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Framing new constitutions, most of the States had met the demands of Congress by the summer of 1868, with the respectable portion of the South looking on in desperate silence. The war had left no grievances equal to those now being suffered. Seven of the new constitutions were adopted in time for the radicals to give to their States votes in the election of 1868. Alabama, making the eighth, was allowed to vote under a constitution which Congress had forced upon her after it had failed of ratification by the people. Only Georgia and Louisiana, of these eight, did not give their votes to Grant. Only Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas remained without the pale when Grant was inaugurated in 1869.

The completion of reconstruction in its formal sense was reached during Grant's first Congress. Mississippi completed her process in February, 1870. She had in 1868 voted down the reconstruction constitution, taking courage in the leadership of a conservative governor, Humphreys. When he was removed, and replaced by a Northern governor, the conservatives lost heart and ratified the constitution that they had rejected. Their delay cost the State one more humiliation, since in the interval the Fifteenth Amendment had been submitted by Congress and made a condition of readmission for the recalcitrant States. A Republican legislature, the first fruit of reconstruction, accepted this and sent to Washington as the new Mississippi Senators the Northern military governor, Ames, and a negro preacher named Revels.

Virginia was readmitted in January, 1870. Her original loyal government under Pierpont, which Lincoln had respected, had been supplanted by a military r?gime, having lost its last chance for recognition when it rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867. Under congressional direction a negro-radical convention made a new constitution which was forced upon the people in January, 1870. Texas, too, was in her final stage of restoration in 1870, and like Virginia and Mississippi was readmitted upon conditions that had become more onerous since the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867.

Eleven States, all the old Confederacy, had been restored by the spring of 1870; but one, Georgia, was ejected after restoration, and thus became the last item in congressional reconstruction. In 1868 Georgia had ratified her new constitution and moved her capital from its ante-bellum location at Milledgeville to the new town growing upon the ashes of Atlanta. She had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but her first legislature had so poorly read the meaning of Congress that it expelled every negro whom the radicals had elected to membership. Congress had thereupon declined to seat the Georgia delegation at Washington, and had renewed the probationary period until the legislature, humbled and browbeaten, had undone the expulsion, whereupon Georgia received her final recognition.

The arbitrary acts of Congress, passed by the radicals over the unvarying vetoes of Johnson, find little sanction in the Constitution, but it is to be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war. Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment , was expected by all and accepted without a fight. The next amendment, inspired by a fear that the freedmen would be oppressed and by a hope that they might be converted into a political ally of the Republicans, was submitted to the States before the Reconstruction Acts were passed, and was proclaimed as part of the Constitution July 28, 1868. Only compulsion upon the Southern States procured its ratification. It left negro suffrage optional with the States, but threatened them with a reduction in representation in Congress if they refrained from granting it. In the Southern States Congress had already planted a negro electorate by law. The Fifteenth Amendment forbade the denial of the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and was not submitted to the States until after the inauguration of General Grant. A fear that the South would disfranchise the freedmen, pay the price, and revert to Democratic control seems to have been the prime motive in its adoption. When it was proclaimed, March 30, 1870, the radical Republicans had done everything in their power to save themselves, and had inflicted on the conquered States, in malice, ignorance, or mistaken philanthropy, a condition that in the North, with its trifling number of negroes, was tolerated with reluctance.

The South was in name completely restored in 1870, but neither restoration nor reconstruction was in fact far advanced. In the latter process it was yet clearing away the wreckage of the institution of slavery, breaking up the plantations, devising new systems of tenure and wage, rebuilding the material equipment that the war had left desolate. The former process was only commenced. It was unthinkable that an American community should permit itself to remain subject to the absolute control of its least respected members, yet this was the aim of white disfranchisement and negro suffrage. Law or no law, the restoration of the South was not complete until its government was back in the control of its responsible white population.

Almost without exception, until 1870, the Southern State Governments were what Congress had chosen to make them. Their Senators and Representatives in Congress were Republican, commonly of the carpet-bag variety. Their governors, administrative officers, and legislatures were Republican, too. Rarely were they persons of property or standing in their communities, and often, as their records show, they were both black and illiterate. Had all possessed good intentions they could hardly have hoped to meet the local needs, which called for a wise revision of law in order that the community might recover and live. That their work should be accompanied by error and waste was inevitable.

From the contemporary accounts of travelers in the South, from public documents, from the growing body of Southern biography and reminiscence, it is easy to gather a mass of detail upon the extravagance of the Reconstruction Governments. Printing bills and salary lists rose without a corresponding increase in service done. When expenditures exceeded the revenues, loans were created carelessly and recklessly. For negroes, only a few months out of the cotton-field, there was an irresistible attraction in the plush carpets, the mahogany desks, and the imported cuspidors that the taxpayers might be forced to provide for the comfort of their servants. A free and continuous lunch, with ample food and drink, was set up in one of the capitols. Gratuitous waste was the least of the burdens inflicted upon the South.

It is unreasonable to lay all the corruption of the Reconstruction Governments to the account of the congressional policy. The period of the Civil War was one of abuse of power by local officials everywhere. It took a Tweed in New York to drive a Northern public to revolt, and a Nast to focus public attention upon the crime. In other States, where rogues were less brutal in their methods, or prosecutors less acute, the evil ran, not unnoticed but unchecked. In the South the same phenomena were resented with greater vigor than in the North because the crimes were more openly and clumsily committed, and because they were the work of "outsiders."

The Ku-Klux Klan was a secret movement, with slight organization, that appeared earliest in Tennessee, but spread to nearly every crossroads in the South. It began in the hazing of negroes and carpet-baggers who were insolent or offensive to their neighbors. Its members rode by night, in mask, with improvised pomp and ritual, and played as much upon the imagination of their victims as upon their bodies. Frequently it revenged private grievances and went to extremes of violence or murder. From hazing it was an easy step to intimidation at election time, the Ku-Klux Klan proving to be an efficient means of reducing the negro vote. It was so efficient, indeed, that Grant asked and Congress voted, in 1871, special powers for the policing of the South. In this summer a committee of Congress visited Southern centers and accumulated a great mass of testimony from which a picture of both the Ku-Klux Klan outrages and the workings of reconstruction may easily be drawn. The reign of terror subsided by 1872, but it had done much to dissuade the negro from using his new right, and had started the movement for home rule in the South.

That the normal politics of the South was Democratic is shown by the votes of the border States, where a population of freedmen had to be assimilated and Congress could not interfere. Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky voted against Grant in 1868, although all the restored Confederate States but two voted for him. In Georgia the Democrats swallowed their pride, electioneered among the negroes, and elected a conservative State Government in 1870. Tennessee escaped negro domination from the start. Virginia, late to be readmitted, had consolidated her white population as she watched the troubles in South Carolina and Mississippi, and never elected a radical administration. In North Carolina, after a fight that approached a civil war, a Democratic State Government was chosen in 1870. The rest of the Confederate States followed as opportunity offered; after 1872 the process was rapid, and after 1876 there was no Republican administration in the old South. The Republican party, itself, almost disappeared from the South at this time. A bare organization, largely manned by negroes, endured to enjoy the offices which a Republican National Administration could bestow, and to contribute pliant delegations to the national conventions of the party. But the South had become solid in the sense that its votes were recorded almost automatically for the Democratic ticket.

Force and fraud played a large part in the restoration of white control, but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted. Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order which needed the constant support of troops lost the confidence of political independents. These, as the presidential campaign of 1872 drew near, openly expressed their hostility to reconstruction as carried out by Grant, and threatened to prevent his re?lection.

The first term of Grant ended unsatisfactorily. His appointments to office were marked by favoritism and incapacity. He appointed the only really inferior man who has ever represented the United States in London,--one who thought it not incompatible with his high office to publish a treatise on draw-poker, and to appear as bellwether in a mining prospectus. Grant's personal intimates included shifty financiers. Corruption and misgovernment at the South were held against him, though Congress was properly to blame for them. Only in his stand for honest finance, his effort to improve the Indian service, and his conclusion of the disputes with Great Britain, could his supporters take great pride.

The settlement with England was his greatest achievement. Since the summer of 1862, when the Alabama had evaded the British officials and had gone to sea, the American Minister in London had continued to press for damages. The Alabama claims were based on the assertion that the law of neutrals required Great Britain to prevent any hostile vessel from starting, in her waters, upon a cruise against the United States. In the face of official rebuff and popular sneers Charles Francis Adams formulated the claims. His successor, Reverdy Johnson, reached a sort of settlement which the Senate declined to ratify, and which Sumner denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged by British aid and that a demand for national damages ought to be advanced. So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870. The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles Francis Adams, loomed up as the possible presidential candidate of the Republican dissenters.

No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South the support of the party of the South.

The Republican Convention renominated Grant at Philadelphia without opposition, refused Colfax a second term, and picked Henry Wilson for Vice-President. Its platform, as in 1868, was retrospective, taking pride in its great achievements and assuming full credit for the war, reconstruction, and financial honor. It offered its ticket to all the States for the first time since 1860, and elected Grant with ease. The inharmonious Democrat-Liberal-Republican alliance increased the Republican majority, but the returns from the South confirmed the suspicion that home rule was in sight.

Restored completely to themselves, four years later, the Southern Governments ceased to play much part in national affairs and continued the economic rebuilding of their region. It was thirty years after the war before the South, in population and business, had recovered from its devastation, and even then it was far from subordinating its local politics to national issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE PANIC OF 1873

"Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he considered the relations of business and politics. He answered himself in the affirmative and found comrades in his pessimism throughout that intellectual class in whose achievements America has taken conscious pride. For at least ten years they despaired of the return of honesty. James Russell Lowell, decorated with the D.C.L. of Oxford, and honored everywhere in the world of letters, was filled with doubt and dismay as late as 1876, at "the degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not," he asked, "a result of democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or ... for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"

The years of Grant's Presidency were filled with unsightly episodes, that were scandalous then and have been discouraging always. In his first year of office, Jay Gould and James Fisk, tempted by the premium on gold, tried to corner the market, and Grant's public association with the speculators brought upon him fair reproach. Tweed, exposed and jailed after a long fight, revealed the close alliance between crooked politics and business in the cities, and became a national disgrace. Less prominent than these but far from proper were Schenck and Fr?mont. The latter was arrested in France, charged with promoting a railroad on the strength of land grants that did not exist. He had been close to the old Republican organization, and the figurehead of the radicals in 1864, so that his notoriety was great. Schenck, while Minister in London, posed as director of a mining company, and borrowed from the promoters of the scheme the money with which he bought his shares. When the company proved insolvent, and perhaps fraudulent, Grant was forced to recall him. Critics who saw dishonesty or low ethical standards in these men were ready to see in the carnival of the Reconstruction Governments wholesale proofs of decadence.

During the campaign of 1872 yet another item was added to the unpleasant list. Letters were made public showing how Congressmen had taken pay, or its equivalent, from men behind the Union Pacific Railroad. The scandal of the Cr?dit Mobilier touched men in all walks of life, beginning with Schuyler Colfax, Vice-President of the United States, including Blaine, Allison, and Garfield, Wilson and Dawes, and other men who no longer held office. Some of these denied the charges and proved their innocence. But none entirely escaped the suspicion that their sense of official propriety was low, and their list sampled the Republican party at all its levels. One of the victims, Colfax, talked freely in 1870 of gifts received--a carriage from a Congressman and horses from an express company.

In 1872 the notorious Butler aimed at the governorship of Massachusetts. He failed to get the Republican nomination, but the strength of his candidacy showed the uncritical devotion of many voters to success. He resumed his seat in Congress, unabashed, and put through an act properly increasing the salaries of Washington officials, but applying also to the men who voted for it and to the session just ending. Its makers went home to explain their part in the "salary grab" to their constituents, and many never returned to Congress.

Other improprieties of the first Administration of Grant came to light in his second term. His Secretary of War, Belknap, confessed to the sale of offices. In the Treasury Department were uncovered the whiskey frauds which tainted even Grant's private secretary. And the Speaker of the House, Blaine, was shown to have urged a railroad company to recognize his official aid, promising not to be a "deadhead in the enterprise" in its future service.

There is no better illustration of the commercial ethics of the sixties than may be found in the letters of Jay Cooke, philanthropist and financier. With a lively and sincere piety, and an unrestrained generosity, he at once extended hospitalities to the political leaders of the day, carried their private speculations on his books, and performed official services to the Government. It was impossible to tell where his public service ended and his private emolument began, but there was nothing in his life of which he was ashamed. A friend of General Grant, and liberal patron of his children, Cooke was actually entertaining the President at his country home just outside of Philadelphia when the failure of his banking house precipitated the panic of 1873.

There had been financial uneasiness abroad and in the United States for several months, but few had anticipated the collapse of credit that followed the suspension of Jay Cooke and Company, September 18, 1873. If this house failed, none could be regarded as safe. Jay Cooke had established his reputation during the Civil War through his ability to find a market for United States bonds. After the war he had carried his activity and prestige into railways. In 1869 he had become the financial agent of the Northern Pacific, and customers, encouraged by their good bargains in the past, continued to invest through him as he directed. His personal followers, numerous and confident, had been taught to believe his credit as sound as that of the Government whose bonds he had handled. When he collapsed, overloaded with Northern Pacific securities, in which his confidence was enthusiastic, the panic was so acute that the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors for ten days, to prevent the ruinous prices that forced sales might have created. Thirty or more banking houses were drawn down by the crash within forty-eight hours. Others followed in all the business centers, while trade stood still through the paralysis of its banking agents.

The distribution of the panic throughout the United States followed the usual course. In the first crisis, banking houses broke down, unable to meet the runs of their depositors or their original obligations. The depositors next, unable to secure their own funds or to obtain their usual loans, were driven to insolvency. After the failure of banks came that of railroads, the wholesale houses, and the factories. As these last defaulted, the loss was spread over their employees, their contractors, and their creditors. Confidence was everywhere destroyed. Investments were lost, or lessened, or put off indefinitely in their payments. After a few days the acute crisis was over, but the resulting depression brought stagnation to business. Industries marked time, at best; expansions were out of the question; new enterprises were not heard of. From 1873 until 1879 the United States was engaged in recovery from the injury which the panic had done and from the weakness which it had revealed.

The faulty currency, outstanding since the war, and adding to the business uncertainty, now aggravated the panic when it broke. The greenbacks were slowly rising in value. They profited by the growing credit of the United States, and received a special increase because of the development of business. After 1865 business transactions grew in number and volume more rapidly than the amount of available money, and this, driven to greater activity in circulation, rose in value from the increased demand. As the purchasing value of the dollar increased, prices, measured by the greenbacks, necessarily fell, while the equivalent of every debt that had to be paid in a specified number of dollars as steadily rose. Indeed, so great was the increase of production from the new farms, reached by the new railroads, and supplying raw materials for the new factory processes, that prices fell, even when stated in terms of gold. In a period of falling prices and appreciating currency, the gap between the poor and the rich was widened. The debtor carried a growing burden while the creditor harvested an unearned increase. Persons who lived on fixed salary or income profited by the fluctuations, but commercial transactions were made more difficult for the debtor.

The organized Greenback movement had figured in politics during the campaign of 1868, and made a special appeal to the debtor section during the hard times after 1873. The Republican Congress had, in 1869, sealed the professions of the party's platform by passing a resolution "to strengthen the public credit," in which it declared "that the faith of the United States is solemnly pledged to the payment in coin or its equivalent," of the greenbacks, and that the United States would not take advantage of its creditors by paying off its "lawful-money" bonds in depreciated paper. All debts created before the war or during its early years had lost through depreciation, just as the later debts had gained through the reverse.

Despite this pledge, advocates of greenback inflation, with Butler among their leaders, became more numerous in both parties after the panic, and an attempt was made to have Congress reverse itself. Grant's Secretary of the Treasury gave a new construction to the law by reissuing during the critical days of the panic some ,000,000 of greenbacks that had been called in by McCulloch. He raised the total outstanding to 2,000,000, and Congress in 1874 passed a law increasing the amount to 0,000,000, in an act named by its opponents the "Inflation Bill." To the surprise of many, Grant sharply vetoed the act, adhering to his views of 1869 on the evils of an irredeemable paper currency. During the next winter John Sherman, Senator from Ohio, induced Congress to take a step in fulfillment of the guaranty which Grant had saved. On January 14, 1875, it was provided that the Treasury should resume the payment of specie on demand on January 1, 1879.

Ultimately Congress was saved from the act of repudiation which the Greenbackers urged upon it, but while the movement flourished it added another to the catalogue of troubles with which men like Godkin and Lowell were distressed. Easterners, in general, had as little understanding of the West as they had had of the race problem in the South. They were disposed to attribute to inherent dishonesty the inflation movement, and to ignore the real economic grievance upon which it was founded. The suspicions directed against the ethical standards of the West were increased by the Granger movement, to which the panic gave volume and importance.

Among the social phenomena of 1873-74 was the sudden emergence in the Northwest of a semi-secret, ritualistic society, calling itself the "Patrons of Husbandry," but popularly known as the "Grange." It was founded locally upon the soil, in farmers' clubs, or granges, at whose meetings the men talked politics, while their wives prepared a picnic supper and the children played outdoors. It had had a nominal existence since 1867, but during the panic it unexpectedly met a new need and grew rapidly, creating 1000 or more local granges a month, until at its maximum in 1874 it embraced perhaps 20,000 granges and 1,600,000 persons. In theory the granges were grouped by States, which latter were consolidated in the National Grange; in fact, the movement was almost entirely confined to the region north of the Ohio River, and even to the district northwest of Chicago.

Such a movement as the Grange, revealing a common purpose over a wide area and in a great number of citizens, could not but affect party allegiance and the conduct of party leaders. Simultaneously with its development the legislatures of the Northwest--Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa--became restive under existing conditions, and assumed an attitude which became characteristic of the Grange,--one of hostility to railroads and their management. With the approval of the people, these States passed, between 1871 and 1874, a series of regulative acts respecting the railways, which were known at the start as the "Granger Laws," and which became a permanent contribution to American government.

To Eastern opinion the Greenback movement had been barefaced repudiation; the Granger movement seemed to be confiscation; for every law provided a means by which public authority should fix the charge imposed by the railroad upon its customer. Both movements need to be studied in their local environment, which at least explains the Western zeal in clamoring for the greenbacks, and shows that in the Granger movement the West saw farther than it knew.

The Civil War period marks a new era in the history of American railways. Prior to the panic of 1837, the few lines that were built were local. Few could foresee that the railway would ever be more than an adjunct to the turnpike and canal in bringing the city centers closer to their environs. In the revival of industry after the panic of 1837, the mileage increased progressively, and before the next panic checked business in 1857 the tidewater region was well provided, and the Alleghanies had been crossed by several trunk lines whose heads extended to the Lakes and to the Mississippi. But in these years the change was of degree rather than of kind. The lines were built to supplement existing routes, like the Erie Canal, the Lakes, the Ohio River, or the Mississippi. They connected communities already well developed and prosperous, and in undertaking new enterprises promoters had figured upon capturing the profits of existing trade.

This inevitable dependence on railways colored the history of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, and, to a lesser degree, of all the West. While men were yet prosperous and sanguine and without adequate railway service, they offered high inducements to promoters of railways. Once the roads were built and the communities began to pay for them and to maintain them, the dependence was realized and anti-railway agitation began. The fact that they were commonly built on money borrowed from the East threw debtors and creditors into sectional classes injurious to both.

The antagonism to railways was increased because these yet regarded their trade as private, to be conducted in secrecy, with transportation to be sold at the best rates that could be got from the individual customer. The big shipper got the wholesale rate; the small shipper paid the maximum. Favoritism, discrimination, rebates, were the life of railway trade, and railway managers objected to them only because they endangered profits, not because they felt any obligation to maintain uniformity in charges.

In a community as dependent on the railways as the Northwest was, the iniquity of discriminatory or extortionate rates was soon seen. The East, with rival routes and less dependence on staple interests, saw it less clearly. The charges were paid grumblingly in good times; in bad times, when the rising greenbacks squeezed the debtor West and the panic of 1873 stopped business everywhere, the farmers soon made common cause. They seized upon the skeleton organization of the grange and gave it life. In 1874 their organized discontent compelled attention.

The Granger Laws were an attempt to establish a new legal doctrine that railways are quasi-public because of the nature of the service which they render and the privileges they enjoy. This principle was overlaid in many cases by the human desire to punish the railroads as the cause of economic distress, but it was visible in all the laws. It is an old rule of the common law that the ferryman, the baker, and the innkeeper are subject to public control, and railways were now classified with these. In Wisconsin, the "Potter" Law established a schedule with classified rates, superseding all rate-cards of railroads in that State. Illinois created a railroad and warehouse commission with power to fix rates and annul warehouse charters. In Iowa the maximum rates were fixed by law.

The railroads failed to realize at once what the new laws meant. They denounced them as confiscatory, and attacked them in court as wrong in theory and bad in application. Even admitting the principle of regulation, the laws were so crudely shaped as to be nearly unworkable. Farmer legislators, chosen on the issue of opposition to railways, were not likely to show either fairness or scientific knowledge. Coming at the same time with the panic of 1873, it is impossible to measure the precise effect of any of these laws, and all were modified before many years. But the railroads' objection lay beneath the detail, and the fundamental fight turned on two points--the right of public authority to regulate a rate at all, and whether state regulation was compatible with the power of Congress over interstate commerce.

The legal consequences of the "Granger Cases" extended through the ensuing generation. The need for public intervention grew steadily stronger, and as time went on it became clear that this control could not be administered by orators or spoilsmen, but called for scientific training and permanence of policy. It was one of many influences working to reshape American administrative practice.

The Granger movement had close relations with the panic of 1873, although it must anyway have appeared in the Northwest at no remote date. As a political force it soon died out, leaving the principle of regulation as its memorial. With the gradual recurrence of prosperity the Northwest found new interests, and as early as 1877, when the decisions were made, the passion had subsided.

It was, however, a gloomy United States that faced the end of its first century of independence, in 1876. Pessimism was widely spread among the best educated in the East. Public life was everywhere discredited by the conduct of high officials. The South was in the midst of its struggle for home rule, which it could win only through wholesale force and fraud. The West was discouraged over finance and still depressed by the panic. Yet Philadelphia went ahead to celebrate the centennial as though it were ending the century as hopefully as it had begun.

The Exposition at Philadelphia this year was a revelation to the United States. Though far surpassed by later "world's fairs," it displayed the wide resources of the United States and brought home the difference between American and European civilization. The foreign exhibits first had a chastening influence upon American exuberance, and then stimulated the development of higher artistic standards. In ingenuity the American mind held its own against all competition. But few Americans had traveled, the cheap processes of illustration were yet unknown, and in the resulting ignorance the United States had been left to its assumption of a superiority unjustified by the facts. From the centennial year may be dated the closer approach of American standards to those of the better classes of Europe.

In the summer of 1876 the thirty-eighth State, Colorado, was added to the Union. It had been seventeen years since the miners thronged the Kansas and Nebraska plains, bound for "Pike's Peak or Bust!" In the interval the mining camps had become permanent communities. Authorized in 1864 to form a State, they had declined to accept the responsibility and had lingered for many years with only a handful of inhabitants. Now and then entirely isolated from the United States by Indian wars, they had prayed for the continental railroad, only to be disappointed when the Union Pacific went through Cheyenne instead of Denver. One of the branches of the Union Pacific was extended to Denver in 1870, and thereafter Colorado grew in spite of the panic of 1873. Grant began to urge its admission in his first Administration, and signed a proclamation admitting it in 1876. It came in in time to cast three Republican electoral votes in the most troublesome presidential contest the United States had seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION

The re?lection of Grant in 1872 was almost automatic. No new issue had forced itself into politics to stir up the old party fires or light new ones. The old issues had begun to lose their force. Men ceased to respond when told that the Union was in danger; they questioned or ignored the statement. Many of them contradicted it and voted for Greeley in 1872, but they were impelled to this by repulsion from Republican practice rather than by attraction to Democratic promise. Yet, on the whole, the habit of voting the Union or Republican ticket retained its hold on so many in the North that Grant's second term was insured, and it was even possible that a Republican successor might profit by the same political inertia.

The second term added no strength to Grant or to his party. Throughout its course, administrative scandals continued to come to light, striking at times dangerously near the President, but failing to injure him other than in his repute for judgment. The period was one of financial depression and discouragement. The best intellect of the United States was directed into business, the professions, and educational administration. Politics was generally left to the men who had already controlled it, and these were the men who had risen into prominence in the period of the Civil War.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917

Showing the party in control of the national government in each Congress

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