The Three P's Collide

People, places and power are all connected to each other because particular people have power over others in specific places. There are certain individuals or groups of people who create certain events to occur. Sometimes these events happen when two or more people or groups of people interact, whether these are pleasant or terrible events. When a number of people have the same ideas and goals, they team up in order to pursue their goals. A group of people or a singular person can be in control of a specific place. Some areas, including countries, regions, cities, neighborhoods, or factories, confine people to that area, or kick out people due to the people in power of that place. People are affected by the places that they live because of the different geographies, cultures, and resources. People, places and resources are often under control of certain people. Many cultures have social statuses and people cannot control which status they were born into or were given. Power can come in the form of religion and culture from groups of people, individuals, economics, or the military.

KEY TERMS:

Push-pull factors are events that force or strongly encourage people to leave an area.
Nomads are people who travel to different places, especially to look for food sources.
Reservations were areas of land put aside for Native Americans by the federal government.
Wounded Knee was the creek that Big Foot, children and women escaped to after the Indian          Bureau in Washington shot chief Sitting Bull for leading the Ghost Dance.
The Dawes Act separated reservation land into individual plots with each Native American family with a head man getting a 160 acre plot of land.
The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 granted alternate areas of public land to the amount of five alternative sections for each mile on the side of the railroads.
The Morrill Land-Grant gave millions of acres of Western land to state governments so that the states could sell the land to collect money in order to build "land grant" colleges that were specifically agriculture and mechanical arts.
Land speculators were people who bought large plots of land to later sell to others to make money.
The Homestead Act was signed by Lincoln in 1862 so that for a small profit, the head of families, American citizens or immigrants that were filing for citizenship received 160 acres of land and small houses to live in for at least 6 months per year.
The Great Plains is a large grassland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains that provided a large number of buffalo in the 1800's.
The Massacre at Wounded Knee was the last place of violence in the Indian Wars where Sitting Bull was shot, along with over 200 Sioux killed.

          The interaction between white settlers and Native Americans in the West created chaos.  White settlers were involved with push-pull factors because they caused the Native Americans lose their homes. (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 488)

           White settlers forced Native Americans out of the West because they had more power than the Native Americans. White soldiers shot Native American women and children. (The "Indian Question", page 216)

            The Great Plains gave the Native Americans opportunities to trade with other places. The French and American fur trade allowed the Native Americans to trade their hides from buffalo for guns in order to make buffalo hunting more efficient. 491) 

The white settlers thought that they would make the Western land more productive. Treaties were made so that settlers would have to buy the Native Americans’ land, but the Native Americans would get little in return and they would be restricted to reservations (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 492). Since the white settlers had more power over the Native Americans, the Native Americans became nomads. Settlers would kill buffalo, divert water supplies, stole land, and attacked Indian camps to force them out of the Western land (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 492). The Great Plains provided plenty of buffalo for the Native Americans to use for meat, hides for shelter, and clothing. With access to the French, they were given more supplies to help hunt for buffalo (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 491).  Even though sometimes when different groups of people connect great events happen, in this case when Native Americans and white settlers came across one another in the West, there was confusion and disappointment.

Destruction of Reconstruction

Violence, discrimination and destruction were some of the terror that blacks faced in the South after the Civil War. In 1876, it was the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence for the United States. The Civil War had recently ended and the slaves who were just freed were given rights so they could rebuild their lives. The freedmen were given the right to vote from the 15th Amendment in time for the election between the Republican, Hayes, and the Democrat, Tilden. Reconstruction was the twelve year period after the Civil War when there were attempts to help former slaves have freedom in the South. The South destroyed the efforts to help former slaves attain freedom because they were violent towards anyone who supported Reconstruction.

Although the South mainly killed Reconstruction, the North neglected the South because they were distracted with their own issues. One example of this is how Grant, who was unexpectedly elected for president after being a hero for the Union in the Civil War, began to focus his attention to national problems, like the Panic of 1873. In the political cartoon below, Grant is trying to dig to the bottom of the barrel in order to dig out all of the problems that occurred in the North at the time. By doing this, Grant cannot see what is going on around him since he is only looking in the barrel. This represents that when Grant was focused on national concerns, he could not pay attention to the terrible way that blacks were being treated in the South. Another example of how the North negatively impacted the growth of former slaves’ lives is that they did not agree with the fact that former slaves could vote. In 1873 the Boston Evening Transcript wrote a letter saying, “The blacks, as a people, are unfitted for the proper exercise of political duties.” Even though blacks were given the right to vote and to be involved in office, they had few political rights because the majority of white Americans did not think that blacks were prepared to be in office. The North believed that former slaves needed time to learn about the United States’ systems and to become civilized. They thought that the government would become chaotic if blacks were allowed into office right away. Even though the South was responsible for ruining the efforts to help former slaves gain freedom after the Civil War, the North did have affect on the poor treatment of Southerners.

Harper’s Weekly, 1876.

In addition to the North lacking their protection to the South, the South was the major killer of Reconstruction because of their violence. One example of this terror is one that Albion Tourgee, a white, Northern soldier who was a judge during Reconstruction, wrote in his letter to the North Carolina Republican Senator in 1870. He states, “He was foully murdered by the Ku-Klux in the Grand Jury room of the Court House on Saturday… He was stabbed five or six times, and then hanged on a hook in the Grand Jury room.” The KKK threatened whites who were supported Reconstruction, especially carpetbaggers and scalawags. Many whites who wanted to go into office as Republicans were afraid to because of the white supremacy groups. Another example of violence in the South was when the Ku Klux Klan members would threaten blacks into not voting. The image below shows two white men holding guns up to a black man’s head before voting. The majority of blacks voted for Radical Republicans, which disturbed the KKK. Therefore, the Klan would frighten the blacks so that they would not use the voting rights that they had recently earned. Reconstruction was ruined due to the brutality of the South.

Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1876.

After the Civil War in the United States, slaves were freed but were not given a chance to create new lives. The North was supposed to aid the freedmen into starting civilized lives for themselves. The North was distracted on their own problems, along with national problems, so they lost interest in helping the South. On the other hand, the Southern white supremacy groups treated blacks, and any whites who supported Reconstruction, horribly. Since the South threatened any assistance of Reconstruction, they were responsible for the destruction of it.


Article Sources:

Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.

Albion Tourgee, Letter on Klu Klux Klan activities. New York Tribune, May 1870.