1870, U.S. Census: total population, 38.93 million (residential); black, 5.39 million (13.8%). Full names of African-Americans recorded for the first time. Since close of the Civil War, black population of South’s 10 largest cities doubled.
Immigration slowed down in 1860s, but still totaled 2.32 million.
Undercounts are suspected, but recounts in New York and Philadelphia find discrepancies of no more than 2.3 percent.
Blacks get their voting rights.
1870, The 15th Amendment is ratified, guaranteeing that the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race, Feb. 26. Women’s rights leaders are frustrated that female suffrage is not also protected.
Virginia, Mississippi and Texas readmitted. Georgia is the final state to be readmitted, July 15.
1870, New masses of black votes put many blacks into local office and on state legislatures, particularly in South Carolina (above), Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, although no legislature is majority black. White “Unionists” who opposed Confederacy and white Republicans from North also play large roles in state governments. The former are called “Scalawags” by Democratic opponents; the latter are scorned as “Carpetbaggers.”
New office holders are accused of bleeding white taxpayers to support expanded schools and of corrupt bond issues to support rebuilding of railroads.
Hiram Rhodes Revels.
1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels, born free in North Carolina with mixed ancestry, is elected to be the first black U.S. senator by the Mississippi senate. He is a Methodist minister who helped raise black regiments in Maryland and Missouri.
On Feb. 3, he takes seat vacated by Jefferson Davis in 1861 after supporters overcome opposition of Southern Democratic senators.
In 1875, Blanche K. Bruce, born into slavery in Virginia but raised much more equally by white master-father, is second black elected to U.S. Senate, also by Mississippi senate. Serves to 1881.
After 1881: The next black elected U.S. senator is Edward Brooke, Massachusetts, in 1966 (by popular vote). The next black elected by a Southern state is Tim Scott, South Carolina, in 2014.
Joseph Rainey.
1870, Joseph Rainey, born a slave but freed when his father was able to purchase family’s freedom, becomes first black U.S. representative, representing South Carolina’s 1st district (Charleston), Dec. 12. Serves to 1879.
The following year, blacks Jefferson Long, Georgia; Robert De Large and Robert Elliott, South Carolina; Benjamin Turner, Alabama; and Josiah Walls, Florida, are elected to the House. In the following years, seven more are elected to the House, including the first to represent North Carolina and Louisiana.
Robert Smalls of South Carolina (famous for his 1862 Charleston Harbor escape) is the last of the Reconstruction blacks to leave the House, March 1887.
Six more black men are elected to the House in ’80s and ’90s, including the first to represent Virginia. The last of these is George Henry White of North Carolina who leaves in 1901.
After 1901: No blacks elected from any state to the House until 1928, when Oscar Stanton De Priest wins a seat to represent Chicago. No blacks elected to the House from a Confederate state until 1972, when Barbara Jordan, Texas, and Andrew Young, Georgia, are elected.
Nationwide: Barack Obama, Illinois, is the first black elected president, 2008. Kamala Harris, California, is the first black, first Asian and first woman elected vice president, 2020. Both are of mixed race; and their black fathers were born in foreign countries.
1870, Grant proposes annexing the Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo) to provide land for freed slaves. Frederick Douglass joins exploratory commission visiting Santo Domingo, January 1871. Sen. Sumner and many others are opposed and plan fails to advance.
Soldiers watch Indians dying.
1870, More than 170 Piegan Blackfeet die in surprise attack by 2nd U.S. Cavalry on the Marias river in Montana Territory. Soldiers, pursing a small band for the killing of a white settler, strike the wrong group; the dead are mostly women and children plus a few elderly men; many were suffering from smallpox.
1870, Angry blacks rise up on Martinique. French authorities imprison 500 rebels; 74 are found guilty. Twelve leaders are executed, others are deported to Guiana or New Caledonia.
1870, Franco-Prussian War breaks out July 16 with German states, led by Prussia and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, quickly victorious; Napoléon III captured at Sedan, Sept. 2. Besieged Paris falls Jan. 28, 1871.
1870, War with Paraguay ends with total victory for Brazil and its allies, Argentina and Uruguay. More than 50,000 Brazilian soldiers die, with blacks, both free and slave, bearing a large share of the losses.
1870s, A first uptick in use of term “white supremacy,” as measured by a 21st-century digital analyses of U.S. books between 1800 and 2000. Use begins to swell after 1900 and then soars to a peak around 1970 (with a brief dip in the 1950s). There is a steep fall-off in late ’70s and a surge to a new peak in 1999. Graph available.
1870s, Caribbean sugar plantations bring in tens of thousands of indentured servants to replace slaves. New workers labor under near-slave conditions over 10-year contracts. By 1900, 450,000 laborers from India will arrive in British colonies, especially Trinidad and Guyana. Dutch bring in thousands of Javanese people to Surinam.
1871, In Meridian, MS, rising tensions over Ku Klux Klan pursuit of freedmen from Alabama lead to a downtown fire of unclear origin. A white mob seizes three black leaders who are charged with arson, March 4. Two days later, a crowd of 200, some black, most white, packs courthouse. Shooting breaks out, killing the judge, a white Republican, and several others. One black defendant escapes; the others die at hand of whites who kill nearly 30 more blacks over the next two days.
White Republican mayor flees town; his letter describing the killings is published by Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune.
1871, Birmingham, AL, founded June 1 by a consortium of cotton planters, bankers and railroads at the planned junction of the Alabama and Chattanooga and the South & North Alabama railroads. Also important for siting: Nearby deposits of iron ore, coal and limestone, key materials for production of steel.
The first coke-fired iron is produced at Oxmoor Furnace in 1876. In the following decade 19 more furnaces are erected.
Workers are drawn from poor whites and blacks leaving sharecropping. Coal is mined in large part by convict gangs provided by prisons.
1871, Great Chicago Fire kills about 300, burns down 3.3 square miles of city and leaves more than 100,000 homeless, Oct 8-10.
Group of Jubilee singers.
1871, Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce Negro spirituals in performances in Northern cities to raise funds for the all-black Fisk Free Colored School opened in Nashville, TN, in 1866 by the American Missionary Association.
The black student chorus, comprising five women and four men, donates proceeds from their first performance, in Cincinnati, to survivors of the Chicago fire.
William Holden.
1871, In North Carolina, Republican William Woods Holden (white) is first U.S. governor to be impeached, convicted and removed, March 22. Newly elected Democratic legislature acts after Holden attempts to uphold Reconstruction laws and crack down on Ku Klux Klan after Klan lynches a black police officer and assassinates a Republican state senator.
1871, Pres. Grant orders martial law in South Carolina to curb Ku Klux Klan violence against blacks and their allies. Suspends habeas corpus in nine counties, Oct. 17. Nearly 600 Klansmen jailed by December; more than 200 indicted, 53 plead guilty, five more convicted at trial.
Leads to dramatic reduction of Klan terrorism and, in Louisiana, of Knights of White Camelia. But other organizations—White League, White Liners and Red Shirts—soon rise.
Buffalo make way for railroads.
1871, Extermination of buffalo escalates as more railroads push into Plains and hunters arm themselves with more-powerful .50-caliber Sharps rifles, which can kill the large animals at a longer range.
Also, a Philadelphia tannery develops method to convert hides into commercial leather for drive belts and for boots for European armies.
With approval of U.S. Army, 2,000 hunters pursue hides worth $1 to $3 each, killing five times as many animals as Indians do. Total buffalo numbers fall from 15 million in 1865 to 7 million in 1872.
1871, Brazilian parliament adopts Law of Free Birth to provide freedom for all newborns of enslaved mothers as an abolition movement gets underway. But children continue “under care” of slave masters or state until they are 21. Thus relatively few are actually freed before full emancipation in 1888.
Grant and Greeley.
1872, Grant easily re-elected president over Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, who is supported by Democrats and Liberal Republicans, Nov. 5. Greeley dies a few weeks later in a Westchester sanitarium.
1872, Great Boston Fire burns 65 acres of downtown and financial district. More than 30 die, including 12 firefighters, Nov. 9-10.
1872, William Still, a free-born black abolitionist, publishes The Underground Railroad Records, detailing stories of hundreds of blacks whom he helped to escape slavery through Philadelphia while chairman of the Vigilance Committee in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Colfax riot claims many lives.
1873, As many as 153 blacks, most of them state militia guarding the Grant Parish Courthouse in Colfax, LA, are killed in an assault by a larger group of armed whites, April 13. Most of the blacks are executed after they surrender, with many bodies thrown into Red river. Only three whites die.
Incident culminates a long-running political feud between white Democrats and Republican officials over widely disputed election of Republican William Pitt Kellog (a Lincoln friend from Illinois) in the previous November. It is the bloodiest of many attacks and killings perpetrated to restore white political dominance in Southern states during Reconstruction.
Prosecution of nine whites goes to Supreme Court, which rules 5-4 that federal government has no authority under 14th and 15th amendments to charge “non-state” (civilian) perpetrators, March 27, 1876.
Large crowd rallies outside bank.
1873, Jay Cooke’s bank in New York, over-extended in transcontinental railroads, closes suddenly Sept. 18, kicking off Panic of 1873. Ultimately, 89 railroads crash nationwide. Stock market falls hard, closes for two weeks and resumes falling. Farmers hurt by end of Franco-Prussian War demand from Europe. Production of iron and steel declines by 45%. Unemployment reaches 14% and wages drop 45%.
This “Great Depression,” as it is called, lingers through 1877. Immigration to U.S. increases from hard-hit regions of Europe, while many Americans depart Eastern cities for the West.
Also: These economic worries are a major factor in turning public attention in the North away from Reconstruction.
1873, Slavery abolished on Puerto Rico by the Spanish National Assembly, March 22, after long abolitionist campaign on the island. Slaves are required to work three more years; masters are compensated at 35 million pesetas per slave.
1874, Alarmed by relentless extermination of buffalo, Congress passes legislation forbidding non-Indians to kill female buffalo or males beyond need for food, June 23. But Pres. Grant, who reluctantly supports elimination of last herds as more humane than war to force Indians onto reservations, stops the bill with a pocket veto.
Indian's home base in disarray.
1874, Desperate to slow the buffalo killing, 700 Comanche and allies, led by Quanah Parker, attack the Adobe Walls trading post (inside are 28 men, mostly buffalo hunters, and one woman) in the Texas panhandle.
After initial surprise charge, Indians can’t close on hunters’ long-range rifles, which kill 70 and wound many more, June 27. It is a spiritually crushing defeat for Plains Indians.
1874, U.S. 7th Cavalry expedition, led by Lt. Col. George Custer, explores Black Hills of Dakota Territory—Lakota Sioux land by treaty—to seek sites for a fort and to investigate possibilities of mining, July. Custer returns to report “existence of gold.” Which is enough to set off a miners’ rush in a nation suffering from economic panic.
By early 1876, lawless town of Deadwood is home to more than 20,000 miners and other “entrepreneurs.” Disputes with Lakota, who hold the land sacred, mount. Rich vein discovered in April, 1876, is developed by George Hearst as the Homestake Mine, most productive single gold mine in Western Hemisphere.
1874, Mississippi becomes a Reconstruction battleground. The previous year, Republicans, with votes of black majority in state, took governorship and statehouse (electing 10 black legislators of 36 total) with a 30,000-vote cushion.
But armed White Liners in Vicksburg work to intimidate black voters and defeat Republican city officials in August. The black county sheriff, Peter Crosby, is forced to flee in December.
Gov. Adelbert Ames directs a black militia group to aid Crosby. Fighting and gunfire break out; over 10 days at least 29 blacks are killed. Pres. Grant directs federal troops to restore order, January 1875.
White soldiers wreak havoc.
1874, 5,000 members of the White League (founded in northern Louisiana earlier in year) battle outnumbered New Orleans police and state militia, and take control of Louisiana statehouse as well as the armory and downtown blocks, Sept. 14.
More than 20 White Leaguers (most are former Confederate soldiers) are killed and 19 wounded; 11 police and militia are killed and 60 wounded. Former Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, who leads the police, is taken prisoner by the White League.
White League removes Gov. William Pitt Kellogg and replaces him with Democrat John McEnery and the latter’s “rump” legislature.
Insurrection comes to a negotiated end three days later as federal troops approach. Their general, William H. Emory, promises White Leaguers freedom from arrest.
While state government remains in Kellogg’s hands to the end of his term; the Republicans control only the city, protected there by U.S. troops. McEnery and his candidate for governor, Francis T. Nicholls, hold sway over the rest of Louisiana.
1874, Armed members of the White League target black voters marching to polls in black-majority Barbour County, AL, Nov. 3, Election Day. They kill 15 to 40 blacks, wound dozens more and drive crowds from the polls. White Democrats replace all Republicans in office. This repeats Vicksburg tactics, but in national election.
Blacks turned away at polls.
1874, Democrats gain control of the U.S. House for first time since 1861, flipping 92 seats as economic depression continues and Grant administration battles corruption charges. Also, white intimidation and violence tilt many elections in the South. Although Senate continues with a large Republican majority, the election signals the coming end of Reconstruction.
British troops destroy Kumashi.
1874, Large British force under Gen. Garnet Wolseley defeats an even greater number of Ashanti at Amoaful, Jan. 31, in the Third Ashanti War. Four days later, they blow up the royal palace and burn most of Kumasi, the Ashanti capital.
Ashanti had threatened Elmina, which the British had purchased from the Netherlands in 1872. Ashanti claimed Elmina as theirs with the dissolution of the 213-year-old Dutch agreement with the neighboring Ahanta people.
Peace agreement signed in July by Kofi Karikara, the Ashanti king, awards British 50,000 ounces in gold and requires an end to human sacrifice. Ashanti are assured of access to Elmina and other coastal trade points.
1875, “Mississippi Plan” to restore white political domination is devised by senior state Democrats: First, persuade the relatively few white voters supporting Republicans to switch to Democratic Party; many fearfully do so. Second, pressure black sharecroppers economically, then intimidate blacks with armed White Liners. Assassination is even condoned (Sheriff Crosby is shot down by a white deputy in June).
The main architects are L.Q.C. Lamar, a congressman elected in 1872; White Line leader James Z. George; and John Marshal Stone, president of the state Senate. Lamar drafted the Mississippi secession ordinance; George was a signer. Lamar had been a Confederate officer and diplomat; George served as a Confederate colonel; both go on to be U.S. senators and Lamar to be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
More violence: A political rally in Clinton, MS, organized by Republican freedmen, is interrupted by heckling White Liners brandishing weapons. Shots ring out; three whites and five blacks (two of them children) die, Sept. 4. Rumors of black retaliation lead to several hundred White Liners hunting down black people through the night; death toll is between 35 and 50 blacks and one white Republican candidate.
Pres. Grant, worried about holding Republican seats in Ohio, delays on Gov. Ames’s request for more federal troops and adopts a new policy of “non-intervention” in future conflicts.
Democrats take Mississippi legislature by 30,000-vote margin, November. That legislature impeaches Ames, who resigns, to be replaced by Senate Pres. Stone.
Democrats in Louisiana and South Carolina vow to duplicate the “Mississippi Plan” in their “redemption” efforts.
1875, Republican Congress passes Civil Rights Bill of 1875, prohibiting segregation in public facilities and transit, and prohibiting exclusion of blacks from jury service. Grant signs it, March 1, but does little to enforce it.
This is the last federal civil rights act until 1957, and much of it is struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883.
Quanah Parker.
1875, Last Comanche band, led by Quanah Parker (whose white mother was an assimilated child captive), surrenders at Fort Sill, Indian Territory. This after U.S. commanders destroy their Panhandle camps in the 1874 Red River War and encourage massacre of last major buffalo herd by scores of commercial hunters looking for hides to ship east.
Comanche population, 10,000 in 1859, falls to 5,000 in 1870 and to only 1,500 when they arrive at reservation. Most of the decline is attributed to 1859 outbreak of cholera, associated with the third worldwide pandemic that had earlier hit Chicago, and settlers on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails.
1875, Slavery abolished on São Tomé as island becomes a leader in exporting cocoa, decades after decline of sugar cane.
Warriors arrive at Little Big Horn.
1876, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, led by Crazy Horse, wipe out a large 7th Cavalry force led by Custer and turn back a second column (altogether, 274 dead, 49 wounded) near Little Big Horn river in the Montana Territory, June 25.
Cartoon depicting massacre.
1876, In majority-black Hamburg, SC, 100 Red Shirts escalate a minor roadside disturbance into an attack on 30 black militia in their armory, July 7. Overnight and into next day, one white and six blacks are killed, four of them execution-style, and more blacks are wounded.
A much bloodier incident follows in nearby Ellenton, with 500 or more armed whites warning blacks to stay away from polls or risk death. At least 35 black people are killed over six days in September.
Both incidents are attributed to the “Edgefield Plan” of former Confederate Gen. Martin W. Gary and wealthy planter Benjamin Tillman, which echoes the Mississippi Plan in using bribery, intimidation and violence to suppress black votes (South Carolina is also a black-majority state) and elect white Democratic legislators and governor. The latter is won by Wade Hampton, another former Confederate general and “Lost Cause” proponent, in a close count.
1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden (New York) wins the popular vote for president (51.6%-48.4%) over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (Ohio) in November but electoral votes of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina are disputed.
In Compromise of 1877, Congressional Democrats accept the election of Hayes (by a single electoral vote) in return for the already-promised withdrawal of the 3,000 federal troops remaining in the South (in “unredeemed” Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina) and thus the effective end of Reconstruction.
Note: The South Carolina vote for Hayes was undoubtedly suppressed by the Hamburg and Ellenton incidents. His winning margin of 889 votes is not accepted by legislature until the compromise is agreed to.
Illustration of Uncle Remus.
1876, Uncle Remus of Br’er Rabbit fame first appears in columns written by Joel Chandler Harris for The Atlanta Constitution.
Harris later retells scores of folk stories heard from slaves on the Turnwold Plantation near Eatonton, GA. Harris lived there as a teenager during the Civil War, working as a printer’s devil for the plantation owner who also published The Countryman newspaper.
Harris credits real Uncle George Terrell, “Old Harbert” and “Aunt Crissy” as the original storytellers after Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings is published in 1881. Various of these tales are later found to echo folk stories of Senegal, Gambia and other regions of Africa.
Angry workers protest pay cuts.
1877, Hard times continue for railroads, leading to drastic pay cuts and Great Railroad Strike. It starts at Baltimore & Ohio shops in Martinsburg, WV, July 16, and spreads to Baltimore, Chicago and then to New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads. Thousands of rail workers block movements of hundreds of trains. Governors send militias and Pres. Hayes sends federal troops.
In Baltimore, 10 civilians killed. In Pittsburgh, strikers burn Union Depot and many other buildings, and destroy 104 locomotives; 20 civilians die. St. Louis workers call nation’s first general strike; 18 die there. Troops finally suppress strikes after six weeks.
But it’s a major precursor to widespread labor unrest over the next two decades.
Congo river.
1877, Henry Morton Stanley completes first descent of the Lualabela (beginning at the slave-trading town of Nyangwe), and Congo rivers, arriving at Boma, Aug. 9, near the Congo’s Atlantic mouth. This adds much to the map of Central Africa.
Half the original party of 228 dies of disease or drowning. The expedition is financed by the The New York Herald and The Daily Telegraph of London.
1877, Civil war ignites among various Yoruba peoples, including Ibadan, Ijebu, Egba, Alake and Ekiti. Fighting continues sporadically for next 16 years, weakening the tribes as Britain presses to expand its Lagos colony.
Soldiers attack El Cobre, Oriente.
1878, Cuba’s Ten Years’ War ends with Pact of Zanjón, Feb. 10, after two years’ negotiation between rebels and Spanish Gen. Arsenio Martínez Campos. Provides general amnesty, freedom for enslaved fighters on both sides and final end of slavery by 1888. Many in the rebel movement, including José Martí, continue to work for independence and rise up again in 1895.
Disease wipes out city living.
1878, Yellow fever breaks out in New Orleans, perhaps introduced by families fleeing Cuba at end of Ten Years’ War, and moves up Mississippi. More than 4,500 die in New Orleans, 5,000 in Memphis, and perhaps 20,000 altogether.
1878, Slavery abolished on Cape Verde Islands; plantation workers slide into sharecropping system.
Blacks escape Red Shirt violence.
1879, “Exoduster” movement sees 26,000 blacks, mostly from Louisiana, Mississippi and western Tennessee, migrate to Kansas (Missouri and Illinois are lesser destinations). They are fleeing bitter white enmity, Red Shirt violence, and political and economic suppression.
They travel by steamboat up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Many settle in small cities, particularly Topeka and Kansas City, because little good farmland is available 17 years after the Homestead Act.
Ex-slave Benjamin Singleton is a leader of the movement and battles with Southern senators who oppose it; they fear loss of plantation workers.
1879, Henry Morton Stanley returns to the Congo in service to Belgium’s King Leopold II. Over the next five years, he builds a road around the falls to Stanley Pool, launches steamboats on the upper river and, most importantly, negotiates hundreds of treaties with local chiefs granting “all rights” to their territories to Leopold and his International Congo Society, a privately held corporation.