growth of, 762–763 and Haymarket Riot, 575–583, 585–586, 588 and Homestead Strike, 619–27 and Ludlow Massacre, 707–711 martial law, 243 and New Deal, 715–716 and Pullman Strike, 643–650 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 847–850 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 847, 857–859, 861–865 Lacrosse, 110–111 LaFollette. Robert, 761 Lake Erie, 112–113 Lakota (Sioux) Indians overview, 613–614 Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 602, 604, 605, 606, 607–608 Lally, John F., 672 Lamb, Peter, 671–672, 676 Lamm, Richard, 1086 Lamont, Daniel S., on Pullman Strike, 647 Land Ordinance survey, 1090–1091

I-31

I-32

Index Lane, James H. Bleeding Kansas, 348–349, 350, 351 “Redlegs,” 353, 355 Laney v. United States, 789–791 Langdon, Frank W., 460, 461 Larkin, Consul Thomas, 334, 342 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 746 Lassen, Peter, 334 “Last Speech to the Court and Last Statement before Execution” (John Brown), 430–432 Laton School, 673 Lattimer Massacre (1897) collective action, 661–664 “Strikers Resolutions and Editorials,” 668–669 Laura (Texas Revolt), 292–293 Laurens, Henry, 133 “Law and Order Constitution” Charterites, 316 Dorr’s Rebellion, 312 “Law for the Better Preventing of Fire, A” 83 Lawrence (KS), 348, 349 Lawrence raid guerilla warfare, 353–354 and Jayhawkers, 355 and Pottawatomie Massacre, 360 Lawson, John, 709, 710 League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights (LASER) and Ronald Reagan, 1092 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086 League of Nations, 757 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 731 League of Women Voters, 481 Leary, Timothy, 1016 Leavenworth (KS), 348 Lecompton Constitution, 350, 362–363 Lee, “Light Horse” Harry, 427, 926 Lee, John D., 387 Lee, Robert E. biography, 427–429 and Harpers Ferry Raid, 419, 428 Lee, Spike, 908 Lee, William Henry Fitzhugh, 366–367 Leese, Alcalde (Major) Jacob, 335, 344 Lehigh Coal Mining Company, 466

Leisler, Jacob biography, 60–61 Calvinist faith, 58, 60, 62 colonial regime, 53, 54 execution of, 55, 61 “Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety of Boston” (1689), 62–63 “A Modest and Impartial Narrative,” (1690), 63–67 opposition to, 54 Leisler’s Rebellion (1689), 53–56, 58 Lenox, David, 232, 233 Lerman, Steven, 1095–1096 Lester, Julius, 253 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (King), 898 “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” (Dickinson), 204 “Letter to the Governor and Committee of Safety of Boston” (Leisler, 1689), 62–63 Lewis, John and SNCC, 912, 913 Lewis, John L. and CIO, 763 and UMWA, 667, 717 Lewis and Clark Expedition, 553 “Lexington of Texas,” 293 Ley, Peter, 579 Liberal Constitution of 1824 (Mexico), 291, 295 Liberal feminism, 1044, 1046–1047 Liberal League, 594 Liberal Republicans and Brooks-Baxter War, 545, 550–551 and Radical Republicans, 552 “Liberationists,” 314 Liberator, The, 279, 475 Liberia, 274–275 Liberty Party, 429 Liberty Tree Andrew Oliver effigy, 159 Boston Massacre, 153 Stamp Act protests, 131–132 Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Anthony/ Harper), 486 Ligonier, Sir John, 117 Lily, 475, 477 Lincoln, Abbey, 897

Index Lincoln, Abraham and Bleeding Kansas, 351 and conscription, 441 and Copperheads, 443, 444 election of, 238, 389, 420–421 and Emancipation Proclamation, 280 martial law, 242, 314 and New York Draft Riots, 435, 440 and Pinkertons, 632 and Reconstruction, 454 slave repatriation, 445 and Southern voters, 426 “Ten Percent Plan,” 449 Lincoln, Benjamin on Disqualifying Act, 213 Shays’ Rebellion, 211, 212 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 340 Lindsay, John V., 996 Lingg, Louis bomb making, 587 Haymarket Riot, 580, 581, 582 Lithuanian immigrants, 661 Little Big Horn Battle of, 553, 602, 614 and Sitting Bull, 615 Little Bill (steamer), 624 Little Crow, 612 Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X “Little Rock Nine,” 895 Lively, C. E., 799 Livingston, Robert, 134, 144 Livingston, William, 239 Lloyd, Thomas, 97 Locke, Gary, 1123 Locke, John, 139 Lockouts Homestead Strike, 621, 622, 632 overview, 631–632 Lockwood, Belva Ann, 478 Logan, James, 97 Logan, Rayford, 891 London Chronicle, 157 Long, Alexander, 927 Long, Richard, 761 Long Island, 197 Long Strike (1875), 716 Longest Walk demonstration, 1073–1074

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth and antiwar activism, 927 Paul Revere’s Ride, 162 Longshoremen defined, 857 and scrap metal, 859, 863 Longstreet, James, 538 Longview (TX), 765, 768 Looting Detroit Riots, 989 Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 Watts Riot, 967, 973, 974–975 Los Angeles (CA) “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 Governor’s Commission Report on the Watts Riots, 976–985 and Mexican Americans, 877 “Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Recovery,” 1106–1120 Zoot Suit Riot, 869–875, 879–881 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) police brutality, 879 and Rodney King, 1103–1105 and Watts Riot, 965–971 and Zoot Suit Riot, 873, 874 Los Angeles Times, 759 Los Angeles Uprising (1992), 1095–1099 Loudoun, Lord, 118 Louiaillier, Louis, 242 Louis XIV (king of France), 58 Louisiana Charles Deslondes’s German Coast Uprising, 252, 255–256, 262–263 and civil rights movement, 894 and Colfax Massacre, 537–539 Freedmen, 541 and New Orleans Riot, 449–452 racial segregation, 677, 678 Louisiana Purchase and Bleeding Kansas, 347 and First Missouri Compromise, 356 and Indian treaties, 1073 Louisville (KY), 377 Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad (LNO&T), 675 Lowell, John, 926

I-33

I-34

Index Lowell, Lawrence, 758 Lowery, Joseph, 911 Loyalists, Boston Massacre, 152 and the Boston Tea Party, 193 defined, 151 Loyola, Ignatius, 103 Lucas County Unemployed League (LCUL), 848, 852–853 Lucy (slave), 254 Ludlow Massacre (1914) collective action, 707–711 “Godfrey Irwin’s Account of the Killings at the Mining Encampment in Ludlow, Colorado,” 718–719 “Walter Finks Depiction of Events at the Ludlow Camp,” 719–726 Ludlow tent colony, 707, 709, 710, 713 Luis of Pitic, 105 Luther v. Borden (1849) Dorr’s Rebellion, 314 Supreme Court decision, 319–323 Lutherans, 61 Lutwyche, Edward Goldstone, 184 Lyford Courant, 729 Lyman, Stanley D., 1079 Lynchings and Jim Crow Laws, 677 and NAACP, 695 and New York Draft Riots, 436, 439 overview, 775–776 and Plan de San Diego, 729, 730 Red Summer Riots, 765, 767 and segregation, 807 Springfield Race Riot, 689 MacArthur, Douglas Anacostia Flats Battle, 835–836 and BEF, 829, 831, 832, 833 biography, 840–845 Madison, James and antiwar activism, 926, 933 on Articles of Confederation, 237 martial law, 242 on Shays’ Rebellion, 213, 215 on strong central government, 237 Magna Carta English rights, 146

and salutary neglect, 142 and Stamp Act, 129, 131, 141, 144 Maguire, Connor, 466 Mailer, Norman, 1016 Maine and First Missouri Compromise, 356 Irish immigrants, 369–370 Portland Rum Riot, 365–367 “Maine Law,” 365, 366, 370, 371 Maine Temperance Union, 365, 366 “Maintaining Order in the District of Columbia, President Hoover’s Letter and Press Conference,” 844–846 “Major J. H. Carleton’s “Special Report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” 396–414 Malcolm X biography of, 907 murder of, 899, 969 Malcolm X (film), 908 Malone, Vivian, 897 Mamaltee, 112, 124 Manassas, Second Battle of, 428 Mancusi, Warden Vincent, 1064–1065 Manhattan Island, 84–85 “Manifesto” (N. Bacon), 21–24 Mann, Horace, 486–487 Mann, Tess, 160, 163 Mansfield, Pat Battle of Athens, 883–885, 888, 889 biography, 887–888 March Against Fear, 899, 903 “March Island” campaign, 859 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and civil rights movement, 891–892, 897 and Martin Luther King Jr., overview, 908–910, 905 and SCLC, 911 and SNCC, 912 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, 931 Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) and communism, 864 and ILA, 865 Markham, William, 97 Marriage, 476, 1044 Marriage and Love (Goldman), 526–528 Marshal, Thomas, 154

Index Marshall, John, 1072 Marshall, Thurgood appointment to Supreme Court, 899 and Brown v. Board of Education, 893 Martial law Arkansas, 546, 547, 551 and Blair Mountain Battle, 793 Dorr’s Rebellion, 313 and New Orleans, 451 overview, 241–243 Martin, James, 661, 663 Martin Luther King federal holiday, 900, 906 Marx, Karl, 746 Marxism, 564, 567, 572 Mary (queen of England), 53–54 Maryland antiwar activism, 926 and Bacon’s Rebellion, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 Catholic settlers, 329 and civil rights movement, 897 and Great Railroad Strikes, 563 intergovernmental assemble, 54 Know-Nothing Party, 373 and Plug Uglies, 373, 374, 379–380 and Rip Raps, 380–381 and Shays’ Rebellion, 214 and Susquehannock Indians, 17, 18 and vigilance committees, 382–383 Masculinity, 871, 872, 875, 880–881 Mason, George Bacon’s Rebellion, 1–2 House of Burgesses, 15 Massachusetts and Calvin Coolidge, 761 Dominion of New England, 59 intergovernmental assemble, 54 Shays’ Rebellion, 207–215 Stamp Act Congress, 139, 144 Stamp Act protests, 130, 131, 134–135 Townshend Act, 204 women’s property rights, 476–477 Massachusetts General Court overview, 218–219 taxation, 222–223 Massachusetts Government Act, 197, 199 Massachusetts House of Representatives, 217 Massachusetts Humane Society, 218

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 941 Matamoras, 295, 296, 298 Matewan Massacre and Blair Mountain Battle, 793, 797–798 overview, 799–800 and Sid Hatfield, 798–799 Matheson, Scott, 1086 Matson Navigation Company, 863 Matthew, Thomas, 1 Maverick, Samuel, 153 May Day, 589 Mayflower replica seizure, 1067, 1071 Mayhew, Jonathan, 145, 146 Mayos Indians, 100 Mays, Terry M., 71, 74, 78 McCallum, 369 McCarthy, Eugene antiwar candidate, 1009, 1010, 1013 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1022–1023 and Sam Brown, 941 McCarthyism and AFL, 851 and antiwar activism, 930 McCaulay, William, 153 McCleary, William H., 622, 624, 625 McClellan, George B., 444 McClure, John “Poker Jack,” 546, 551 McCone Commission (Watts Riot), 968 McConnell, Ward, 1101–1102 McCord, Jim Nance, 887 McCormick, Cyrus, 590 McCormick, Leander, 590 McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and Haymarket Riot, 576–577 and Knights of Labor strike, 599 structure/policies, 590–591 McCormick Reaper Works. See McCormick Harvesting Machine Company McCorvey, Norma, 1055 McCrady, Edward, Jr., 456 McCulloch, William M., 996 McEnery, John O., 538 McEntire, Carl, 1068 McFarlane, James, 233 McGillicuddy, Valentine, 603

I-35

I-36

Index McGovern, George and David Mixner, 942 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1013, 1023 and Wounded Knee occupation, 1076 McKenna’s Corner, 661 McKinley, William and antiwar activism, 933 and Atlanta Race Riot, 681–682 McKinney, Jesse, 538 McLaughlin, James “White Hair” and Sitting Bull, 615 Wounded Knee Massacre, 603, 604 McLean, Evalyn, 831 McLuckie, John, 624 McMahon, John K., 579 McMinn County War, or Battle of Athens, 883–885, 887–889 McNary-Haugen farm bill, 761 McNelly, Leander, 737 McParlan (McPartland), James “An Article Describing His Infiltration of the Molly Maguires,” 467–471 and Molly Maguires, 459, 461 Means, Russell AIM leadership, 1067, 1069 and Dick Wilson, 1083 and Wounded Knee occupation, 1075 Mechanics’ Institute, 450, 451 Medina, Battle of, 308 Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature (Dix), 487 “Men of Worth,” 194 Mennonites antiwar activism, 925 in New Amsterdam, 61 Mental health reform, 486–487 Meredith, James, 896, 899, 903 Merriam, Frank and Bloody Thursday, 861 and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858 Merritt, Ezekiel “Stuttering Zeke,” 335, 340 Merritt, John, 85 Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887), 592 Methodism, 370 Methodist Episcopal Church, 550 Metzel, Katherine, 652

Mexı´a (Mexica), Jose Antonio, 291, 297 Mexican-American War annexation of Texas, 300 antiwar activism, 925, 927, 933 and Indian treaties, 1073 and Robert E. Lee, 427–428 and Santa Anna, 309, 310 Mexican Americans overview, 877–878 and police brutality, 878–880 in Watts, 969 and Zoot Suit Riot, 869–875 Mexican immigrants “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129–1131 Ludlow Massacre, 707, 708 Mexican Revolution and Plan de San Diego, 727, 728 and United States, 733–734 Mexico and acquisition of Utah, 383 and Bear Flag Revolt, 333–338 Plan de San Diego, 727–732 and Santa Anna, 309–310 and Texas Revolt, 289–301 and United States, 733–734 Micheltorena, Manuel, 333 campaign against, 339, 340 Michigan Civil Rights Commission, 994 Michigan Daily, 1024 Michigan National Guard, 989–990 Michigan State Police, 990 Michigan Volunteers, 439 “Middle class,” 132 Milam, Ben, 294–295 Milam, J. W., 894 Milchrist, Thomas E., 647, 648, 649 Miles, Nelson A. and antiwar activism, 928 Nez Perce´’s flight, 554, 558 and Sitting Bull, 615 and Wounded Knee Massacre, 603, 604, 605, 607–608 Military Order of Santiago, 39, 41 Militia Act (1862), 435 Millenarianism, 181 Miller, Antoine, 1105

Index Miller, James, 291 Miller, Jeffrey, 939 Miller, Oliver, 233 Miller, William, 232, 233 Milligan, L. B., 927 Milligan, Lambdin P., 242–243 Mine Safety Act (1869), 466 Mine War of 1920–1921, 794, 797–798, 799 Miners Chinese immigrants, 597–598 defined, 666 historical overview, 666–667 Pima Revolt, 99 Miners Journal, 460 “Miners March,” 793 Mingo Creek Association Tom the Tinker warnings, 244 Whiskey Rebellion, 231 Mingo Creek militia, 232–233 Mingo Indians Ohio River Valley, 121 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 113. See also Iroquois Miniger, Clem, 848 Minikus, Lee, 965 Minneapolis General Strike, 847 Minnesota Uprising (1864), 611–612 Minor (VA), 478 Minor v. Happersett, 478 Minstrel Republicans, 545–546, 550–551 Minuit, Peter, 84 Missemer, W. S., 651 Mission, The (film), 103 Mission Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Purı´sima Concepcio´n, 294 Mission San Francisco Solano, 343 Mission San Xavier del Bac, 107 “Missionary Era,” 29 Missionary work, 103 Mississauga Indians, 111 Mississippi and civil rights movement, 894, 897, 898, 903 “Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation,” 913–915 women’s property rights, 476 Mississippi Flood (1916), 766

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and civil rights movement, 898 and Malcolm X, 908 and SNCC, 912 “Mississippi Plan,” 675 Mississippi Poor People’s Corporation, 1026 Mississippi River, 227 Mississippi Summer Project, 912 Missouri and Bleeding Kansas, 347, 348 guerilla warfare, 353–354 and Jayhawkers, 354 and Missouri, slavery, 274 Missouri Compromise (1820–1821) Bleeding Kansas, 347, 348 Maine statehood, 365 overview, 356–358 and Stephen Douglas, 359 Mitchell, Ann Lytton, 239 Mitchell, John, 716–717 Mixner, David, 942 Model 1803 Rifle, 392 “Modest and Impartial Narrative, A” (Leisler) (1690), 63–67 Mohawk Indians Leisler’s Rebellion, 54 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111 Molly Maguires (1870s) collective action, 459–462 “Excerpts from An Article by James McPartland Describing His Infiltration,” 467–471 and industrial violence, 715 and unionism, 466–467 Molly Maguires, The (film), 462 Monongahela River, 619, 622 Monopolies, 697 Monroe, James Gabriel Prosser uprising, 253, 264 on slave resettlement, 274–275, 279 Monroe, John T., 450 Montagu, Admiral, 195 Montcalm, Louis Joseph, Marquis de, 118 Montgomery, Hugh Boston Massacre, 153, 161 manslaughter conviction, 155, 157

I-37

I-38

Index Montgomery, James, 350, 351, 355 Montgomery, John B., 337 Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), 895, 910 Montreal (Canada), 109 Moore, Gregory, 940 Moore, Putnam, 272 Moore, Thomas, 272 Moore v. Dempsey, 771 Mora, August T., 671, 676 Mora, Dennis, 951–954 Moran, Percy, 303, 304 Morehouse College, 904 Morgan, Ephraim, 793 Morgan, Michael, 1037 “Mormon fundamentalists,” 393 Mormon Nauvoo Militia, 385 “Mormon War,” 383 Mormons. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, 393 Morris, Gouverneur, 926 Morris, Robert and Alexander Hamilton, 239–240 strong central government, 237 and Whiskey Rebellion, 228–229 Moses, Bob, 912 “Moses of Her People, The” 283 Moses story, 282–283, 284 Most, Johann, 585, 586–587 Mother Jones magazine, 743–744 Motherhood, 1044 Mott, Lucretia and ERA, 1053 and Nineteenth Amendment, 489 and women’s movement, 474 Moulin, Michael, 1097 Mount Holyoke College and Lucy Stone, 475 and women’s movement, 474 Mount Vernon Hook-and-Ladder Company, 379 Mountain Meadows Massacre and Brigham Young, 396 “Major J. H. Carleton’s Special Report,” 396–414

and Nauvoo Legion, 392 and Utah War, 384, 386, 387 Mountain States Legal Foundation, 1093 MoveOn.org, 933 Ms. magazine, 1957 Muckrakers, 571, 572 Mudgett, Ebenezer, 184, 185 Muhammad, Elijah, 907–908 “Mulattoes” classification, 73–74 Muller v. Oregon, 515–516 Munson, “Rube,” 740 Murietta, Joaquin, 336 Murphy, L. J., 578, 579 Murphy, T. J., 1101 Muskie, Edmund, 1012, 1023 Muste, A. J. antiwar activism, 931 and the Mobe, 1028 “Mustizoes” classification, 73–74 “My Day” column, 885 Nafaratte, Emiliano, 728–729 Nakota Sioux, 613 “Napoleon of Temperance,” 365 Naranjo, Pedro, 49–51 Nash, Christopher Columbus, 537, 538–539 Nash, Diane, 912 Nation of Islam, 907, 908 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Report, on Watts, 973–997 National Afro-American League, 695 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 1053 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and Susan B. Anthony, 486, 489 and women’s movement, 479–480, 481, 484 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and black soldiers, 753 and civil rights movement, 891, 892, 895, 897 and Elaine Massacre, 770, 771 established, 776 and Houston Riot, 751, 755 and Jim Crow Laws, 678 and March on Washington, 909 overview, 694–695

Index and Roy Wilkins, 905 and Springfield Race Riot, 691, 694 National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), 1046 National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, 905 National Citizen and Ballot Box, 489 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. See Rights in Conflict National Council of Churches, 1076 National Council of Jewish Women, 1047–1048 National Council of Negro Women, 1047–1048 National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, 1047–1048 National Female Anti-Slavery Society, 474 National Grange, 697, 702 National Guard, 896–897 National Historic Landmark, 626 National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), 1035, 1073–1074 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) and auto industry, 847 and labor unions, 715, 865 overview, 854–855 and UMWA, 717 National Labor Relations Act (1935) and New Deal, 715 and NIRA, 855 and West Coast Strike, 859 National Liberation Front, 930 National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe) and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1010, 1011, 1012, 1019 overview, 1027–1029 and Tom Hayden, 1024 National Negro Committee. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) National Organization for Women (NOW), 1045 National Park Service, 1091 National Peace Action Coalition, 1028 National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers, 716

National Prosecuting Committee on Lattimer Victims (NPCCLV), 663 National Recovery Administration, 854 National Soldiers’ Bonus League of America, 844 National Student Association (NSA) and David Hawk, 941 and SNCC, 912 National Student Christian Federation, 912 National Temperance Convention (1851), 365 National Tribal Chairman’s Association, 1071 National Urban League (NUL) and March on Washington, 909 and Whitney Young, 905 on Watts, 969 National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and AWSA, 483 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 overview, 487–489 and Susan B. Anthony, 484, 488–489 and women’s movement, 477–478, 479–480 National Woman’s Party (NWP) and ERA, 1053 and feminist movement, 1043, 1046, 1049 and women’s suffrage, 480, 481 National Women’s Conference, 1054 National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and feminist movement, 1046 and Gloria Steinem, 1057 National Women’s Rights Convention, 475 Native American Party and nativism, 378 and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 Native Americans Alcatraz Island occupation, 1031–1034, 1037, 1038–1039 “Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father,” 1035, 1040–1042 Bacon’s Rebellion, 1–7, 10 and Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 336 Dakota Uprising, 611–613 and Jeffrey Amherst, 117, 118 and John Charles Fre´mont, 334, 335 and Mormons, 391–392 Nez Perce´’s Flight, 553–555 and Papago Revolt, 107 and Pima Revolt, 99–103

I-39

I-40

Index Native Americans (continued) and Plan de San Diego, 727 and plantation economies, 69 and Pontiac’s Rebellion 109–115 Pueblo Revolt, 27–35 reservations, 557 Seris Revolt, 100 Trail of Broken Treaties protest, 1067–1070 and “termination” policy, 1031, 1038–1039 and Texas Rangers, 736 treaties, 1072–1073 Wounded Knee Massacre, 601–609 and Wounded Knee occupation, 609, 1075–1077 Nativism and Germans, 331 and Know-Nothing Party, 373 and Mexican Americans, 869, 877 overview, 378–379 Philadelphia, 325–327 “Natural rights of mankind,” 134 Nauvoo Legion overview, 391–392 Utah War, 384, 387, 392 Navajos, 34–35 Naval Reserve Armory, 871–873 Navigation Acts Dominion of New England, 59 and salutary neglect, 142 Naylor, Charles, 327 Neal, Samuel, 337, 340 “Necessary evil,” 257 Neeb, Oscar (Haymarket Riot), 580, 581, 582 “Negroes” classification, 73–74 Neill, James C., 296 Nelson (Texas Revolt), 290 Nentvig, Juan, 100 Neolin (Delaware Prophet) biography, 119–120 and Pontiac, 123 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109 Netherlands Calvinist religion, 58 John Adams’s ambassadorship, 157 religious freedom, 61

Nevada and Fre´mont’s expedition, 341 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1085 Neville, John, 231–233 New Deal and AFL, 851 and labor unions, 715 and NIRA, 854 and UMWA, 717 and unions, 710 “New Departure,” 478 New Detroit Committee, 991 New England and antiwar activism, 925–926, 927 backcountry-coastal conflict, 169 Know-Nothing Party, 374 New England Emigrant Aid Company, 348 New England Regulation Massachusetts General Court, 219 Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 210–211, 212, 214, 221 New France, 119, 121 New Hampshire Dominion of New England, 59 Pine Tree Riot, 183 and Shays’ Rebellion, 213 shipbuilding, 188 state constitution, 185 New Hampshire Gazette (Pine Tree Riot), 184 New Helvetia, 333, 334 New Immigrants industrial violence, 714 Ludlow Massacre, 708 New Jersey, 196 New Left, 943 New Market Fire Company, 380 New Mexico Cruzate governorship, 34, 42 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 “Missionary Era,” 29, 47 Otermı´n governorship, 31, 32–34, 41–43 Plan de San Diego, 727 Spanish division, 32 Spanish settlement, 27–29, 37 Trevin˜o governorship, 30–31 Vargas governorship, 35, 43, 47 New Mobilization, 941, 942

Index New Netherland, 61 New Orleans (LA) Battle of, 242 Catholic settlers, 329 and Charles Deslondes, 262–263 Colfax Massacre, 537–539 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 martial law, 241–242 and Neal S. Dow, 366–367 Treaty of Paris (1763), 119 and vigilance committees, 382 New Orleans Citizens’ Committee, 678, 679 New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 671–673 New Orleans Riot (1866), 449–452, 453 New Right, 1049 “New South,” 541, 681, 682 New Spain, 99 New Ulm, 612 “New Urban Black,” 968 New York (city) and Boston Tea Party, 196 Chinese immigrants, 369 Draft riot, 446–447, 927–928 and Great Migration, 773–774 Hoovervilles, 838 Know-Nothing Party, 373 Know-Nothing Riots, 374–375 New York (state) colonial, 55, 61–62, 79–80, 83, 84 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 intergovernmental assembly, 54 Leisler’s Rebellion, 53–56 and Shays’ Rebellion, 213 and Stamp Act Congress, 134, 144–145 women’s property rights, 476 New York Committee of Vigilance, 382 New York Conspiracy, 79–81, 85–90 New York Daily Tribune, 451 New York Draft Riots (1863), 435–440 New York Fire Brigade (establishment), 83 New York Harbor cadets, 439 New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, 476 New York Militia, 439 New York National Guard, 1060

New York Post, 273 New York Radical Feminists, 1047 New York Slave Insurrection, 79–81, 85–90 New York State Militia, 437 New York State Vigilance Committees, 382 New York Times on ARU, 646 on Boston Police Strike, 758 “Excepts from an Account of the New York City Draft Riots,” 446–447 Haymarket Riot, 579 and New York Draft Riots, 438 on Pinkertons’, 623 on polygamy, 393 on Pullman Strike, 647 robber barons, 571 on Watts Riot, 969 New York Volunteer Fire Department, 83 New York Volunteers, 439 Newark Community Union Project, 1024 Newark Riot (1967), 899 Newburyport (NH), 188 Newby, Dangerfield, 417, 419 Newman, William, 749 Newport (RI), 133 Newton, Robert C., 546 Neylan, John Francis, 864 Nez Perce´ “Chief Joseph’s Surrender Speech,” 561 flight, 553–555 relocation, 560 Niagara Movement, 695 Nicholson, Francis Dominion of New England, 59 Leisler’s Rebellion, 53, 54 Nickels, Greg, 1123 “Nig Five,” 701 Night Riders and Black Patch War, 697, 698–699, 703 and DTDPPA, 701 Nineteenth Amendment overview, 489–491 women’s movement (1870s), 473, 481, 1053 Nixon, Richard M. and antiwar activism, 942 and Broken Treaties protest, 1069, 1071–1072 Cambodian invasion, 938

I-41

I-42

Index Nixon, Richard M. (continued) election of 1968, 1009, 1014, 1017, 1022, 1023 and the Mobe, 1028 and Native Americans, 1031, 1033, 1034, 1067 resignation, 1065 and Vietnam War, 941 Niza, Fray Marcos de, 37 “No Justice, No Peace,” 1097 “No taxation without representation” English origin, 145–147 protest slogan, 129, 131, 141, 143 Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. See Knights of Labor Noiret, Charles A., 672, 676 Nonconformist movements, 96 “Nonresistance,” 415 Norfolk (VA), 773 Norris-LaGuardia Act, 633 North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College 895, 903, 912 North Carolina and Arthur Dobbs, 178–179 Battle of Alamance, 177–178 and civil rights movement, 895, 896 Johnston Riot Act, 171–172 and Nat Turner, 273 Regulator Movement, 170 Stamp Act protests, 132 and U.S. Constitution, 174 Whiskey Rebellion, 230, 231 North Carolina Gazette, 133 North Carolina Regulator Movement, 169–172, 173–175 North Elba, 416, 423 North End Caucus, 163 North, Lord, 197, 199 Northampton (MA), 761, 762 Northern Pacific Railroad, 563, 593, 615 Northwest Passage expeditions, 178 Northwest Territory, 210 Norton, Gale, 1094 Nuevo Reyno de Andalucia, Parilla, 105 Nugent, Robert, 437 Nursing profession, 476 O’Donnell, Hugh, 624 O’Hare, Kate Richards, 747

Oacpicagigua, Luis biography, 104–105 Pima Revolt, 100, 101, 103, 104–105 Oakes, James, 255, 256 Oakes, Louis, 1104 Oakes, Richard and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1032, 1033, 1037, 1039 biography, 1036–1037 and Broken Treaties protest, 1067 and Indians of All Tribes, 1035, 1036 and termination policy, 1038 Oates, Steven, 420 Obama, Barack, 933 Oberlin College, 474, 475 Obrajes (sweatshops), 38 Obscene literature, 496 “Obstructive demonstration,” 944 Occoneechees, 4 Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 717 Ochs, Phil, 1012, 1016 Office of Federal Indian Relations and Community Construction, 1068 Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO), 1075, 1079 Oglethorpe, James “Description of Stono Rebellion” (1739), 76–78 Stono Rebellion, 70, 71 Ohio, 563 Ohio Company, 178 Ohio National Guard Kent State, 939, 940 and Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 849, 852, 853 Ohio River Valley British penetration, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120 colonial era, 121–122 Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, 28, 31–32, 39, 47 Ojeda, Bartolome´ de, 34–35 Ojibwas Nakota Sioux, 613 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 110, 111, 120 Oklahoma Green Corn Rebellion, 739 and Ku Klux Klan, 741 Tulsa Race Riot, 771, 801–804

Index “Oklahoma Commission to Study Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 Reports,” 809–828 Oklahoma National Guard, 802, 803 Olatunji, 897 Old South Church (ME), 370 “Old Sow,” 392 Older Women’s League (OWL), 1046–1047 “Olive Branch,” 143 Oliver, Andrew Liberty Tree effigy, 159, 202 Stamp Act protests, 132 Olney, Richard, 647, 648, 649 Omaha, 765, 769 On the Waterfront (film), 862 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 937 Oneida Indians, 111 Onondaga Indians, 111 On˜ate, Juan de biography, 39, 41 and Franciscans, 37 governorship of New Mexico, 27, 28, 29, 33, 47 picture, 40 Opdyke, George, 438 Operation Dewey Canyon III, 931–932 Opponents of War, (Peterson/Fite) 1917–1918, 741 Order in Council, 54 Order of Good Templars, 371 “Order of the American Knights, The,” 242 Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, 373 Oregon, 341, 480 Oregon Territory, 385 Organization of African Unity, 908 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 908 Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, 438 Osawatomie militia and Bleeding Kansas, 349–350 and John Brown, 416, 424 and Pottawatomie Massacre, 360–361 Osgood, Charles, 709, 713 Oswald, Russell, 1060 Otermı´n, Antonio de biography, 41–43 New Mexico, 31, 32–34 Other American, The (Harrington), 943 Otis, Harrison Gray, 926

Otis, James, 130, 141, 146 Ottawa Indians, 109, 110, 111, 120 Ottoman Empire, 665 Overseers, 253 Owens, Richard, 337 Oxford Union Debate, 908 Pace, John T. and BEF, 832 and Walter Waters, 843, 844 Pachucos, 871, 875 Padilla, Juan and Bear Flag Revolt, 336 Padre´s, Jose´ Maria, 343–344 Pagago Revolt, 107 Page, Sarah and Tulsa Race Riot, 801, 802 Paine, Robert Treat and Boston Massacre prosecution, 154 Paine, Thomas and Stamp Act protests, 130, 141, 143 Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike (1913–1914), 797, 799 Palmer, A. Mitchell government raids, 757 and Red Scare, 741 Palmer, Bertha and Pullman Strike, 646–647 Palmer, John M. and Homestead Strike, 625 Palmes, Richard and “Account of the Boston Massacre” (1770), 166–167 Pamunkey Indians Bacon’s Rebellion, 6 and “Pamunkey and Chickahominy march,” 11 Pan Handle Railroad and Pennsylvania Railroad strikes, 569 Pan-Slavic sentiment, Eastern European, 665 Panic of 1819 Stephen Austin, 305 and Texas Revolt, 289 Panic of 1837 and Susan B. Anthony, 484 and women’s property rights, 476 Panic of 1873 and Chinese immigrants, 593

I-43

I-44

Index Panic of 1873 (continued) and Great Railroad Strike (1877), 563, 564 and Pullman Palace Car Company, 655, 656 Pullman Strike, 643–644 Paper currency and American Revolution, 208–209, 213 Parilla, Diego Ortiz biography, 105–106 and Oacpicagigua, 104, 105 Parker, Isaac and antiwar activism, 926 Parker, Theodore and antiwar activism, 927 Harpers Ferry Raid, 415 secret six, 417, 429, 430 Parker, Timothy and antiwar activism, 926 Park, Maud Wood and women’s movement, 481 Parker, William and Pine Tree Riot, 185 Parks, Rosa and civil rights movement, 895 and Martin Luther King Jr., 904 and SCLC, 910 Parma and expulsion of Jesuits, 103–104 Parsons, Albert anarchism, 585 eight-hour day, 588 and Haymarket Riot, 578, 580, 581, 582 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 46 Partido Liberal Mexicano and Plan de San Diego, 728 Pasadena City College and Rodney King, 1102 “Pastry-War,” 310 Patawomeck Indians and Bacon’s Rebellion, 1 Patman, Wright and BEF, 830, 831, 832, 835 and veterans’ rights, 842 and Walter Waters, 843, 844 Patronato Real, 37 Patterson, Bradley H., 1034 Patterson, Daniel T. and martial law, 242

Patterson, Robert “Tut,” and civil rights movement, 893 Pattison, Robert, Homestead Strike, 624, 625 Patton, George Anacostia Flats Battle, 835 and BEF, 829 and Douglas MacArthur, 840 Paul, Alice and ERA, 1053 and feminist movement, 1043 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and women’s suffrage, 480–481 Paul Potter Speech of Students for a Democratic Society Delivered at the Washington Monument (1965), 945–950 Paul Revere’s Ride (Longfellow), 162 Pawnee and Lakota Sioux, 613 Payment in lieu of taxes (PILT), 1090 Peace Democrats and antiwar activism, 927 Peace Movement and antiwar activism, 925 Peace Party, Texas Revolt, 295 Pearson, Drew on Anacostia Flats Battle, 835–836 and Douglas MacArthur, 840–841 Pecan State Prison, 1106 Peck, George R. and Pullman Strike, 646 “Peculiar institution,” 251 Peden, Katherine Graham and Kerner Commission, 996 Pelham, Henry and Boston Massacre picture, 154, 163 Peltier, Leonard and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1082 Pence, George and Baldwin-Felts, 799 Penn, William, 93 colonial Pennsylvania, 91 and Pennsylvania, 464 Quaker faith, 96, 97 Pennsylvania backcountry-coastal conflict, 169 colonial settlement, 91 Fries’ Rebellion (1790s), 238

Index German immigrants, 330–331 George Thomas, 93 Herman Husband, 181 Homestead Strike, 619–627 Irish immigrants, 325, 329 Lattimer Massacre, 661–664, 668–669 and Molly Maguires, 460 natural resources, 464–465 religious freedom, 97 settlement of, 464 Stamp Act protests, 134–135 Whiskey Rebellion, 227–228, 231 Pennsylvania Charter (1682), 92 Pennsylvania “Dutch,” 330–331 Pennsylvania Freeman and antiwar activism, 927 Pennsylvania National Guard and Homestead Strike, 625 Pennsylvania Railroad and Andrew Carnegie, 630 and Great Railroad Strikes, 563, 569, 570 Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Philadelphia Election Riot, 93 Pentagon, attack on, 932 People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Mobe, 1028 “People’s Constitution” and Charterites, 315 Dorr’s Rebellion, 312, 313, 317 People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace and antiwar activism, 930 “People’s Government” (RI), 313 Peoria Indians and Illinois Confederacy, 123 Peralta, Pedro de, New Mexico, 29, 47 Perez, Judge Leander and civil rights movement, 894 Perkins, Frances, 481 and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 864 Pernicious system of religion,” 604 Perry, David and Nez Perce´ flight, 554 Peter Zenger Case and Stamp Act protests, 131 Peters, Andrew Jones and Boston Police Strike, 758

Peterson, Esther, 1048–1049 Peterson, Gilbert, 741 Petion, Henri, 263 Pettigrew, Richard and Wounded Knee Massacre, 603 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention (1787), 214, 215 Continental Congress (1774), 200 Great Migration, 773–774 and Ku Klux Klan, 542 race riots (1834), 777 Philadelphia and Reading Coal Company, 460–461 Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and Molly Maguires, 716 wage cuts, 715 Philadelphia Election Riot (1742), xxiv, 91–93 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and Women’s Movement, 474 Philadelphia National Guard and Pennsylvania Railroad strikes, 569 Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844), collective action, xxiv, 325–327 Philippine-American War, antiwar activism, 925, 928 Philippines and Douglas MacArthur, 840, 841 Spanish-American War, 928, 933 Philips Exeter Academy and Thomas Wilson Dorr, 316 Philipse, Adolph, 80 Philipse, Frederick, 85 Philo, Baptiste, New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 672 Picket lines Homestead Strike, 622 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 848–849 Pico, Pı´o Bear Flag Revolt, 333, 335 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 Picurı´s Pueblo, 34 Piedras, Jose de la and Texas Revolt, 291 Pierce, Franklin Bleeding Kansas, 348, 350, 357 and Dorothea Dix, 486–487

I-45

I-46

Index Pierce, Franklin (continued) Kansas-Nebraska Act, 359 Topeka Constitution, 361 Pierce, Lenard New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 672 and Robert Charles, 675 Pierson, Robert, 1015 Pike, Zebulon, 1073 Pima Revolt (1751) collective action, xxi–xxii, 99–103 and Jesuit Order, 103 and Parilla, 105–106 and Tohono O’odham, 107 Pine Ridge Reservation AIM, 609 and BIA, 1079 and Dick Wilson, 1082–1083 FBI infiltration, 1080–1081 overview, 1081–1082 Wounded Knee Massacre, 602, 603, 605, 607, 608 Wounded Knee occupation, 1075 Pine Tree Riot (1772) and collective action, xxii, 183–185 Pine Tree Tavern and Pine Tree Riot, 184 Pinkerton, Allan, agency founder, 621, 632 Pinkerton, Robert A., 621–622 Pinkerton agents and Homestead Strike, 621–622 and Molly Maguires, 461 Pinkerton National Detective Agency “Account of Violence between Strikers and Company Security Guards,” 634–637 and Homestead Strike, 619, 621, 623–625 and industrial violence, 715 overview, 632–633 Pı´o, Padre Juan, 32 Pitcairn, Robert and Pennsylvania Railroad strike, 569 Pits Bessemer Steel Works and AA, 619 Pitt, William (the Elder) and Jeffrey Amherst, 117 replacement of, 203 Stamp Act protests, 131, 135, 136 western defense, 143

Pittsburgh (PA) and Great Migration, 773–774 and Great Railroad Strikes, 566, 569–570 Pittsburgh Gazette Benjamin Well’s resignation, 232 warning to tax collectors, 230, 244 Pius IX (pope) and Dorothea Dix, 487 opposition to liberalism, 330, 374 Pizan˜a, Aniceto, Plan de San Diego, 728, 729, 731 “Placemen,” 237 Plan de San Diego (1915) collective action, xxiii, 727–732, 734 and Tejanos, 735–736 and Texas Rangers, 737 translations of, 732 Plan of Vera Cruz, Santa Anna, 291 Plantations colonial South Carolina, 75 Stono Rebellion, 69 Planter elites/class and slavery, 251, 253 Planters’ Protective Association (PPA) and Black Patch War, 697–699 Plasters and Laborers Union, Rodney King, 1102 Platte County Self-Defense Association, Bleeding Kansas, 349 Plessy, Homer, 678, 679 Plessy v. Ferguson and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 682 and civil rights, 891, 893 de jure segregation, 807 and Jim Crow Laws, 677 overview, 678–679 Plug Uglies and Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374 overview, 379–380 and Rip Raps, 380 and vigilance committees, 381–382 Plumsted, Clement, 92 Plunkett, James and Haymarket Riot, 579 Plural marriage. See Polygamy Plymouth, Dominion of New England, 59

Index Plymouth, earliest intergovernmental assembly, 54 Pohe´-yemo. See Pope´ Police brutality defined, 878 extent of, 878–880 Houston Riot, 751 Police harassment and Detroit Riots, 987, 993 Police Protective League, 1104 Polish immigrants and Eastern European immigrants, 665, 666 Lattimer Massacre, 661, 665 Political corruption and Battle of Athens, 883–885, 888–889 Polk, James K. and antiwar activism, 927, 933 election victory, 327 and Mexican War, 733 and Santa Anna, 310 Poll tax and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681 and political machines, 888 Shays’ Rebellion, 209–210 Polygamy (Mormons), 390, 391, 392–394 Pontiac, biography, 122–123 Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763), collective action, xxi–xxii, 109–115 Pony Express, origin, 387 Poor Law, Anglican Church, 95 Poor People’s Campaign and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 and SCLC, 911 Pope´ biography, 43, 45 picture, 44 Pueblo Revolt, 31–32, 34–35, 42 Pope, Gabriel and Watts Riot, 965 Pope’s Day, Stamp Act protests, 131–132 Popular sovereignty and Bleeding Kansas, 347 and Jayhawkers, 354 Rhode Island suffrage, 311 and slavery, 358–359 Populist Party and Knights of Labor, 599

and tobacco farmers, 697, 702 Port Huron Statement and counterculture, 937 and Tom Hayden, 1012, 1024 SDS, 943 Porteous, Gabriel and New Orleans Race Riot (1900), 672 Porter, David R. and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 327 Portland Rum Riot (1855) and collective action, xxiv, 365–367 Portugal and expulsion of Jesuits, 103–104 Possum Hunters and Black Patch War, 697 Potato famine and Irish immigration, 325, 369 Potawatomi Indians and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 120 Pottawatomic Rifles and Bleeding Kansas, 349 Pottawatomie Massacre Bleeding Kansas, 349 and John Brown, 423–424, 426 overview, 359–361 Potter, Paul, speech delivered at the Washington Monument (1965), 945–950 Powderly, Terence V., 462 Knights of Labor, 598, 599 on Pinkertons, 533 Powell, Colin, 900 Powell, Dave antebellum slave rebellions, 258, 262, 263 Nat Turner section, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286 Powell, Laurence and Los Angeles Uprising, 1095, 1096, 1097 Powhatan Chiefdom Bacon’s Rebellion, 3 Sir William Berkeley, 11–12 and Susquehannock Indians, 17 tobacco wars, 19–20 Poyas, Peter and Vesey’s uprising, 265, 266 Pratt, R. H. and Wounded Knee massacre, 603 “Prayed clergy,” 155

I-47

I-48

Index Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and civil rights movement, 897 and SCLC, 910–911 “Preliminary and Final Reports of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” 809–828 Prentice, George D., incendiary writings, 377 Presbyterian organization model, Calvinism, 58 Presidio Bear Flag Revolt, 337 and Mariano Vallejo, 343 Presidio (Goliad/La Bahia), Texas Revolt, 293–294, 296, 298–299 Presidio del Pitic, Diego Ortiz Parilla, 105 Preston, Thomas biography, 161–162 Boston Massacre, 153 Boston Massacre trial, 154–155, 157 Price, John G. and Brooks-Baxter War, 545, 550 Price, Rena and Watts Riot, 965, 970 Prichett, Laurie and civil rights movement, 898 Primus Plot (1720), slave rebellion, 76 Prince (slave) and New York Slave Insurrection, 80, 87–88, 89, 90 Prioleau, J. C. and Vesey’s uprising, 266 Prioleau, Peter and Vesey’s uprising, 265 “Proclamation and Executive Order against State Resistance to Desegregation in Mississippi,” 913–915 “Proclamation Declaring California an Independent Republic,” 345–346 “Proclamation to the Great White Father,” 1035, 1040–1042 Professions and Women’s Movement, 476, 478 “Progress Report of the Presidential Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery,” 1106–1120 Progressive Era journalists, and “robber barons,” 571, 572 race riots, 777

Progressive Labor Party and Haymarket Riot, 583 Progressive movement and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 Prohibition and temperance movement, 371 Prohibition Party, electoral showing, 371 and Neal S. Dow, 367 “Project C,” 897–898 Promised land,” 252 “Proned,” 1104 Property rights Chinese immigrants, 593, 597 women’s movement (1870), 473, 474, 475–477, 478 Property taxes, Fries’ Rebellion (1790s), 238 Proposition 14 and Watts Riot, 968, 969 Proposition F, 1097 Proprietary Party, Philadelphia Election Riot, 91, 92 Prosser, Gabriel and antebellum slave revolts, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257 Virginia uprising (1799), xxiii, 263–265 Prosser, Thomas and Gabriel, 256, 263–264 Protestant Reformation and Jesuit Order, 103 Protestants, early settlers, 329 Province of New York, 84 “Provisional Constitution” (John Brown), 417 Provoost, Davide, 85 Prudon, Victor and Bear Flag Revolt, 335 and Sonoma, 344 Public Advertiser, The (Samuel Adams), 139 Public domain, overview, 1090–1091 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1085 Public housing projects and Detroit Riots, 995 Public Land Law Review Study, FLPMA, 1089 Public lands BLM, 1089 FLPMA, 1089–1090 overview, 1090–1091 Sagebrush Rebellion, 1085

Index Public Ledger, “Strikers Resolutions and Editorials,” 668–669 Public schools, Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 325 Pueblo de los Angelos and Diego Ortiz Parilla, 105 Pueblo people arrival of Spaniards, 27–28 Indian attacks, 34 reciprocal sharing, 28 religious traditions, 29, 45–46 revolt of, 32–35, 38, 41–42 Spanish demands, 28, 29–30 Pueblo Religion (Clews), 46 Pueblo Revolt (1680), xxi, 31–35, 41–42 “Declaration of Pedro Naranjo” (1681), 49–51 Puerto Rico, Spanish-American War, 928 Pulaski Circuit Court, Brooks-Baxter War, 546 Pullman, George and Pullman Palace Car Company, 654, 655, 657 Pullman Loan and Savings Bank, 656 Pullman Palace Car Company, 654 ARU strike, 643–650 overview, 654–655 Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894, 657–659 wage cuts, 656–657 Pullman Strike (1894) and AFL, 851 collective action, xxii–xxiii, 643–650 Puritanism, 57 Puritans, Calvinism, 58 Dominion of New England, 59 and Quakers, 95, 96 Putnam, Rufus, Shays’ Rebellion, 212 Quakers, antiwar activism, 925 in colonial Pennsylvania, 96–97 New Amsterdam, 61 Philadelphia Election Riot, 91–93 and women’s movement, 475 Quantrill, William Clark and Bushwackers, 353 Quartering Act (1765) Coercive Acts, 197, 199

passage of, 128 and provisions, 203–204 Quartering and Mutiny Acts, protests against, 141 Quebec Act, Canadian rights, 199 Quebec, colonial attack, 54 French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War, 118, 191, 192 Quigly, John and Pine Tree Riot, 184 Quimbly, William and Pine Tree Riot, 185 Quimby, Aaron and Pine Tree Riot, 184 Quincy, Josiah II and Boston Massacre defense, 154, 157 Quincy, Samuel and Boston Massacre prosecution, 154 Quipo (knotted cord), 31 Raboteau, Albert J., 284 Race Pullman Strike, 645–646 and Pullman Palace Car Company, 655 Race riots Atlanta Race Riot (1906), xxiv, 681–687 Bleeding Kansas (1854), xxiv, 347–352 Colfax Massacre (1873), xxiv, 537–539 collective action, xxiv Houston Riot (1917), xxiv, 749–752, 753–754 after King’s death, 906 Know-Nothing Riot (1866), xxiv, 373–375 Lattimer Massacre (1897), xxiv, 661–664 New Orleans Race Riot (1900), xxiv, 671–673 New Orleans Riot (1866), xxiv, 449–452, 453 New York Draft Riots (1863), xxiv, 435–440, 777 overview, 777–778 Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844), xxiv, 325–327 Portland Rum Riot (1855), xxiv, 365–367 Red Summer (1919), xxiv, 765–772 Seattle Riot (1886), xxiv, 593–595 Springfield Race Riot (1908), xxiv, 689–692, 778 Tulsa Race Riot (1921), xxiv, 771, 801–804 “Race to the bottom,” 1121, 1126, 1128

I-49

I-50

Index Racism and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681 and New York Draft Riots, 436, 439, 777 overview, 444–446 Springfield Race Riot, 689, 690, 691, 778 Radical feminism and women’s rights, 1044, 1047 Radical Republicans and Reconstruction Act, 552 “Radio Free Alcatraz,” 1039–1040 Railroad strike (1877) and Molly Maguires, 461–462 Railroad workers, 570–571 Railroads ARA, 651–652 Chinese immigrants, 593 East Louisiana Railroad Company, 679 industrial violence, 715 LNO&T, 675 Pullman Strike, 643–650 and racial segregation, 677, 679 Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894, 657–659 state bond aid, 546 Railway Times and ARU, 651 Rainach, William and civil rights movement, 894 Raleigh (NC), 174 Ramos, Bailio, Plan de San Diego, 727 Rancherı´a Indians, 38 Randolph, A. Philip and civil rights movement, 891–892, 897 March on Washington, 909 Randolph, Edmund, Whiskey Rebellion, 230, 231 Rankin, Janet, 481 “Rape of Zacatecas,” 309 Rathburn, William, on King beating, 1099 Rather, Dan and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1013 Ray, James Earl, 899, 906 Reagan, Ronald Martin Luther King holiday, 906 public lands policy, 1091–1092 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086

Realities of Irish Life, The (Trench), 459 Rebellion in Newark (Hayden), 1024 Reckless Decade, The (Brands), 608 Reconstruction (1863–1877) Brooks-Baxter War, 545–547 and Compromise of 1876, 677 overview, 454–455 and woman’s suffrage, 488 Reconstruction Act (1867) and Brooks-Baxter War, 545 and New Orleans Riot (1866), 451 Radical Republicans, 552 Red Cloud and Black Hills, 614 Red Cloud, Wounded Knee Massacre, 602, 605 “Red Napoleon,” 555 “Red necks,” 793 “Red Power” movement and Alcatraz occupation 1035, 1037, 1039, 1040 and civil rights movement, xxiii overview, 1073–1074 Red Scare and American socialists, 746 and Boston Police Strike, 759 and Red Summer Riots, 765 and socialism, 741 “Red Special,” 653 Red Summer (1919) and collective action, xxiv, 765–772 Red Tomahawk, Wounded Knee Massacre, 605 “Redeemers,” 238 “Redlegs,” 353, 355 Redpath, James and John Brown, 424 Redstockings and Feminist Movement, 1047 Ree, Richard, Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 Reeder, Andrew, Bleeding Kansas, 348 Refugio Mission, Texas Revolt, 298 Regional Council of Negro Leadership, civil rights movement, 893 Register, Robert C. and Colfax Massacre, 538

Index “Regulation, The” North Carolina, 169 South Carolina, 169, 172 Regulation Association, 170 Regulation Movement, Shays’ Rebellion, 210–212, 214 Regulator Movement (1771) and collective action, xxii, 169–175 Regulator revolt and William Tryon, 132, 171–172 Reid, Whitelaw and Homestead Strike, 625–626 “Reign of the Rabble,” 446 Reimer (Raymer), Abraham and Springfield Race Riot, 690–691, 693 Religion Broken Treaties protest, 1068 Calvinism, 57–58 collective action, xxiv Colonial New York, 61–62 Colonial Pennsylvania, 95, 96–97 early settlers, 329 Indian Shakers, 602 Leisler’s Rebellion (1689), xxiv, 53–56 Nat Turner, 270, 271 Philadelphia Election Riot (1742), xxiv, 91–93 and Regulator Movement, 170, 179–180 slave preachers, 254, 283–284 and the Temperance movement, 371 Utah War (1857–1858), xxiv, 383–387 Religious Society of Friends. See Quakers Relocation, Native American policy, 560 Remick, Christian, Boston Massacre picture, 154 Rental property and Pullman Palace Car Company, 656–657 Repartimientos (labor), 28 Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894, 657–659 “Report on the Riots in Detroit, Vance Report,” 997–1008 Representative government and Leisler’s Rebellion, 53, 55–56 “Reproductive freedom,” 1058 Republic of Texas established, 733 and Tejanos, 735

Republican National Convention (2000) and Direct Action Network, 1125 Republican Party and Bleeding Kansas, 351 Brooks-Baxter War, 545, 549 and Calvin Coolidge, 761 and Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374–375 and Neal S. Dow, 366 and Nelson Rockefeller, 1064–1065 Maine, 370 New Orleans Riot (1866), 449–451 opposition to polygamy, 393 opposition to slavery, 426 overview, 551–552 and Reconstruction, 454–455 “termination policy,” 1031 “Republican womanhood,” 473–474 Reservations, Native Americans, 557, 1031 Reserve Officers Training Corps and SDS, 944 Revere, Paul biography, 162–164 Boston Massacre area plan, 155 Boston Massacre engraving, 151, 152, 154, 155, 160, 163 and the Boston Tea Party, 196 Revolution, The (Anthony), 485–486 Revolutionary War Science (Most), 586–587 Revolutions of 1848, 331 Reyes Berryessa, Jose´ de los and Bear Flag Revolt, 337 Reynolds, David, 416 Rhode Island colonial charter, 311 Dominion of New England, 59 Stamp Act protests, 133 universal white male suffrage, 318–319 Rhode Island Constitutional Party and Dorr’s Rebellion, 311 Rhode Island General Assembly and Dorr’s Rebellion, 312 Rhode Island Suffrage Association and Charterites, 315 Dorr’s Rebellion, 311–312, 313 and Thomas Wilson Dorr, 317 Rhode Island Suffrage Party and Charterites, 315

I-51

I-52

Index Rhodes, James A. and Kent State, 939 Ribbonmen Molly Maguires, 459 secret society, 466 Ribicoff, Abraham and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1013, 1023 and Richard J. Daley, 1021 Rice in colonial South Carolina, 75 Stono Rebellion, 69 “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” 436 Richard Palmes’s Account of the Boston Massacre” (1770), 166–167 Richardson, Ebenezer, Boston Massacre, 152 Richardson, George, Springfield Race Riot, 689 Richardson, Gloria and civil rights movement, 897 Richardson, Bill, 1130 Right to bear arms and Battle of Athens, 885 Rights in Conflict, 1014–1015, 1016–1017 Rı´o Abajo (NM), 32, 33 Rı´o Arriba (NM), 32 “Rioter’s Letter to the New York Times and the Newspaper’s Response (1863), A,” 447–448 Rip Raps Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374 overview, 380–381 and Plug Uglies, 379 and vigilance committees, 382–383 Roach, Max, and civil rights movement, 897 Roarity, James and Molly Maguires, 461 “Robber barons” and Great Railroad Strikes, 565–566 overview, 571–572 Robertson, Curtis, alias of Robert Charles, 675 Robinson, Bernice and civil rights movement, 896 Robinson, Charles Bleeding Kansas, 348, 349 Topeka Constitution, 362 Robinson, Jackie, 892, 897 Robledo, Francisco Gomez, 41, 42

Rockefeller, John D. and CF&I, 713 Ludlow Massacre, 707, 708–710 “robber barons,” 571 Rockefeller, Nelson A. and Attica Prison Riot, 1060, 1064–1065 biography, 1064–1065 Rockefeller Plan, CF&I, 710, 713 Rockefeller, Winthrop, 552 Rockingham, second marquis of and Stamp Act protests, 135 Rocky Mountain News, on Ludlow Massacre, 709 Rocky Mountain region heavy industry, 707, 713, 714 Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086 Roe v. Wade, 1055–1056 Rolfe, John, 19 Romney, George and Detroit Riots, 989 Roosevelt, Eleanor, on Battle of Athens, 885 Roosevelt, Franklin African Americans voting rights, 456 on Anacostia Flats Battle, 836 and BEF, 833 and civil rights movement, 891–892 and Douglas MacArthur, 840 and Great Depression, 837 and Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 848, 849 and union movement, 861, 862, 864, 865 and veterans’ rights, 842 Roosevelt, Theodore and antiwar activism, 933 and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681–682 Rose, Ernestine, women’s property rights, 477 Rose, Thomas, Stono Rebellion, 70, 77 Rosebud Reservation, Wounded Knee Massacre, 602, 603 Rossi, Angelo and Bloody Thursday, 861 Rotch, Francis and the Boston Tea Party, 195–196 “Rough music,” 229 Rouzan, Joe and Watts Riot, 965, 967 Rowland, Dick and Tulsa Race Riot, 801, 802

Index Royal authority and Pine Tree Riot, 187–188 Royal Navy (Britain) Pine Tree Riot, 183 shipbuilding, 188 Royer, Daniel and Wounded Knee Massacre, 603 Royko, Mike, on Richard J. Daley, 1022 Rubin, Jerry and Abbie Hoffman, 1026 antiwar activism, 937 Chicago Eight, 1015, 1019 and Chicago Seven, 1019, 1020 Yippies, 1010, 1011 Ruffin, Josephine and AWSA, 483, 488, 490 Ruger, Thomas H. and Wounded Knee Massacre, 604 Rumford Fair Housing Act and Watts Riot, 968, 969 “Runaway Scrape,” 297, 304 Rural regions, Green Corn Rebellion, 739 Rushmore, Mount, 1033–1034 Russ, Cliff, 1104–1105 Russian Jews and Eastern European immigrants, 665 Russian Revolution and American socialists, 746 Russo-Japanese War and Douglas MacArthur, 840 Rustin, Bayard and civil rights movement, 897 and March on Washington, 909 and SCLC, 910 Rutland, William R. and Colfax Massacre, 538 Ryan, Joseph and ILA, 858, 865 Sacco, Nicola, 586, 587 Sachaman, John and Haymarket Riot, 579 Sacramento (CA) and Bear Flag Revolt, 333 Saenz, Florencio and Plan de San Diego, 729

Sagebrush Rebellion (1979) and collective action, xxii, 1085–1087 Sagebrush Rebels, 1092, 1093 “Sagebrush Solution,” 1092 Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Charles Deslondes, 262, 263 and Denmark Vesey, 265 slave uprising, 255–256 Salinas Pueblo, 30, 43 Salter, Bill and Baldwin-Felts, 799 Salutary neglect Stamp Act Protests, 127, 142–143 Texas Revolt, 289, 290, 292 Salvation Army and BEF, 831 Samas, David, “Statement of the Fort Hood Three,” 951–953, 954–956 San Antonio de Bexar, Battle of the Alamo, 303 and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 289, 294, 296 San Carlos de Buenavista, Pima Revolt, 101 San Felipe Pueblo, 49 San Felipe, Texas Revolt, 292–293 San Francisco (CA) Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 337 counterculture, 937 “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 and Great Railroad Strikes, 563–564, 566 and Seattle General Strike, 867 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 857–859, 866–867 San Francisco General Strike Committee, West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 859 San Francisco Indian Center, 1031, 1035, 1037, 1038 San Francisco Industrial Association and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858, 861, 866–867 San Francisco Police Department and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858, 861–862, 864 San Francisco State University and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1031–1032 and Richard Oakes, 1036–1037

I-53

I-54

Index San Gabriel de Yungue, 28, 47 San Ignacio de Tubac, Pima Revolt, 101 San Jacinto and Santa Anna, 309–310 San Jacinto, Battle of, 306, 307 San Juan (NM), 28, 31 San Juan Pueblo, 43, 45, 47 San Miguel Mission, Santa Fe´, 47 Sanborn, Franklin and Secret Six, 417, 429, 430 Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and Dakota Nation, 612–613 Sandı´a Pueblo, 33 Sando, Joe, 45 Sandy Creek Association Herman Husband, 180 Regulator Movement, 169–170 Sanger, Margaret, on Sex Education and Contraception, 533–536 Sangre de Cristos, 47 Santa Anna, Antonio Lo´pez de Battle of the Alamo, 303 biography, 308–310 and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 291, 292, 296, 297, 298, 299–300 Santa Clara, Bear Flag Revolt, 335, 337 Santa Fe´ (NM) “city different,” 47–48 Pueblo Revolt, 32, 35, 42, 47 Santa Gertrudis de Altar, Pima Revolt, 101 Santanistas, 291 Santee Sioux Reservation and John Trudell, 1039 Santo Domingo Pueblo, 39 Sash, Moses, Shays’ Rebellion, 211 Satrom, Leroy, Kent State, 939 Sauk Indians, Pontiac’s Rebellion, 110 “Scabs” and Haymarket Riot, 576 Pullman Strike, 645, 646 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858, 861 Scalawags and Ku Klux Klan, 542 Radical Republicans, 552 Schafly, Phyllis, 1049

Schell, Paul, WTO protests, 1123 Schenectady, Leisler’s Rebellion, 54, 60 Scheuer, Sandra, Kent State, 939 Schmidt, Ethan, Bacon’s Rebellion, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20 Schmidt, Fritz and Haymarket Riot, 576 Schnaubelt, Rudolph and Haymarket Riot, 580–581 Schofield, John M., on Pullman Strike, 647 “School trusts,” land, 1090 Schroeder, William, Kent State, 939 Schultz, Richard, Chicago Seven trial, 1015, 1019 Schurz, Carl, antiwar activism, 928 Schuyler, Adoniah, 85 Schuyler, Elizabeth, and Alexander Hamilton, 239 Schuyler, Philip and Alexander Hamilton, 239 Schwab, Michael, Haymarket Riot, 580, 581, 582 “Scientific racism,” 682 Scorsese, Martin, 378–379 Scotland and Calvinist religion, 58 Scott, John Morin and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 Scott, Shirley, 993 Scott, Thomas A. and Great Railroad Strikes, 566, 569 Scott, Winfield and Robert E. Lee, 427–428 and Santa Anna, 310 Scottish immigrants, Regulator Movement, 169 Sea Island Citizenship Schools and civil rights movement, 896 Seale, Bobbie Black Panthers, 1012, 1019 Chicago Eight, 1015 Seattle (WA) Battle of, 1121–1123 Hooverville, 839 Seattle General Strike (1919) and post–World War I, 757 support for, 867 Seattle Riot (1886) and collective action, xxiv, 593–595 Secession, and American Civil War, 441

Index “Second American Revolution,” 1086 Second Great Migration (1940–1970) African Americans, 773 and segregation, 807 Second Reconstruction and civil rights movement, 892 Secret ballot, Regulator Movement, 170 Secret Six and Harpers Ferry raid, 417 overview, 429–430 Sectionalism and American Civil War, 441 Sedelmayr, Jacobo, Pima Revolt, 100 Sedition Act and American socialists, 746 Sedition Act and IWW, 741, 744, 745 Seeger, Pete, 900 and Chicago Seven trial, 1016 Segregation and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 682, 684 Jim Crow Laws, 671, 677 overview, 806–807 Plessy v. Ferguson, 678–679 Tulsa Race Riot, 801 U.S. military, 753 Seguin, Erasmo, Texas Revolt, 291 Seider, Christopher and Boston Massacre, 152 Selective Service Bill (1917) military segregation, 753 overview, 743–744 Self Leadership for all Nationalities Today (SLANT), Watts, 969 Seminary of the Sisters of Charity and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 Semple, Robert Baylor “Bob“ Bear Flag Revolt, 335 Bear Flagger, 340 Seneca Falls Convention and ERA, 1053 and Feminist Movement, 1043 and Nineteenth Amendment, 489, 490 and NWSA, 488 women’s movement (1870), 473, 474, 475 Seneca Falls Declaration and women’s movement, 474, 475, 481

Seneca Indians and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 111, 113–114 “Separate but equal,” 678, 679, 682, 807 “Separate Car Act,” 678, 679 Sequin, Juan and Texas Revolt, 294 Serbian immigrants and Ludlow Massacre, 708 Sergeant York (film), 740, 743 Seris Revolt (1749) Diego Ortiz Parilla, 105 and Pima Revolt, 100 Servicemen defined, 880 and Zoot Suit Riot, 871–875, 879–881 Settlement house movement and Women’s Movement, 480 Settlers, Bleeding Kansas, 348 “Sevastopol Policy,” 385 Seven Days Battles and Robert E. Lee, 428 Seven Years War, 103–104 and Arthur Dobbs, 179 and the Boston Tea Party, 191, 198 British success, 151 end of, 109 and French and Indian War, 118–119 Ohio River Valley, 121 Pine Tree Riot, 183 and Pontiac, 122 Seventh Kansas Cavalry and Jayhawkers, 355 71 Hustlers, 1105 Sex Education, Margaret Sanger, 533–536 Seymour, Horatio and New York Draft Riots, 437, 439–440 Shakers, Indian religious tradition, 602 Shangreau, John and Wounded Knee Massacre, 606 Shannon, Thomas and Haymarket Riot, 579 “Shape up,” 857, 862 Shapp, Milton and Molly Maguires, 461 Shattuck, Job and Shays’ Rebellion, 211

I-55

I-56

Index Shaw, Anna Howard and Women’s Movement, 480 Shaw, Daniel and Colfax Massacre, 538 Shaw University and civil rights movement, 896 SNCC, 912 Shawnee Indians Ohio River Valley, 121 Pennsylvania native tribe, 464 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111, 113, 120 and Susquehannock Indians, 17 Shawnee Mission, Bleeding Kansas, 348, 349 “Shawnee Prophet,” 120 Shays, Daniel biography, 220–221 and Lafayette, 211, 220 Massachusetts General Court, 219 Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213, 215, 237 Shays’ Rebellion (1787) “An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion” (1786), 223–224 collective action, xxii, 207–216 “Letter to the Hampshire Herald Listing the Grievances of the Rebels” (1786), 224–225 and Massachusetts General Court, 318 and Regulator Movement, 174, 207, 210–211, 212, 214, 219 Shelly v. Kraemer and segregation, 807 Shepard, William and Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 211 Sherbrooke, Sir John S. and antiwar activism, 926 Sherburn John and Pine Tree Riot, 183–184 Sherman Antitrust Act and on Pullman Strike, 648 Sherman, Henry “Dutch Henry” and Pottawatomie Massacre, 360 Sherman, William Tecumseh and Nez Perce´ flight, 554 Shiloh, Battle of and Albert Sidney Johnston, 387

Shipbuilding deforestation, 188 employment, 188–189 Shippen, Edward, 97 Shoemaker, Charles and Haymarket Riot, 579 Short Bull and Wounded Knee Massacre, 602, 603, 608 Shoshone and Lakota Sioux, 613 Shults, Robert and Haymarket Riot, 579 Shuttlesworth, Fred and SCLC, 910 Siegenthaler, John and civil rights movement, 896 Sierra Club and James Watt, 1093 and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086 Sign of the Green Tree and Whiskey Rebellion, 230 Silent Brigade and Black Patch War, 697 Simi Valley (CA) and Rodney King trial, 1096–1097 Simmons, William Joseph and Ku Klux Klan, 542, 805 Simons, J. and Haymarket Riot, 579 Siney, John, 466 Singer, Melanie and Los Angeles Uprising, 1095 Sioux Indians overview, 613–614 return of Mount Rushmore, 1033–1034 Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 602, 604, 605, 606, 607–608 Sit-ins antiwar activism, 931 BIA, 1033 and civil rights movement, 895 SNCC, 912 Stokely Carmichael, 903 Sitting Bull (Tatanka Yotanka) biography, 614–615 and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1081

Index Wounded Knee Massacre, 602–603, 604–605, 614 “Skimmington,” 229 Sklencar, Marge, 942 Slave Codes, South Carolina, 71, 73–74, 76 Slave education, after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 270, 274 Slave owners dilemma, 252 “slave problem,” 256–257 “Slave power,” 351 Slave preachers, 254, 283–285 Slave rebellions, Charles Deslondes’s German Coast Uprising (1811), xxiii, 252, 255–256, 262–263 collective actions, xxiii, 251–259 Denmark Vesey’s uprising (1822), xxiii, 252, 255, 256, 257, 265–266 Gabriel Prosser’s Virginia Uprising (1799), xxiii, 252, 253, 254, 255–256, 263–265 George Boxley (1815), xxiii, 254, 255 John Brown at Harpers Ferry (1859), xxiii, 257–258, 415–421 legacy, 257–258 Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), xxiii, 252, 254, 255, 269–278 New York Slave Insurrection (1741), xxiii, 79–81 Stono Rebellion (1739), xxiii, 69–72, 76 Slave trade, end of, 891 Slave violence, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 272–273 Slavery abolition of, 449 and American Civil War, 425–426 American contradictions, 256 Bacon’s Rebellion, 1, 6, 7 Bleeding Kansas, 347–352 Buchanan administration, 389 Colonial New York, 84 common misconception, 253 Emancipation Proclamation, 441 and federalism, 238 and First Missouri Compromise, 356–358 and indentured servants, 16 justifications, 251 Massachusetts ban on (1783), 891 after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 270, 274–275

and New York Draft Riots, 435–436 and popular sovereignty, 358–359 in South Carolina, 75–76, 84 and Texas Revolt, 289 tobacco crop, 19 Topeka Constitution, 361–363 Slaves antebellum population, 253 armed rebellion, 255–257 bondage culture, 253–255, 282–283 classification of persons, 73–74 patterns of resistance, 252–255 Pima Revolt, 99 price of rebellion, 252 resettlement of, 274, 279–280 Sleepers, secret society, 466 Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots, 872, 879 Sloat, John Drake Bear Flag Revolt, 337 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 Sloughter, Henry, 55 and Jacob Leisler, 60–61 Slovak immigrants and Eastern European immigrants, 665 Lattimer Massacre, 661, 665 Smallpox Jeffrey Amherst, 117 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111, 112, 123, 124–125 Smith, Charles Ferguson, Utah War, 386 Smith, Erastus “Deaf” and Texas Revolt, 300 Smith, Frank and Attica Prison Riot, 1060–1061 Smith, George Venable and Seattle Riot, 594 Smith, Gerrit and John Brown, 423, 429–430 Harpers Ferry Raid, 415 Secret Six, 417, 429 Smith, Gloria Steinem, 1056 Smith, H. T. and Haymarket Riot, 579 Smith, Henry and Texas Revolt, 295–296 Smith, Hoke and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681, 685

I-57

I-58

Index Smith, Howard, 1049 Smith, John, on Susquehannock Indians, 17 Smith, Joseph, 390 and Brigham Young, 395 and Nauvoo Legion, 391 polygamy, 393 visit of John the Baptist, 389 Smith, Lot, Utah War, 385, 387 Smith College and Betty Friedan, 1045 Smithfield Quarters Colfax Massacre, 537, 538–539 Smithwick, Noah and Texas Revolt, 293 Snow, Kneeland S. and Houston Riot, 749–750 Snowden, George R., Pinkertons, 633 Snyder, Jacob Rin, Sonoma vineyards, 344 Social culture, women’s share, 529–533 Social Darwinists and American industrialists, 572 “Social Purity” speech (Susan B. Anthony), 501–504 Socialism American, 746–747 and Green Corn Rebellion, 739–740 Haymarket Riot, 575, 576, 577 Socialist anarchism, ideology, 585 Socialist Labor Party and anarchism, 585 bomb use, 586 and WPUS, 573 Socialist Party of America, 746 antiwar activism, 930 and Eugene Debs, 653 suppression, 741 “Society within society,” 255 Sociological Department, CF&I, 709, 713 Sociology for the South (Fitzhugh), 275 Socorro (assistance) village, 27–28 “Soft coal,” 661–662 “Solitude of Self” Address, 510–512 Solomon (slave), 253, 254 Sommers, Tish, and OWL, 1046 Sonoma (CA), Bear Flag Revolt, 333, 335, 336, 337, 340 Bear Flaggers, 339

overview, 343–345 vineyards, 344 Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party, 193, 194, 195 overview, 202–203 Paul Revere, 163 response to Coercive Acts, 197 Samuel Adams, 140 Stamp Act protests, 132, 133–134, 141, 143, 202 Townshend Act, 204 Townshend Act protest, 202–203 Sorcery, Pueblo Indians, 31, 43 Sorubiero, Peggy (Margaret), New York Slave Insurrection, 80, 88, 89 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 683 South Carolina and civil rights movement, 896 colonial, 75–76 Denmark Vesey’s uprising, 265–266 Regulator Movement, 169, 172–175 secession of, 390 and Shays’ Rebellion, 214 Slave codes, 73–74, 76 Stamp Act protests, 133 state capital, 174 Stono Rebellion, 69–72 South Carolina Assembly Regulator Movement, 173 slave code, 73, 74 Stono Rebellion, 69–70, 71 South Dakota and Lakota Sioux, 614 and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1081 Wounded Knee Massacre, 604 “South Texas,” Tejanos, 735 Southampton County Rebellion (1831), 257, 273, 274–275, 280, 285 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and civil rights movement, 895, 897–899 and Jim Crow Laws, 678 and March on Washington, 909 and Martin Luther King Jr., 904, 905 overview, 910–911 “Southern Editorial Response to John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia,” 432–434

Index Southern European immigrants Lattimer Massacre, 662 Ludlow Massacre, 707 “Southern Freedom Movement,” 893 Southern Manifesto, and civil rights movement, 894 Southwest Strike (1886) and Texas Rangers, 736 Southwestern Railroad and Knights of Labor strike, 599 Spain contract with On˜ate, 28, 39 expulsion of Jesuits, 100, 103–104 and Santa Anna, 309 Stono Rebellion, 69, 71 Treaty of Paris (1763), 119 Spalding, Martin and Bloody Monday, 377 Spanish Decree (1733) and slave emancipation, 69 Spanish Florida and Stono Rebellion, 69–70, 71 Spanish-American War antiwar activism, 925, 928 and Theodore Roosevelt, 681 Sparks, Lee and Houston Riot, 750 Spears, John and Green Corn Rebellion, 740 “Special Rangers,” 729, 737 Speed, James S. and Bloody Monday, 377 Spence, Homer and Green Corn Rebellion, 740 Spencer, Anna Garlin and Woman’s Share in Social Culture, 529–533 Spencer, George, 85 Sperry, Howard, West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858, 861 Spicer Manufacturing Company, 851 Spies, August anarchism, 585 Anarchist circular, 591–592 and eight-hour day, 588 and Haymarket Riot, 576, 577–578, 580–581, 582

and McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, 590–591 “Splendid isolation,” 128, 134 Spock, Benjamin and the Mobe, 1028 United States v. Spock, 957–960 Sports, and women’s rights, 1044 Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1028 Springarn Medal, Daisy Bates, 895 Springfield (IL) Race Riot (1908), collective action, xxiv, 689–692, 778 Springfield (OH) Race Riots (1904–1906), 778 Springfield armory, Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 212 Stamp Act (1765) British responses, 135 colonial responses, 128, 129, 131–134 fiscal solvency, 127 passage of, 127–128, 129, 146 repeal of, 131, 135, 139, 141, 145, 146 and Sons of Liberty, 202 Stamp Act Congress attendees, 134, 144 overview, 144–145 Samuel Adams, 139 and Stamp Act protests, 130, 131, 141, 146 Stamp Act Protests (1765) and collective action, xxii, 127–137 Stamp Act Resolution (1765), 147–148 Stamper, Norm and WTO protests, 1123 “Standing army” and Whiskey Rebellion, 227 Standing Rock Reservation and Sitting Bull, 615 Wounded Knee Massacre, 602, 603, 604–605 Stanford, Leland and “robber barons,” 571 Stanton, Edwin M. and New Orleans Riot (1866), 450 Stanton, Elizabeth Cade Introduction to The Woman’s Bible, 512–514 and Nineteenth Amendment, 489–490 and NWSA, 487–488, 490

I-59

I-60

Index Stanton, Elizabeth Cade (continued) on “Solitude of Self,” 510–512 and Susan B. Anthony, 484, 485–486 and women’s movement, 474, 477–478, 480, 483 Stanton, James, Haymarket Riot, 578–579 Starr, Paddy and Wounded Knee Massacre, 607 State governments, martial law, 243 State of Deseret (proposed Mormon state), 394–395 “Statement of the Fort Hood Three,” 951–957 States’ rights and American Civil War, 441 Stauffer, John, 423 St. Augustine (FL), and Stono Rebellion, 69 St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church, Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 Stearns, George Luther and Secret Six, 417, 429, 430 Steel Workers Organizing Committee, 629 Stein, Dan, 1130 Steinem, Gloria, 1056–1058 Stephens, Uriah and Knights of Labor, 598 Stevedores and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 857 Steward, Ira and the eight-hour day, 587–588 Stewart, Charles and Bleeding Kansas, 351 Stith, Gerald and vigilance committees, 382 St. Louis (MO) and Great Railroad Strikes, 565 WPUS, 573 St. Louis Times, WPUS, 573 St. Martin of Tours church and Bloody Monday, 377 St. Mary Magdalen Church and Homestead Strike, 622 St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church and Philadelphia Nativist Riots, 326 Stockton, Robert F. and J. C. Fre´mont, 342

Stokely Speaks Black Power to Pan-Africanism (Carmichael), 904 Stoll, Joost, Leisler’s Rebellion, 54 Stone, Lucy and AWSA, 483, 484, 488, 490 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 and women’s movement, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479 Stone Mountain Coal Corporation and Matewan Massacre, 799 and Sid Hatfield, 798 Stono Rebellion (1739), xxiii, 69–72, 73, 76 impact of, 79 Stony Point and Shays’ commendation, 211, 220 Stop ERA, 1049 Storrow, James Jackson and Boston Police Strike, 758 Stotesbury, Edward T. and Douglas MacArthur, 840–841 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 279 Stowell, David O., 564, 571 St. Patrick’s Church, Maine, 369 St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, and ARU, 651 St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, Richard Oakes, 1032, 1036, 1038 Stricker, John, and antiwar activism, 926 Strikebreakers Homestead Strike, 621, 622, 625 Pinkertons, 633 and Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 849 “Strikers Resolutions and Editorials,” Lattimer Mine, 668–669 Strong, Caleb and antiwar activism, 926 Stronghold and Wounded Knee Massacre, 603–604, 605 Stuart, Charles Edward (Bonnie Prince Charlie), 187 Stuart, J. E. B. and Harpers Ferry Raid, 419 and Robert E. Lee, 428 Stuart, John, Lord Bute, 132, 160 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) antiwar activism, 931

Index and civil rights movement, 896 and Malcolm X, 908 and March on Washington, 909 overview, 912–913 and SCLC, 911 and Stokely Carmichael, 903, 913 Students for a Democratic Society antiwar activism, 930–931, 937, 944 antiwar leaflet, 950–951 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1010 and Tom Hayden, 1024 overview, 943–945 Paul Potter speech, 945–950 and SNCC, 912 Stump, Henry and Know-Nothing Party, 374 Stuyvesant, Peter and religious conflict, 61 Styron, William and The Confessions of Nat Turner, 277, 281 Subterranean Pass Way,” 423 Succession and federalism, 238 Suffrage Bacon’s Rebellion 5 colonial Rhode Island, 311 House of Burgesses, 14, 15 Suffragists, Charterites, 315 Sugar Act (1733), fiscal solvency, 127 Sugar Mound and Bleeding Kansas, 350 Sullivan, Tom and Los Angeles Uprising, 1099 Sumner, Charles attack by Brooks, 351, 360 and Dorothea Dix, 486–487 Sumner, Edwin V., Wounded Knee Massacre, 605 Sumner, William Graham, antiwar activism, 928 Supreme Court cases A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp v. United States, 855 Bakke case, 899 Brooks v. Baxter, 546, 549

Bradwell v. Illinois, 499–500 Brown v. Board of Education, 678, 679, 807, 893 Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education, 893 Guinn v. United States, 456 Hudson v. McMillan, 1063 Laney v. United States, 789–791 Luther v. Borden (1849), 314, 319–323 Minor v. Happersett, 478 Moore v. Dempsey, 771 Muller v. Oregon, 515–516 Native American treaty rights, 1038–1039 Plessy v. Ferguson, 677, 678–679, 891, 893 Roe v. Wade, 1055–1056 Shelly v. Kraemer, 807 United States v. Cruikshank, 538 Williams v. Mississippi, 675 Wolff v. McConnell, 1063 Supreme Judicial Council, Dorr’s Rebellion, 312 “Surrender Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce´,” 561 Surveyor of the King’s Woods, Pine Tree Riot, 184 Susan B. Anthony amendment, 488–489, 490 letter to, 508–510 Susquehannock Indians Bacon’s Rebellion, 1–5, 10, 17, 18 geographic penetration, 17 Pennsylvania native tribe, 464 trade, 17–18 Sutter, John Bear Flag Revolt, 333, 334 and Bear Flaggers, 339, 340 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 Sutter’s Fort and Bear Flag Revolt, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 340 Swann, Thomas Know-Nothing Party, 374 and Plug Uglies, 379, 380 and Rip Raps, 380, 381 Swift, Granville and Bear Flag Revolt, 337 Bear Flagger, 340

I-61

I-62

Index Swisshelm, Jane and divorce law reform, 477 Synod of Dort, Calvinism, 57 “Tac Squad,” 987, 993 Taft, Charles and Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 849 Taft, William Howard and NAACP, 695 Taft-Hartley Act (1947) and AFL, 851 Take Back the Night Marches, 1050 Tallmadge, James and First Missouri Compromise, 356 Taney, Roger B., and Luther v. Borden (1849), 314 Taos Pueblo Indians, return of Blue Lake, 1034, 1067, 1071 Tappan, Arthur, 279 Tariff collection and Texas Revolt, 290 Tariffs and American Civil War, 441 Tax collectors Tom the Tinker warnings, 244 Whiskey Rebellion, 228–229, 230 Taxation Alexander Hamilton, 239, 240 Bacon’s Rebellion, 3, 5 Boston Massacre, 151 British-colonial conflict, 191–192 House of Burgesses, 14 Regulator Movement, 169, 170 Samuel Adams’ opposition, 139 Shays’ Rebellion, 207, 210, 211, 214, 222–223, 237 and salutary neglect, 142–143 Stamp Act Congress, 144 Stamp Act protests, 127–129, 131, 136 and Texas Revolt, 289 Townshend Act, 203 Whiskey Rebellion, 227, 229, 243–244 Taylor, Dwight (Fishman), Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 Taylor, Stewart and Harpers Ferry Raid, 419

Taylor, Zachary and Santa Anna, 310 Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party, 193, 194, 195 Tea Party (2010), collective action, xxiv Tea tax, consequences, 192–193 Teaching American History in South Carolina (website), 74 Teaching profession and women’s movement, 476 Teamsters Union and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858, 865 Teapot Dome Scandal and Warren Harding, 761 Tear gas Attica Prison Riot, 1060 and BEF, 829 and Blair Mountain Battle, 794 Kent State, 939 and Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, 849 Tejanos overview, 735–736 and Plan de San Diego, 729–730 and Texas Rangers, 737 Telemaque. See Vesey, Denmark Temperance and Quakers, 270 and religion, 371 and women’s movement, 475, 479, 484 “Ten Days War,” 710 “Ten Percent Plan,” 449, 454 Tennessee Battle of Athens, 883–885 Black Patch War, 697–699, 702 Ku Klux Klan, 805 racial segregation, 677 Regulator settlers, 178 and Sam Houston, 307 Tenskwatawa, “Shawnee Prophet,” 120 Tera´n, Manuel Mier and Stephen Austin, 306 Texas Revolt, 289 Termination and Broken Treaties protest, 1068 and Red Power, 1074

Index “Termination”policy overview, 1038–1039 Republican Party, 1031 Terrell, Joseph M. and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 686 Testerman, C. C. and Sid Hatfield, 798, 800 Tet Offensive and Chicago Riot, 1009 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1022 Teton Sioux and Sitting Bull, 614 tribes of, 613 Texas Franciscan missionaries, 37, 38 Plan de San Diego, 727–732 racial segregation, 677 and Sam Houston, 307–308 and Santa Anna, 309–310 and Stephen Austin, 305–306 Texas Revolution, 733 “Texas Fever,” 739 Texas Gulf Coast and Diego Ortiz Parilla, 106 Texas National Guard and Houston Riot, 750 Texas Rangers overview, 736–737 and Plan de San Diego, 729, 730 Texas Revolt (1835–1836) and collective action, xxiv, 289–301 Thirteen Amendment abolition of slavery, 280, 456 abolitionist victory, 499 and Susan B. Anthony, 484 38th Street Gang and Zoot Suit Riots, 872 Thirty Year’s War, religious conflict, 60, 61 Thomas, George, Pennsylvania governor, 93 Thomas, Neval H., Anti-Lynching bill, 783–785 Thompson, Thomas, Texas Revolt, 292, 293 Thomspon, Robert, execution of, 177 Thoreau, Henry David and antiwar activism, 927 on John Brown, 420 Thorton, Charles, Kerner Commission, 996

Tikas, Louis and Ludlow Massacre, 708, 709 Till, Emmet, murder of, 894 Tilton, Theodore and John Brown, 420 Tinner, Grover, 1106 To Be a Slave (Lester), 253 Tobacco Bacon’s Rebellion, 1 Black Patch War, 697–699 Colonial Virginia, 19–20 indentured servants, 15–16 Tobias, J. N. and Joseph Brooks, 550 Todd, William and Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 336, 340–341 Tohono O’odham (“People of the Desert”), 106–107 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (1934) and collective action, xxii–xxiii, 847–850, 852–853 Tolpuddle Martyrs, 633 Tom the Tinker, 243–244 “Tombstone Bonus,” 830, 842 Tompiro Pueblo, 43 Topeka (KS) Bleeding Kansas, 348 Topeka Constitution, 361–363 Topeka Constitution Bleeding Kansas, 348, 350 overview, 361–363 Torre, Joaquin de la, Bear Flag Revolt, 336, 337 Tourgee, Albion and Plessy v. Ferguson, 679 Townshend, Charles, 151, 203–204 Townshend Act (1767) and Boston Massacre, 151, 192, 193 overview, 203–204 Samuel Adams’ opposition, 139 and Sons of Liberty, 202–203, 204 Trade Bacon’s Rebellion, 3, 10 House of Burgesses, 14 Susquehannock Indians, 17–18 Trade unions and Great Railroad Strikes, 564 and Homestead Strike, 619–627

I-63

I-64

Index “Traditional rights of Englishmen,” 146 Traffic in Women (Goldman), excerpts, 523–526 Trail of Broken Treaties protest (1972) and collective action, xxii, 1067–1070, 1074 Trans-Continental Railroad, Chinese immigrants, 593, 597 Transcendentalism and antislavery militancy, 417, 420 Transylvania University and Stephen Austin, 305 Traverse des Sioux Treaty (1851), 611 and Indian treaties, 1073 Travis, Joseph, 272 Travis, William Barrett Battle of the Alamo, 304 Texas Revolt, 290, 292, 296–297 Treaty of Fort Laramie and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1081 Treaty of Paris (1763), 119 “Tree of liberty,” xxi, xxiv Tremont (Texas Revolt), 292 Trench, W. Steuart, 459 Trevin˜o, Juan Francisco, New Mexico, 30–31 Troy Female Seminary and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 475 and women’s movement, 474 Trudell, John and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1033 biography, 1039–1040 Truman, Harry S. and civil rights movement, 892 and desegregation, 807 and Douglas MacArthur, 841 Truth, Sojourner and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 “Urges Fight for Equal Rights for All Women,” 493–494 and women’s movement, 475 Tryon, William and Arthur Dobbs, 179 Battle of Alamance, 177–178 biography, 181–182 Regulator Movement, 171–172 Stamp Act protests, 132–133, 182

Tubman, Harriet, 283 Tubutama mission, Pima Revolt, 100 Tudor, John, “Destruction of Lt. Governor Hutchinson’s House by the Stamp Act Rioters in Boston,” 148–150 Tuke, William, 486 Tulsa Race Riot (1921) collective action, xxiv, 801–804 “Final Report of the Grand Jury,” 808 interwar race riots, 771 “Oklahoma Commission to Study Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” 809–828 Tulsa Race Riot Commission, 804 Tulsa Tribune, on Tulsa Race Riot, 802 Tupatu´, Luis, 34–35 Tur, Bob and Marika, Los Angeles Uprising, 1097–1098 Ture, Kwame. See Carmichael, Stokely Turkey and Eastern European immigrants, 665 Turner, Frederick Jackson and frontier thesis, 261 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 Turner, Henry M. and Robert Charles, 676 Turner, Nat antebellum slave revolts, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257 biography, 269–272, 285–286 and civil rights, 891 “confession,” 274, 276–277 Confessions of Nat Turner, The, 276, 280–281 “A Contemporary Account of Nat Turner’s Revolt,” 286–288 rebellion (1831), xxiii, 270, 271–273 retribution, 273–274 significance, 274–277 Turtle’s Heart, Pontiac’s Rebellion, 112, 124 Tuscarora Indians, Pontiac’s Rebellion, 111 Tuttle, Jotham, Pine Tree Riot, 185 “20 Point Position Paper” AIM, 1071–1072 Broken Treaties protest, 1067–1068, 1069–1070 Two Sicilies (Naples), expulsion of Jesuits, 103–104 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 139

Index Tyler, John and Dorr’s Rebellion, 313, 317 Ugartecha, Texas Revolt, 290, 292 Ukrainians and Eastern European immigrants, 665 Una, and Women’s Movement, 475, 477 Underground Railroad, 283 and John Brown, 416, 423 Undocumented immigrants, 1133–1134 Union Army African American soldiers, 445 and Copperheads, 444 Union Conscription Act (1863) and New York Draft Riots, 436 Union Mills and Homestead Strike, 626 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 665 Union Pacific Railroad and ARU, 651 Chinese immigrants, 598 Knights of Labor strike, 599 and Red Cloud, 614 Unionism, 466–467 and Molly Maguires, 466–467 Unitarians and Women’s Movement, 475 United Auto Workers, formation, 849, 852 United for Peace and Justice, antiwar activism, 933 United Mine Workers Association (UMWA) and AFL, 851 in Appalachia, 797 and Blair Mountain Battle, 793, 794 and Lattimer Massacre, 663–664 and Ludlow Massacre, 707, 708–710, 713 and Matewan Massacre, 799, 800 modern leadership, 667 overview, 716–717 and Sid Hatfield, 798 United Order of Railway Employees and Eugene Debs, 652 United Sons of Vulcan, 629 United States annexation of Texas, 300, 733 Bear Flag Revolt, 333–338 and Native American treaties, 1072–1073

Plan de San Diego, 727–732 and Santa Anna, 309, 310 temperance movement, 371 women’s suffrage achieved, 481 World War I, 743 United States v. Cruikshank, 538 United States v. Spock, excerpts from, 957–960 United Steelworkers, 629 Universal Negro Improvement Association, and Earl Little, 907 Universal white male suffrage Charterites, 316 overview, 318–319 Thomas Wilson Dorr, 317, 318 University of Alabama and civil rights movement, 897 University of California at Berkeley and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1031–1032, 1037 University of Mississippi and civil rights movement, 896 University of Southern Mississippi and civil rights movement, 896 Up from Slavery (B. T. Washington), 683 “Uppity,” 682, 685 Uptown KKK, 894 Urban ghettos and New York Draft Riots, 438–439 Urrea, Jose´, Texas Revolt, 296, 298 Ury, John, New York Slave Insurrection, 81 U.S. Army Nurses and Dorothea Dix, 486, 487 U.S. Chamber of Commerce and BEF, 829–830 U.S. Coast Guard and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1032, 1033 U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Ludlow Massacre, 710 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1131 U.S. Constitution Eighth Amendment, 1063 federal supremacy, 237–238 Fifteenth Amendment, 455, 456, 477–478, 483, 488, 677 Fourteenth Amendment, 454, 456, 477, 478, 483, 488, 679

I-65

I-66

Index U.S. Constitution (continued) Herman Husband, 181 James Bowdoin, 218 Massachusetts General Court, 219 nativism, 378 Nineteenth Amendment, 473, 481, 489–491, 1053 North Carolina’s ratification, 174 and Shays’ Rebellion, 207 Thirteen Amendment, 280, 456, 485 U.S. Forest Service (USFS), public lands, 1090, 1091 U.S. Mail, Pullman Strike, 646 U.S. Military Academy (West Point) and Douglas MacArthur, 840 and New York Draft Riots, 439 and Robert E. Lee, 427, 428 U.S. Portsmouth, Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 337 U.S. Steel Corporation, 631 U.S. Strike Commission and Pullman Palace Car Company, 656, 657 and Pullman Strike, 646 Report on the Railway Strikes of 1894, 657–659 USS Cyane, Bear Flag Revolt, 334 Utah creation of, 394 Mormon settlement, 390–391 women’s suffrage, 479 Utah War, collective action, xxiv, 383–387 Ute Indians, New Mexico, 34 Utopian socialists, 746 Vaarck, John, 80 Vallandingham, Clement L. and antiwar activism, 927 and Copperheads, 443–444 Vallejo, Mariano Bear Flag Revolt, 334, 335, 336, 337 and J. C. Fre´mont, 342 and Sonoma, 343–344 Valley of Fear (A.C. Doyle), 459–460 Van Cortlandt, Stephanus and Leisler’s Rebellion, 54, 55 Van deer Veen, Elsie Tymens, 60 Van den Bosch, Laurentius, 62 Van Horne, David, 85

Van Vliet, Stewart and Utah War, 384 Van Zant, Winant, 85 Vance, Cyrus and Detroit Riots, 989, 990 “Report on the Riots in Detroit,” 997–1008 Vandalia Railroad and Eugene Debs, 652 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, as “robber baron,” 571 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 586, 587 Vargas, Don Diego de, New Mexico, 35, 43, 47 Versailles Treaty, 757 Vesey, Denmark and antebellum slave revolts, 252, 255, 256, 257 “Description,” 266–267 uprising (1822), xxiii, 265–266 Vesey, Joseph, 265 Veterans Battle of Athens, 883–885 and BEF, 829–834 Veterans’ rights, 841–843 Vice-admiralty courts colonial, 130, 131 Pine Tree Riot, 184 Townshend Act, 203 Victoria (queen of England) and Dorothea Dix, 486–487 Vietnam Moratorium Committee, 941 Vietnam protests and Stokely Carmichael, 903 Vietnam Summer experiment, 941 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and antiwar activism, 931 Vietnam War and Abbie Hoffman, 1026 antiwar activism, 925, 930–932 and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 and Tom Hayden, 1024 Vigilance Committees and Know-Nothing Party, 381–382 Vigilantism and Battle of Athens, 885 Black Patch War, 698–699, 703 and Plan de San Diego, 729 and segregation, 807

Index West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 858–859, 864 Villa, Pancho, 731 Vindication of the British Colonies in 1765, A (Otis), Stamp Act protests, 130 Violence abolitionists, 425–426 and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 683, 686–687 “Bleeding Kansas,” 347–351, 359, 362 Black Patch War, 698–699 civil rights movement, 968 coal mines, 460 Great Railroad Strikes, 566, 567, 569 Harpers Ferry Raid, 415, 416 industrial, 714–716 Molly Maguires, 461–462 “New South,” 541 and Plan de San Diego, 730 Red Summer Riots, 765, 767–770 Seattle Riot, 594 slave rebellions, 252, 253 slave system, 251, 253, 256, 257 Virginia Boxley attempted uprising, 254, 255, 261–262 and civil rights movement, 894 Dinwiddie, 118 and formation of Confederacy, 426 Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), 269–278, 280 and Robert E. Lee, 427 and Shays’ Rebellion, 214 slave population, 264 Whiskey Rebellion, 230 Virginia Colony Bacon’s Rebellion, 1–7 Berkeley governorship, 11–13 and Susquehannock Indians, 17 Virginia Company and revocation of charter, 23 Virginia General Assembly, response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 274–275 “Virtual representation,” doctrine of, 129, 135, 141, 143, 144, 146 “Visible saints,” 57 “Voice of Alcatraz,” 1039 Voice of Missions, 676

Vollmer, August, 1104 Volstead Act, Prohibition, 371 Voorhies, Albert and New Orleans Riot (1866), 450 Voter Education Project and SNCC, 912 Voter registration and civil rights movement, 896 Voting rights Confederate States of America (Confederacy), 456 and New Orleans Riot (1866), 449, 450, 451 Voting Rights Act (1964), renewal of, 899 Voting Rights Act (1965) and March on Washington, 909–910 and Martin Luther King Jr., 906 and SCLC, 911 and SNCC, 912 Waddell, Hugh, Battle of Alamance, 177 and Regulator Movement, 172 “Wage slaves,” 251 Wages and black migration, 766 cuts in industrial, 715 Homestead Strike, 621, 634 Pullman Palace Car Company, 656–657 Waggonner, Joe D., Jr. and civil rights movement, 894 Wagner, Robert and antilynching campaigns, 776 Wagner Labor Relations Act and labor unions, 715 “Wakarusa War,” 349 Walker, Alice and black feminism, 1044–1045 Walker, Daniel and Rights in Conflict, 1014–1015, 1016–1017, 1021–1022 Walker, Edwin, on Pullman Strike, 648, 649 Walker, Quok, 425 Walker, Wyatt T., and SCLC, 911 Walker Commission, on “police riot,” 1009, 1014–1015, 1016–1017, 1021–1022, 1026 “Walker War,” 392 Wall Street, established, 84

I-67

I-68

Index Wallace, George and civil rights movement, 897 1968 election, 1009, 1013, 1023 Wallace’s Tavern, 70, 77 Wallowa Valley and Nez Perce´ flight, 553, 554, 558, 559 Walpole, Sir Robert financial class, 239 and royal authority, 187 and salutary neglect, 142 War bonds, American Revolution, 228–229 debt repayment, 238 War of Austrian Succession, 79, 91 Jeffrey Amherst as aide-de-camp, 117 War of 1812 antiwar activism, 925–926, 933 and electorate, 318 German Catholic immigrants, 330 martial law, 242 and Sam Houston, 307 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 79, 91 and Pine Tree Riot, 183 War of Religions (France), 61 War Party, Texas Revolt, 295 War Powers Act (1973), antiwar activism, 933 War Resister’s League, antiwar activism, 930–931 Ward, William, Haymarket Riot, 578 Ward, William, Colfax Massacre, 537, 538 Ward, William, Texas Revolt, 298 Warmoth, Henry Clay, Colfax Massacre, 537 Warren Court and civil rights movement, 893 Warren, Mercy Otis, 195 Warren, William, Boston Massacre, 153 Washington, Booker T. accommodation policies, 683 antiwar activism, 928 and civil rights movement, 891 impact of Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 685 and Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 Washington, D.C. “Day without an Immigrant” protests, 1129, 1130 Describing Events during Race Riot (1919), 789–791 Know-Nothing Riots, 375, 379

“President Herbert Hoover’s Letter to the District Commissioner and from his Press Conference,” 844–846 Red Summer Riots, 768 Washington, George and Alexander Hamilton, 239 on democratic-republican societies, 234 First Continental Congress, 200 French and Indian War, 118 House of Burgesses, 15 and John Adams, 157–158 Jumonville Affair, 142 and “Mad Anthony” Wayne, 232 Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), 245–248 “Second Proclamation against the Whiskey Rebellion” (1794), 248–249 on Shays’ Rebellion, 215 Whiskey Rebellion, 228, 230–231, 232 Washington, John and Bacon’s Rebellion, 2, 5 Washington, Lewis and Harpers Ferry Raid, 418 Washington and Lee University and Robert E. Lee, 428 Washington National Guard, WTO protests, 1123 Washington Post, on Anacostia Flats Battle, 835–836 Washington State Convention and Trade Center, WTO protests, 1121, 1122–1123 Washington Territory, Chinese immigrants, 593 Washington-on-the-Brazos and Texas Revolt, 295–296, 297 Wasicun, and Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 602, 604, 608 Wasumaza, and Wounded Knee Massacre, 607 Waterfront Employers Union (WEU), and West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, 865 Waterfront Worker, The, 857 Waterman, Charles M., and vigilance committees, 382 “Watermelon Army,” 234 Waters, Walter W. and BEF, 830–831 biography, 843–844 Watkins, Arthur V., and termination policy, 1038

Index Watson, Henry Keith, 1101, 1105 Watson, Thomas E., and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 681 Watt, James and Ronald Reagan, 1093, 1094 Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086, 1087 Watts, Robert, 85, 89 Watts Labor Community Action Center, Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 Watts Riots (1965) collective action, xxiii–xxiv, 965–971 Governor’s Commission Report on the Riots, 976–985 Watts Riot (1992), 970 Wayne, “Mad Anthony,” and Washington, 232 “We Shall Overcome,” 900 Weare, Judge Meshech, Pine Tree Riot, 185 Weather Underground, 1017 counterculture, 937–938 “Wedding Protest,” 476 Weihe, William, and Homestead Strike, 624 Weiner, Lee, and Chicago Eight, 1015 Weinglass, Leonard, and Chicago Seven trial, 1015, 1019 Welborn, J. F., and Ludlow Massacre, 709 Wells, Benjamin, Whiskey Rebellion, 232 Wells, James, and Plan de San Diego, 730 Wells, James M. and New Orleans Riot (1866), 450 Wells, Philip, “Eyewitness Account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee,” 616–617 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. anti-lynching campaigns, 776 black civil rights, 771 and Jim Crow Laws, 677–678 and Nineteenth Amendment, 490 Welsh miners, and Molly Maguires, 460 Wemms, William, Boston Massacre, 153 Wentworth, Benning, 183, 187 Wentworth, John, and Pine Tree Riot, 183, 187 Wesley, John, 370 West Africa, slaves from, 69, 75 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934), xxii–xxiii, 847, 857–859, 861–865 and Bloody Thursday, 861 West Point. See U.S. Military Academy (West Point)

West Virginia and Blair Mountain Battle, 793, 794 and Great Railroad Strikes, 563, 564, 569 and Sid Hatfield, 798 and UMWA, 797 West Virginia Mine Wars, and UMWA, 717 Western Federation of Miners, and industrial violence, 715 Western Reserve Antislavery Society, John Brown, 423 Western Union, Knights of Labor strike, 599 Whally, Frank, and Green Corn Rebellion, 740 “Wharf rats,” 857, 861 Wharton, William H., Texas Revolt, 294 Whatley, Thomas, and Thomas Hutchinson, 193–194 Whig Party death of, 426 and Nativists, 327 and Republican Party, 551 Whigs, Rhode Island suffrage, 311 “Whipping Post Club,” 139 Whiskey Rebellion (1794) and Alexander Hamilton, 240 collective action, xxii, 227–235, 238, 243–244 and Herman Husband, 181 “President George Washington’s Proclamation Against the Whiskey Rebellion” (1794), 245–248 “President George Washington’s Second Proclamation Against the Whiskey Rebellion” (1794), 248–249 and Regulator Movement, 174 White Bird Canyon, Nez Perce´’s flight, 554 White Citizens Councils (WCC), and civil rights movement, 893–894 White Clay Valley, Wounded Knee Massacre, 608 “White Indians,” 172 White, Byron, 1056 White, Private Hugh, Boston Massacre, 152, 153 White, Walter, and Elaine Massacre, 770 White Lance, Wounded Knee Massacre, 606 White supremacy, 686–687 Whiteblade, Margaret, 272–273 Whiteboys, 459

I-69

I-70

Index Whitefield, George, and Herman Husband, 179–180 Whiting, Benjamin, Pine Tree Riot, 184–185 Whiting, William, and Shays’ Rebellion, 211 Whitney, C., and Haymarket Riot, 578 Whitside, Samuel, Wounded Knee Massacre, 605, 606 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 279 Whytock, John, and Brooks-Baxter War, 546 Wickes, Thomas, and Pullman Strike, 644–645 “Wildcat” strikes, and Great Railroad Strikes, 564, 570 Wilder, L. Douglas, 900 Wilderness Act (1964), and public lands, 1091 Wilderness Society, and Sagebrush Rebellion, 1086 Wilkins, Elbert, and Los Angeles Uprising, 1098 Wilkins, Roy Kerner Commission, 996 and March on Washington, 909 and Martin Luther King Jr., 905 Wilkinson, James, and martial law, 241–242 Wilkinson, James, Pottawatomie Massacre, 360 Willard, Emma, and Women’s Movement, 474 Willard, Francis, and Women’s Movement, 479 William III (king of England), and Leisler’s Rebellion, 53–54, 55, 60 William and Mary, and Leisler’s Rebellion, 53–54 William of Normandy, and shipbuilding, 188 William of Orange, and invasion of England, 53 William Styron’s Nat Turner Ten Black Writers Respond, 277 Williams, Damien Monroe, 1101, 1105–1106 Williams, George Henry debate on women’s suffrage, 491–492 and Brooks-Baxter War, 547 Williams, William, 272 Williams v. Mississippi, disenfranchisement, 675 Willys-Overland Motor Company, auto industry, 848 Wilmington (NC), Great Migration, 773 Wilmore, Gayraud, 265

Wilson, Dick (Richard) and BIA, 1079 biography, 1082–1083 and Pine Ridge Reservation, 1082 Wounded Knee Massacre, 602 Wounded Knee Occupation, 1075, 1076 Wilson, Jack. See Wovoka Wilson, Wayne, and Watts Riot, 965 Wilson, Woodrow and antiwar activism, 929, 930 and Boston Police Strike, 757, 758 and Green Corn Rebellion, 740 and Houston Riot, 751 and Jim Crow Laws, 677 and Ludlow Massacre, 710 military segregation, 753 preparedness campaign, 766 and Samuel Gompers, 763 and veterans’ rights, 841–842 and women’s suffrage, 481, 490, 491 Wind, Timothy, Los Angeles Uprising, 1096, 1097 “Winning Plan,” 490 “Winter intermission,” 385 Winters, Jonathan, and Alcatraz Island occupation, 1033 Winthrop, Fitz-John, Leisler’s Rebellion, 54 WITCH, and feminist movement, 1047 Witchcraft trails, presumption of guilt, 127 “Wobblies,” 744, 745 Wolfe, James, French and Indian War, 118 Wolfe, Tom, 1057 Wolff v. McConnell, Attica Prison Riot, 1063 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller), 476 Woman’s Bible, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Introduction, 512–514 Woman’s Journal, AWSA, 483 Woman’s Share in Social Culture (A. G. Spencer), 529–533 Woman’s Tribune, NWSA, 489 “Womanism,” 1044–1045 Women collective action, xxiii, 473–482 disenfranchisement of, 318 History of Women in Industry in United States, 516–522

Index Shays’ Rebellion, 213 and the temperance movement, 371 Women’s Action Alliance, and Gloria Steinem, 1057 Women’s Bureau, 1048–1049 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) established, 371 and Susan B. Anthony, 486 and women’s movement, 479 Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, and feminist movement, 1047–1048 Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), and feminist movement, 1046 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, antiwar activism, 930–931 Women’s Loyal National League, and women’s movement, 477 Women’s movement (1870), and collective action, xxiii, 473–482 Women’s New York State Temperance Society, and Susan B. Anthony, 484 Women’s Political Union, and women’s movement, 480, 490 Women’s Social and Political Union, 481 Women’s Strike for Peace, antiwar activism, 931 Women’s suffrage antebellum women’s movement, 473, 475–476 congressional debate, 491–493 post–Civil War, 477–479, 485–486, 487–489 Wompanoag gang Know-Nothing Party, 374 and Plug Uglies, 379 and Rip Raps, 380 Wood, Fernando, and antiwar activism, 927 Wood, Leonard, and Douglas MacArthur, 840 Woodhull, Victoria C. Address to Judiciary Committee of House of Representatives, 494–496 and women’s movement, 478 Woods, George, and Battle of Athens, 884 Woods, William A. and Eugene Debs, 652 on Pullman Strike, 648

Woodstock Festival, and counterculture, 937 Woodward, James G., and Atlanta Race Riot (1906), 683 Working Class Union (WCU), and Green Corn Rebellion, 739, 740 Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) and Molly Maguires, 460 and unionism, 466 Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS) and Great Railroad Strikes, 564–565, 567 overview, 572–573 World Anti-Slavery Convention, and Women’s Movement, 474 World Economic Forum, Direct Action Network, 1125–1126 World Trade Center, attack on, 932 World Trade Organization (WTO) and Direct Action Network, 1121–1122, 1125–1126 protests (1999), xxii, 1121–1124 World War I and American socialism, 746–747 antiwar activism, 925, 929–930 and BEF, 829 Conscription Act , 743 and Eastern European immigrants, 665 and Eugene Debs, 653 and Great Migration, 773 and labor movement, 763 World War II and women’s rights, 1043 Worthley, Jonathan and Pine Tree Riot, 185 Worthley, Timothy and Pine Tree Riot, 185 Worton, William, 1104 Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) collective action, xxi–xxii, 601–609, 614, 1070 “Philip Wells’s Eyewitness Account,” 616–617 Wounded Knee occupation (1973) and BIA, 1079–1080 collective action, xxii, 609, 1075–1077 and the FBI, 1080–1081 Wovoka and Wounded Knee Massacre, 601, 602

I-71

I-72

Index Wright, William and Colfax Massacre, 539 Writ of Assistance, defined, 130 Wrovsch, Frank and Haymarket Riot, 579 Wyandot Indians and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 109, 113, 120 Wyandotte Constitution, Kansas, 363 Wyat, William and Boston Massacre trial, 154–155 Wyoming Chinese immigrants, 598 J. C. Fre´mont’s expedition, 341 women’s suffrage, 473, 479 Yakama nation and return of Mount Adams, 1034 Yapuis Indians, Pima Revolt, 100 Yellow Bird, Wounded Knee massacre, 606–607 “Yellow-dog contracts” examples of, 640–641 overview, 633–634 Pits Bessemer Steel Works, 619 Yellowstone National Park, 1089 “Yippies,” 937 and Abbie Hoffman, 1026 and Democratic National Convention (1968), 1010, 1011, 1014, 1019 Yonley, T. D. W. and Brooks-Baxter War, 546 York, Alvin, 743

Yost, Benjamin and Molly Maguires, 460, 461 Young andrew J. and SCLC, 911 Young, Brigham biography, 395–396 Great Salt Lake, 341–342 and James Buchanan, 389 Mormon settlement in Utah, 390–391 Nauvoo Legion, 391 on polygamy, 393 State of Deseret, 394 Utah War, 383, 384, 385–386 Young, Coleman, election of, 991 Young, Whitney and March on Washington, 909 and Martin Luther King Jr., 905 Younger, Cole, “Bushwackers,” 354 Youth International Party (Yippies) and Abbie Hoffman, 1026 and Democratic Party Convention, 1010, 1011, 1014, 1019 Yuille, Lei, 1101 Zacatecas mine, 27, 39 Zenger, Peter, Stamp Act protests, 131 Zı´a Pueblo, 34 Zinn, Howard, on slave whippings, 253 Zoot suit, symbolic dress, 869, 878 Zoot Suit Riot (1942), xxiii, 869–875 and police brutality, 878–880 and servicemen, 880–881 Zun˜i Trail (New Mexico), 29

About the Editor

STEVEN L. DANVER is a member of the Core Faculty in the Center for Undergraduate Studies at Walden University. He received his doctorate in American history, focusing on the history of the American West and American Indian peoples, from the University of Utah. Dr. Danver is managing editor of Journal of the West; has edited a number of historical reference works, including ABC-CLIO’s The Great Depression and New Deal: A Thematic Encyclopedia; Seas and Waterways of the World: An Encyclopedia of History, Uses, and Issues; and Popular Controversies in World History: Investigating History’s Intriguing Questions; and has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on various topics. His current work continues along the theme of exploring the histories of issues that have modern relevance primarily to American Indian peoples, but to many other Americans as well.