1868

  ____________________

 

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

 

Red Cloud, war leader of the Sioux

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The U.S. government signs a treaty with the Sioux, with the Sioux agreeing to settle in the Black Hills region, an area considered sacred by the Sioux (or: Lakota) Later, the U.S. will force them to give up much of this land.

Red Cloud defeated the U.S. Army in war.

Elk tooth party dress.

 

*

 

March 5: The impeachment trial of President Johnson begins. Andrews explains:

 

The main charge was that the president had willfully violated the Tenure of Office Act in removing Secretary Stanton from the Cabinet after the Senate had once refused to concur in his removal. The House was hasty in bringing the prosecution. The President was acquitted by a vote of 19 against and 35 four impeachment – one vote less than the two-thirds necessary to impeach. The Johnson-Congressional conflict proved one of the most mortifying episodes in our country’s history. (IV, 198)

 

In this era, Andrews explains,  “The Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations were practically a masked army.” “The negroes soon learned to stay at home on election day, and the whites, once in the saddle, were too skilful riders to be thrown.” (IV, 202)

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I always explained that the vote to impeach must be two-thirds. If I put the numbers on the board, 35 for, 19 against, it worked to ask how many votes would have to have been switched to oust President Johnson.

 

It took most students a bit to figure out that one would have done it.

 

* 

In discussing the post-war years, the historian E. Benjamin Andrews, writing in 1896, paints the following picture: 

The sons of Dixie had been educated to believe in the negro as an inferior being. The Confederacy had been, in a way, based on this principle. To establish a government so founded they had ventured everything and had lost. A power unjust and tyrannical, as they conceived it, had filled their states with mourning, beggared them, freed their slaves, and, as a last injury and insult, done its best to make the negro their political equal. They resisted, some passively, others actively. The best of them could not but acquiesce with a certain joy when the younger and more lawless used violence and even murder to remove the curse. The powerful hand of the Federal Government, sometimes itself perpetrating outrages in effort to suppress such, was evaded by excuses and devices of all sorts. When it was withdrawn, the Southerners announced boldly that theirs was a white man’s government and that the ex-slaves should never take part in it. (11/118)

 

Nor, Andrews notes, were Northerners anxious to allow Negroes to vote. “In 1865 Connecticut rejected a Negro suffrage amendment by 6,272 majority; in 1867 Ohio, Kansas and Minnesota did the same by the respective majorities of 50,620, 8,923 and 1,298. In 1868 New York followed their example with a majority of 32,601.” (11/119) 

“The average negro expressed his views on public affairs by the South Carolina catch: ‘De bottom rail am on de top, and we’s gwineter keep it dar.’” 

*

“A persistent advocate of the social equality idea.”

 

October 16: State Senator Benjamin F. Randolph, one of the first African Americans ever to be elected to office in South Carolina, is changing trains in the town of Hodges, when three white men accost him on the station platform. They shoot him dead and flee on horseback. The assassination takes place in broad daylight; no witnesses are ever interested in talking.

 

As Smithsonian explains, Sen. Randolph’s “crime” is clear. Democratic newspapers had warned that Randolph was “a persistent advocate of the social equality idea.” His death was seen as a warning to Rainey and all others who advocated for the rights of the formerly enslaved.