Story of a Party - Chapter XXX
Assorted American Affairs
"What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief."
- Attributed to Sitting Bull
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From "The Indian Wars of the Nineteenth Century" by Anthony Wilkinson
Anagram Press, Philadelphia, 1994
The Great Lakota War of 1877, as with so many other conflicts throughout human history, can largely be traced back to the previous conflict between the Sioux and the United States government. Red Cloud's War of 1868 had seen a rare Indian victory over the U.S. forces, and the resulting Treaty of Fort Laramie saw a large portion of western Dakota Territory set aside for Sioux use. However, with the rapid western expansion that came after Reconstruction, there was much pressure on the Lakota to counter-cede land back to the whites, and when the Custer Expedition of 1874 found gold in the Black Hills, settlers poured into the region in a clear violation of the treaty. The United States Army initially tried to keep settlers out of the treaty reservations, but failed miserably in this, and in the spring of 1865, the infuriated Sioux leaders travelled to Washington, D.C. to plead for their people. They met with President McPherson, Secretary of the Interior Amos Akerman, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Quincy Smith, who suggested that the Sioux would be paid $25,000 for the Black Hills and relocated to the Indian Territory. The Sioux naturally refused, their delegation leader Spotted Tail exclaiming that "if it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone."
Sitting Bull, war chief of the Lakota confederacy.
After this fiasco, the government sent an expedition to try and win the Sioux people's support, and put pressure on the tribe's leaders to evacuate. This was a dismal failure, and only made relations between the two groups worse. Along with the Black Hills issue, the Northern Pacific was being chartered in the fall of 1875, and the route proposed by the government traversed some of the last remaining Sioux buffalo hunting grounds. To Washington's ire, those Indian groups (both Sioux and Northern Cheyennes) who weren't party to the treaty had also strayed beyond the reservation, and this issue became a running sore for the following months. Both sides began to prepare for war; the U.S. Army leadership felt that an unprovoked attack would lead to more conflict with other tribes in the future, whereas the Sioux felt it was too late in the year to commence a war, as the buffalo hunt had just begun. As such, the government sent an ultimatum to the Sioux war chief Sitting Bull, requesting that the non-treaty bands of Sioux move back into the reservation, with the threat of war should Sitting Bull fail to comply before January 31. The local Indian agency protested the early deadline, as the harsh winter made it difficult to communicate, but nothing was done to rectify it, and as no answer had been received by the end of January, the U.S. Cavalry was ordered in.
The war plan called for three columns of troops, coming out of Forts Mansfield [1], Fetterman and Fremont [2], to converge on the hunting grounds, leaving no route of escape. The Fetterman column was the first to make contact with the Sioux, meeting them in battle at Crazy Woman Creek [3] on June 3. Though the U.S. forces claimed a victory, they were severely checked by the fight, so most modern historians argue it was a draw, if not an Indian victory. Colonel Custer's western column met up with the Sioux at the Little Bighorn, where they managed to score an upset victory, one of few battles in the war to end favourably for the government forces.
George Armstrong Custer in 1863, during his service in the occupied South.
The column coming out of Fort Fremont met with the stiffest resistance; in the Battle of Cherry Creek, the cavalry was decimated by the Sioux forces. Following this setback, the federal government opted to change its strategy; rather than wage a conventional war, they decided to step up troop numbers at the Indian agencies, in order to contain the resisting Sioux and stop them being supplied. In mid-October, the leaders of Red Cloud and Red Leaf villages were taken prisoner, though noncombatant, for failing to apprehend individuals coming from hostile bands. At this point, another commission was sent to the Sioux leadership, who agreed to come to terms.
The resultant treaty, although clearly favouring the government, was not quite as harsh on the Sioux as had been feared earlier. The Black Hills themselves were to be ceded and opened for formal white settlement, and the Northern Pacific was to be given a land grant through Sioux territory, but the railroad was to stay clear of the hunting grounds, and the Sioux were granted the parts of Dakota between the 46th parallel and the Missouri to compensate for the cession. Dakota west of the river was later made a separate territory, and though it did not gain statehood until 1907, the Sioux remain a powerful factor in Hesapa's politics to this day.
***
From "The Worker's Vanguards: A History of U.S. Guild Politics" [4] by Howard Delano
Harper & Sons Publishing Co., New York City, 1967
The end of the Civil War brought about a boom in railroad construction; between the years 1864 and 1870, 49,000 kilometers of track were laid [5]. However, as in so many other cases, this rapid boom came at the expense of workers' rights, and following the stock market crash of 1874, a large number of railroad workers saw their wages slashed as their employers tried to keep their finances in the green in the face of the crashing economy.
In February of 1878, the Baltimore & Ohio made the mistake of cutting its employees' wages for the second time in four months; on February 21, the infuriated workers in Grafton, Vandalia went on strike in protest, refusing to let any rolling stock move until the pay cut had been rescinded. The state governor sent in state militiamen to deal with the situation, but they proved unwilling to engage the strikers, whereupon the governor asked for federal troops. The strike spread quickly across much of the central Alleghenies [6], reaching Pittsburgh within the week. Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad asked the local law to "feed [the strikers] of the rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that kind of bread"; although the authorities were initially reluctant to engage the strikers, on March 1, Pennsylvania state militiamen bayoneted and opened fire on them, killing twenty-two men and wounding some thirty others.
Maryland National Guardsmen fighting their way through Baltimore.
In Cumberland, Maryland, a conflict between strikers and National Guardsmen led to the strikes spreading through most of that state; it was only after President Fish sent in federal troops to restore order on the streets of Baltimore that the violence in that area ended. By then, Philadelphia's Center City had been mostly set on fire as a consequence of the strikers and militiamen fighting in the streets. The strike reached as far west as East Saint Louis, where several rail yards were shut down by striking workers; the Saint Louis Workingmen's Party sent several of its members across the Mississippi in a show of solidarity with the strikers, and before long, the strikes there expanded into a mass movement among employees of several different industries for a ban on child labor and an eight hour workday reform - the first general strike in American history.
The strike, while massive in scale, only lasted a few weeks; the administration sent in federal troops to city after city, and the strikers generally dispersed after these shows of force. By early April, the strike was mostly over, and railroad workers were forced to return to work without any concession on the employers' part. When the dust had settled, many factors were suggested as determining in causing the strikes; the New York Herald suggested that a Marxist conspiracy was behind it [7], whereas many on the workers' side blamed the lack of guild organisation among the rail workers (the railroad brotherhoods, while playing a small part in the strikes, were still in their infancy at this point, and were barely present in the area where the strike started). There is still no general consensus about why the strikes began, but looking back, one thing is certain: the railroad strike of 1878, while possibly the first big strike in American history, was not to be the last.
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From "The Rock of Ages: A History of the Unionist Party" by Joseph E. Crater
Unionist Party Publishers, Washington, D.C., 2008
The 1870s were very much a decade of soul-searching for the Unionist Party. What had come about as a party of Upper Southerners who wanted to either make a compromise on slavery or ignore the issue altogether, and grown into prominence as a party of moderates who opposed both the Democratic and Republican stances on Reconstruction, was now a big tent under which dwelt the original Constitutional Unionists, moderate Republicans, former southern Whigs, and several other groupings. The party had lost control of the executive with Curtin's defeat in 1872, and did not regain it for the rest of the decade; however, they did hold the House during most of the Long Depression, riding a wave of discontent with Republican fiscal policy. Following the termination of the greenbacks in 1873, most of the Unionist Party backed a bimetallic currency; the eventual adoption of a wholly-gold currency standard, and subsequent economic collapse, led to the party leadership making this official policy, and the Unionist campaign of 1876 hinged on this issue.
William "Little Billy" Mahone, railroad president and Leveller leader.
Following the end of Reconstruction, the Establishers, who mostly still identified with the defunct Democratic party, took power in nearly all the southern states; however, Virginia saw a period under the control of a loose coalition that opposed the Establisher dominance and sought to create a more equal society. This group, known as the Levellers [8], wanted to abolish the racially biased voter registration system, break the dominance of the planter class, and establish more comprehensive public education. Though the Levellers were not formally affiliated with the Unionist Party, they did inspire Unionist doctrine regarding reconstruction; the party, unlike the Republicans, never explicitly stressed the importance of racial equality (a fact that earned them no love from most northerners), but the ideas of equal representation and the extension of the public sector were later adopted by the Unionist Party.
However, it was another prominent southern faction that was to get inextricably linked with southern Unionism for all time: the Redeemers. The Redeemers, inspired by the relative impoverishment of the post-war South and the great industrial wealth of the North, held that the South should develop its own industry, partly in order to make its economy less dependent on the cotton trade, but mostly to bring the South closer to equality with the North and lessen its dependence upon northern goods [9]. To this end, Redeemer planters reinvested their capital into building up industry, prominently textile mills that could utilise the abundant southern cotton supply and turn it into a finished product. It is important to note that while supporting modernisation of the southern economy, the Redeemers did not support civil rights; newspaperman Henry W. Grady, one of the principal Redeemers, stated that "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race [10]."
Henry W. Grady, prominent Redeemer agitator.
Though the Establishment remained dominant in southern politics, both of its rival ideologies grew in power over much of this time. The Unionist Party, having already absorbed much of Whig doctrine, integrated Redeemer ideas of industrialisation, fair competition, and internal improvements into their platform, and by the early 1880s, a trend was set that would define American politics for decades to come.
***
From "A History of America through its Presidents"
John Bachmann & Son, Bluefields, Nicaragua, 1945
1880 presidential election
The election of 1880, like that of 1876, was marked by the relative peace that had followed the end of Reconstruction. The Long Depression was mostly over, and the economy was entering what was to become one of the longest boom periods in American history. The Republican administration was praised in many circles for its sober handling of the crisis. President Fish and Treasury Secretary Wheeler, in particular, stood out for their actions to resolve the depression, and there were calls for Fish to run for a second term; however, the President declined, citing both his advancing age [11] and an earlier campaign pledge not to run again. Vice President Hayes, for his part, announced in late April that he would retire from politics on the completion of his term.
This left an open race for the Republican nomination, but when the convention had opened, a frontrunner soon emerged: James Gillespie Blaine, newspaperman and senator from Maine [12]. Blaine had authored the Seventeenth Amendment [13] while was an experienced orator, and a noted supporter of black suffrage; however, his relative disdain for the traditional Republican protectionism served to set many radicals against his candidacy, as did his lukewarm attitude toward Jim Crow. Blaine also suffered from his association with several corruption scandals, which worried the party's growing reformist wing. In the end, despite the opposition of portions of the convention, Blaine was nominated, with noted civil service reformer John Sherman of Ohio [14] selected as his running mate in order to balance the ticket.
The Unionist convention ended up nominating Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, who had previously been the Democratic nominee in 1864 [15]; the fact that the party had, in the first twenty years of its existence, only nominated prominent former Democrats and Republicans says quite a lot about its nature in this period. His running mate was Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania, a member of the party's small but vocal free-trade faction. What little remained of the Democratic party made no formal nomination, but the various (mostly southern and Establisher) local remnants of the party endorsed the Hendricks/Randall ticket, out of the belief that while far from optimal, the Unionists were at least better than the Republicans.
The race was fairly straightforward - the Republicans managed to ride the wave of popular acclaim for ending the depression, even though the previous Republican administration had played a key part in bringing it about, while the Unionists won many votes by accusing the Republicans of corruption and irresponsibility. In the end, however, Blaine managed to win the election by a relatively wide margin, a victory that can mostly be chalked up to the popularity of the outgoing Fish administration.
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[1] Fort Mansfield, named for Brig. Gen. Joseph King Mansfield, who died in the Battle of Hanover Courthouse in 1861 (IOTL he was mortally wounded at Antietam), is OTL's Fort Ellis.
[2] Fort Fremont is OTL's Fort Abraham Lincoln.
[3] A name I just had to include somewhere.
[4] Workers' guilds are, ITTL, the common American name for what we in OTL would call trade or labour unions (in Britain, where they were known as this long before the PoD, they're still called trade unions).
[5] The bloodier and more repressive Reconstruction ITTL frees up less government money for such things as railroad subsidies; this is reflected in these figures. IOTL, the figure for equivalent years was 55,000 kilometres of new track.
[6] The "Allegheny Mountains" refers to the entire Appalachian range ITTL; this usage was popular IOTL until about 1880.
[7] New York Tribune: Doin' the McCarthyism before it was hip.
[8] Not to be confused with the English Civil War-era proto-socialist group of the same name. The Levellers were known as the Readjusters IOTL.
[9] This doctrine existed IOTL as well, though it wasn't quite as prominent as it will be ITTL; it was known as the New South Creed.
[10] Grady said this IOTL as well.
[11] Fish was 72 at this point, making him the oldest president in TTL's history so far; this was as old as Reagan was at his second inauguration.
[12] I know this sentence sounds a bit like a Dr. Seuss rhyme. This may or, more probably, may not have significance later on.
[13] TTL's 17th Amendment, which failed to gain traction in Congress IOTL, forbids local governments from giving tax money or public land grants to religious sects.
[14] The elder brother of General William Sherman, Sherman is most famous IOTL for authoring the Sherman Antitrust Act.
[15] Hendricks was, IOTL, one of the most prominent politicians ever to come out of Indiana (meaning no offence to any Hoosiers reading this); he was the first Democrat to be elected governor of a northern state after the Civil War, and was Samuel Tilden's running mate in 1876. He died in 1885, having served as Grover Cleveland's first Vice President for only a few months.