1873

"An Episode of the Hunt" by Frederic Remington.

 

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“All persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.”

 

South Carolina Black Codes

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A Catholic priest warns “that the present system of public schools, ignoring all supernatural authority and making knowledge the first and God the last thing to be learned, is a curse to our country, and a floodgate of atheism, of sensuality, and of civil, social, and national corruption.” (A Distant Magnet, p. 223).

 

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Margaret Boyd becomes the first female graduate of Ohio University

 

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“The paramount destiny and mission of woman.” 

 

Myra Bradwell sues for the right to practice law in Illinois. The U.S. Supreme Court turns her down at once. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman” was to be a “wife and mother,” the nine judges agreed.

 

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Born a slave, John Hayne Rainey became the first African American to be seated in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. John Hayne Rainey.

 

South Carolina, first to secede from the union in 1860, had elected Rainey in 1869, a sign of progress, but progress soon to be snuffed out. Rainey, himself, had suffered insults related to ingrained prejudice and spreading Jim Crow legislation. As Smithsonian explains,

 

On a boat ride from Norfolk, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., the main dining hall had refused to serve him. In a D.C. pub, Rainey had ordered a glass of beer, only to find he’d been charged far more than white patrons. A hotel clerk had pulled the representative by his collar and kicked him out of a whites-only dining room.

 

Now, in 1873, he rose in Congress to speak in favor of a civil rights bill stalled in the Senate.  He asked:

 

Why is it that colored members of Congress cannot enjoy the same immunities that are accorded to white members [emphasis added]? Why cannot we stop at hotels here without meeting objection? Why cannot we go to restaurants without being insulted? We are here enacting laws of a country and casting votes upon important questions; we have been sent here by the suffrages of the people, and why cannot we enjoy the same benefits that are accorded to our white colleagues on this floor?

 

In those days, the Democratic Party proudly billed itself as “the white man’s party.”

 

Rainey’s father, Edward, had been a slave, but also a barber in pre-war Charleston. Most of his earnings went to his master. He saved his own share, bought his freedom, then bought his family. Joseph followed his father into the business. Although he was now “free,” the future congressman knew there were limits.

 

He was one of about 3,400 free people of color among 20,000 white and 43,000 enslaved people in the city. Their liberties were limited by law. Every free man over the age of 15 was required to have a white “guardian” to enable him to live in the city, and any “insolence” left the African American man open to violent assault. Free people of color had to pay an annual tax; if they failed to pay it, they could be sold into slavery for one year. Wherever they went, free people of color were assumed to be enslaved and had to show documents to prove they were not.

 

In September 1859, Rainey traveled to Philadelphia to marry Susan Elizabeth Cooper. She was the daughter of a free black family from Charleston. When the newlyweds returned to South Carolina, Joseph faced legal trouble. By law, free people of color who traveled out of state were “forever prohibited from returning.” According to one biographical pamphlet, influential friends, perhaps white clients of his barbershop, interceded for him.

 

Even worse, when fighting erupted in 1861, Joseph was conscripted into Confederate service – perhaps the ultimate irony. He may have served as a waiter or steward on a blockade-runner operating out of Bermuda. He and his wife eventually settled in the islands. There, according to one account, he received tutoring from a wealthy barbershop customer. He probably read Plato and Shakespeare and would later quote both writers on the floor of Congress.

 

“This is a country for white men....As long as I am president it shall be a government by white men.” 

In 1868, South Carolina had a population that was 60 percent African American. Rainey had returned home two years earlier. But Jim Crow laws were already sprouting.

 

President Andrew Johnson, for example, made his opposition to civil rights laws clear: “This is a country for white men....As long as I am president it shall be a government by white men.”

 

In South Carolina, ex-Confederates had followed Johnson’s lead and enacted Black Codes designed to “establish and regulate the Domestic Relations of Persons of Colour.” One such code declared: “All persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.”

 

Another made allowances for “suitable corporal punishment” against servants. People of color were forbidden from working as artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics or in any other trade apart from husbandry unless they secured a license from the district court. Such licenses, if given at all, expired after one year.

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This take, from William Least Heat Moon may be overstated, but it certainly would have been true to a large degree: “(when the red man finished with a buffalo nothing was left but memory of it, and that he used also); the animal provided him what a white man might find along the main street of a town: food, lodging, tools, medicine, recreation, religion… 100/327

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Pte Oyate, Buffalo Nation.

 

Slaughter of the bison begins in earnest, with hunters taking only the hides and leaving the carcasses littering the prairie. National Geographic covered the gradual rebound in population in a November 2014 article. Once there were fifty million.

 

Once was the time before an orgy of buffalo hunting left only a thousand or so survivors scattered around North America, most in zoos and private herds, by the last decade of the 19th century.

 

Today this formidable-looking creature – Bison bison to its scientific friends – is enjoying a comeback. As many as 200,000 range public lands and private ranches. Growers marvel at their ability to confront blizzards that make cattle turn tail and die. Conservationists praise their grazing habits, ideally suited to Great Plains native grasses. Consumers are discovering that their tasty meat contains less fat than beef, less cholesterol than chicken.

 

But now the American passion for high-tech farm management and genetic tinkering poses a different threat: breeding a docile, fenced in animal shorn of its horns, separated from its young, and stuffed with corn in feedlots to meet mass-marketing tastes.

 

“Buffalo are wild animals,” says Fred Dubray. “Their survival instincts are still fully intact. The worst thing you could do is teach them to be cows. Cows trample the areas around streams and water holes. They overgraze, and that helps prairie dogs, who like bare ground. Poison set out for prairie dogs goes right through the food chain – wipes out natural predators like ferrets, falcons, hawks, eagles, coyotes, badgers, and foxes.

 

… The Lakota knew them as Pte Oyate, Buffalo Nation, and honored them in religious ritual that was at once a Thanksgiving and a communion.

 

“When the Creator made the buffalo, he put a power in them,” says Les Ducheneaux, former guardian and ceremonial slaughterer of the Cheyenne River herd. “When you eat the meat, that power goes into you, heals the body and spirit. Now we have the poorest diet. We have alcoholism. We have juvenile an adult diabetes. When our spirituality comes back, when we see buffalo as our grandfathers saw them, then will be on the road to recovery.” (68-69) (See also: 1874.)

 

Other notes: Buffalo shed their winter coats in summer, throwing themselves to the ground, and tearing up the ground with their horns and thrashing hooves. The coat of dust helps protect them from biting insects.

 

A modern teepee, made of nineteen buffalo hides, stitched together with buffalo sinew, reflects the old ways. Brain matter was rubbed into the hides for an hour. A bone sliced lengthwise in a restaurant, and broiled, offers tasty marrow. “Then you spread it on toast,” says one restauranteur. “In the old days, they called it prairie butter.” (85)

 

One female buffalo, purchased in 1933 in Wyoming, gave birth almost every year, until her death 41 years later.

 

By 1994, Ted Turner could admit to NG that he had gone “buffalo batty” at his ranch near Bozeman, Montana. “I’ve got about 5,700 buffalo here, including 1,800 calves, and another 2,100 in New Mexico.” (75)

 

Today, says one expert, “Adults respond to buffalo like kids to dinosaurs – you can see it in their eyes.” (77)

 

“Most of today’s buffalo descend from 77 animals in five founding herds,” says one doctor. “They escaped inbreeding problems only because the numbers increased fairly rapidly after 1900, and there was a lot of interchange between the herds. The Bronx Zoo was pivotal, because it acquired bison from various herds.” (80)

 

Most ranchers fear the increase of the herds near them:

 

This provokes outrage among cattlemen, who fear the buffalo will spread a dread disease call brucellosis, which causes spontaneous abortion in domestic livestock. Humans who handle meat infected with the Brucella abortis bacterium can fall victim to a debilitating disease called undulant fever, often difficult to diagnose. (74)

 

Destruction of the herds meant destruction of the Plains tribes' way of life.
(Copy of a painting by Frederic Remington.)

Buffalo on Teddy Roosevelt's old North Dakota ranch. Author's collection.

A bull gives the author the evil eye.

Chase County [Kansas] has 2,839 people. There is one blind person, one insane person, and 745 voters.” Chase County News, 1873 (2,572 in 2020). 100/26

 

 NOTE TO TEACHERS: Stealing an idea from William Least Heat Moon, he mentions that during a two-hour talk with a man in Chase County, Kansas, c. 1990, 22,000 people would have been born around the world. Or: seven Chase counties.  

When I check in 2024, the U.N. estimates 385,000 babies are born – worldwide – every day. That would be 16,041 per hour – or 32,082 in two. Using Loveland, Ohio, where I taught (pop. 13,307) we’d add five Loveland’s every four hours, twenty-nine Loveland’s every day.  

You could adapt this to the community where you teach. For example, that’s more than one Cincinnati, Ohio, daily.