Measurements that carried long term consequences for the future of the United states passed in may of

1862 the homestead act accelerated the settlement of western territories what it did is it granted any
adult head of a family 160 acres of these western territories and when I say western territories I mean
Iowa Nebraska Minnesota South Dakota so on and so forth and when I say head of a household who am
I talking about of course of course still very very very patriarchal I thought we are still today but in this
period of history very much explicitly so so homestead act enacted in 1862 said that any male head of a
household could approach the government and say hey I'd like start a homestead and the requirement
for that homesteader was that they were required to live on and improve the land which meant planting
crops that's what it proved meant and after five years it would be gifted the property for that land free
and clear what's so five years land becomes theirs and you could also acquire the title to that land after
just six months of residency and really trivial improvements and when I mean when I say trivial trivial
improvements I mean like putting up offense putting up a door putting up a wall really small things so
also after the union after the civil war union soldiers could use their service time to count towards that
five years of residency so if a union soldier have been serving in war for the four years of the civil war
when it was over they could say hey I served for four years I would like a homestead so they'd be given
160 acres and if they lived on it and planted crops it would be there as create clear after one year could
you give me an iPhone versus no also the other states South Dakota Minnesota everywhere in the Great
Plains region everywhere West of the Mississippi but so you get 160 acres of land you can homestead
almost free of charge but what was it it giving these people no there were citizens because these are
white men who are the heads of households what else do you need to have a farm to live on land slaves
not not slaves necessarily because remember this is a union effort yeah so cattle water water being
irrigation cattle like cattle oxen horses things you need to plow a field what else do you need to plow a
field big *** hoe you gotta you gotta if they're dying up here you know big old hoe you bring that home
to the field start carving outlines no you need it you do you need and we'll see in a video later in class
like the literal way that they did it is you attach this to the back of either an ox or a large horse
sometimes even a male cattle as well and or a bull I guess I should say and they just drag it it's just like a
like a big blade that they just drag behind them and it clears out a row and then you plant the seeds and
then you cover it up and then you water it but what else do you need other than that tool the farm hand
what do you need to put in the ground humans sees you gotta find those you gotta buy seeds you gotta
create irrigation you need wood to build dollars house where the hell are you gonna live they're not
giving you that either they're literally so when we think about homesteading in this like expansion
westward we're talking about literally like you went with the clothes on your back whatever you had if
you were gonna try this you are not given anything except the land but you still need the capital that
liquidity to purchase those things for your startup cost because just like today with the business if you're
trying to start a business their startup costs right you know you have to pay for the building that's
monthly rent you gotta pay your employees well with homesteading you need the wood to build a
house in a barn to build fences you need hose you need cattle you need oxygen you need seed you need
literally everything you are starting from scratch so you know individual farmers small farmers small
scale farmers and these wage laborers like you know lower end wage laborers they can't afford to do
this this is completely out of the realm of possibility for them so what happens is that and by the way
this is the first homestead act there is another one that comes in the 20th century but under this first
homestead act 500 million acres are dispersed of that 500 million 420 million acres are acquired by land
speculators large cattle owners mining conglomerates logging companies and railroad industrialists does
that sound like the average American no this is a large scale land grab by capitalist from the north guys
please make sure your cell phones are wet it's gonna be my only warning today I've had a lot of that so
in 1862 we also had the passage of the moral act and moral is spelled MORRILL you don't really need to
know that but people always ask so I'm gonna spell the moral act was Congress trying to incentivize
states to build to establish agricultural and technical colleges so we see also not just congresses desire
to expand westward but also to spread and expand the necessary agricultural and technical knowledge
base to successfully spread agriculture and industry westward so this is sort of a concerted effort the
only problem is that with the homestead act as I just said it is just rife with fraud so this isn't really in any
way trickling down to like your common farmer we also have Congress authorizing the construction of
the first national transcontinental railroad which will be a huge factor in Wednesday's lecture the civil
war also brought huge changes to the financial system before the civil war paper notes were issued by
each individual Bank of each individual state in 1860 there were 10,000 different forms of paper
currency circulating in the United states 10,000 so 10,000 different kinds of currencies so Congress in
1862 passes two pieces of legislation that really change everything the legal tender act of 1862 that
authorized the federal government to enact one singular legal tender for the United states this legal
tender at that time was known as greenbacks today we call it the dollar and then in 1863 Congress
instituted the National Bank act which created the first true national banking system and it makes sense
that these reformations of our financial system would come in the midst of the civil war right because
who was it that was opposing the creation of the Federal Bank it was a lot of times those in the South
who wanted greater state power well a lot of the people who want a greater state power concentrated
in the South they seceded from the union and they have no say in Congress at this time so the
Republicans are just going ahead with the things that they wanted before the war and it makes sense
this is the time for them to get it done by early 1863 the civil war had begun to cause severe hardships
along the southern home front what I mean by southern Homefront is that despite the fact that most of
the fighting in the civil war happened in the South it's happening in specific locations so we have the
fighting in the Borderlands like Virginia where the union is continuously trying to take Richmond we
have the push South Down the Mississippi River we have control of western Tennessee places like
Louisiana but certain parts of the South are pretty insulated from the fighting for a long time places like
rural Georgia places like Alabama eastern Tennessee western South Carolina and then a lot of these
places the the actual like tangible effects of the war in their own lives it took some time for that to set in
at first they hear about you know my brothers died husbands died my cousins died etcetera but then it
starts to become a thing where it's impacting their ability to survive and that's because of the union
blockade remember I talked last time about the Anaconda plan the whole point is to encircle the
confederacy to choke them off at all their different ports using a blockade system they capture New
Orleans which is a huge deal and they also capture control of the Mississippi River they have blockaded
the Chesapeake Bay which is the access for Richmond to the outside world and that and circling of the
confederacy grows tighter and tighter and tighter with each successive victory of the union and as that
block as those victories mouth the blockade becomes more effective and therefore less and less and less
is making its way into the confederate states as the months progress and what happens with the
blockade is that it has a multiplying effect just because less is coming in it doesn't make your needs any
less human beings still need a certain amount of food to survive so as this blockade is continuing to
mount month after month year after year what happens is in places like Richmond they're food riots
additionally the confederacy had rampant inflation and the confederate leaders refused to raise taxes to
pay for anything so it is a direct result of the confederate leadership's decisions that led to the peaks of
this inflation and what what I mean by inflation this is a 9000% increase in the cost of goods over the
course of the civil war this is at a time when people are making like maybe a couple bucks in a given
week the buying power of the dollar was far more back then than it is now but at this time in the civil
war in 1863 a pair of shoes were costing people in the South $125 a coke cost 350 a coke a coat coke
didn't exist a coat a chicken costs $15 in a barrel of flour cost $275 before starving a war clerk in
Richmond declared I have lost 20 pounds and my wife and children are emaciated people are suffering
this is an option of a gold piece the power of gold in a in a time of like hyperinflation like this is insane
because all money at this time was backed by gold so as the confederacy just keeps printing money
without it being backed by more gold all they're doing is decreasing the buying power of the currency
that they're issuing so this auction right here for gold that gold is actually has a stable value so that's
why you see this huge crowd and they're all frantically trying to bid on this goal you can see the guy in
the background sort of crunching his chin in anticipation because gold was worth its weight in gold
seriously though gold was extremely extremely important the confederate dollar meant nothing and
these hardships on the home front filtered their way into the ranks of the soldiers in the confederacy as
well because they weren't isolated from their families they were writing letters on almost weekly basis
back and forth anybody seen Ken Burns documentary that's all it is is him reading people's either diary
entries or letters back to their loved ones and they're hearing from their loved ones like we are on the
brink of starvation we are desperate we need to win this war but the soldiers know on the front that
they're losing the war so we start to see this rapid deterioration of southern morale and contributing to
that rapid deterioration is the imposition in April 1862 of a military draft and it produces a protest
movement in the South whose slogan was quote a rich man's war and a poor man's fight so the law did
indeed make any able bodied man aged 18 to 35 subject to three years of service but since this is the
confederacy they build in a couple loopholes they say is that you can pay somebody to serve for you if
you have the money or the institute what's known as the 20 slave law which exempted any white man
from service who held 20 enslaved people in ******* so only affirming exactly what the protesters
thought this is a war for the slave owning plantocracy of the South and we are the ones dying for in
August 1864 Lincoln expressed his views on whether the civil war would end it permanent emancipation
or in something resembling a more negotiated settlement and his observation that over 130,000 black
men and women were fighting and serving to preserve the union he said that they were noted by
motivated by quote the strongest motive the promise of freedom there have been many proposed to
me to return to slavery these black warriors I would be damned in time and an eternity for doing so the
world shall know that I will keep my faith to my friends and enemies come what will but this sort of
belies the general feeling of Lincoln at the time in 1864 specifically in the summer of 1864 Lincoln was
deeply anxious about the upcoming presidential election you would think Lincoln president over what is
looking to be a successful war effort but what's happening is lincoln's being pressured from within his
own party in separate directions we have the sort of peace faction and this peace faction is both in the
Republican Party and the Democrat party and they're saying we need to bring this war to a close
without any more bloodshed it's just find find a settlement that's happy for everybody we just know
more people need to die we'll get into it but I mean it's not an insane thing to think when like literally in
every single battle like 20,000 people are dying so it is like some people have just they don't have the
appetite for it don't we have another faction we have the radical Republicans and the radical
Republicans are saying that Lincoln is being too conciliatory to the South and the reason they're saying
that is because Lincoln has offered what was known as the 10% plan and what Lincoln said is that any
confederate state that wants to be readmitted to the union simply has to get the approval of 10% of its
registered voters they have to swear their loyalty to the union just 10% guys an hour and 15 minute
class with our cell phones away you need to text somebody leave class and then come back I'm not
gonna say it again if I see another cell phone out and people are typing I'm just gonna mark you absent
I've been dealing with this all day I don't know what's going on with everybody just put this cell phones
away So what happens is that the radical Republicans say hey look I'm done with this we're not going
with lincoln's plan so they turn against him and they actually push through a bill known as the Wade
Davis bill my two names Wade Davis and the Wade Davis bill what it said is that it had very very
stringent and specific requirements for re entry into the union first abolish slavery second promise to do
something about the confederate war dead third disenfranchised the confederate war leaders or I'm
sorry confederate leadership get them out of power entirely and it also required 50% of registered
voters to swear loyalty to the union so way more than Lincoln was saying and So what happens is these
radical Republicans actually nominate John C Fremont for president not Lincoln and on the side what
happens is that Lincoln ends up running on a third party ticket the National Union party the National
Union party is cobbled together from mostly Republicans but also people who aren't affiliated with
parties and also some of the Democrats as well people that see that the war is gonna end by one way or
or another and most people at this point in time are blaming the South for this war you know they
seceded so the National Union party chooses Lincoln but because this is a sort of unity party there are
multiple different political perspectives embodied within this so rather than running Hannibal Hamlin
who was lincoln's first vice president they run a guy named Andrew Johnson Andrew Johnson was
originally a poor farmer from Tennessee who was a Democrat I think he became a republican before
they nominated him as vice president and so they run under the National Union party we'll we'll learn a
lot more about Johnson before the end of class and So what happens is in the election of 1864 we've got
these three forces we've got the radical Republicans nominating John C Fremont we've got the National
Union party running Lincoln and then we've got the Democrats run Andrew McClellan and McClellan is
anti emancipation and it is pretty clear that if he wins the presidency slavery will be reinstituted at some
point and Lincoln is extremely extremely anxious about this election he confessed in the summer of
1864 that quote it seems exceedingly probable that this that my administration will not be reelected so
now i flip us to this quick little 2 minute video on the election of 1864

2 faction

Radical republican peace faction

What is the peace faction 1 end the war sentence possible yeah as soon as possible emphasis on as soon
as possible like they wanted negotiated settlement like tomorrow and the radical Republicans wanted
they want the confederacy back into the union but they don't wanna take it as easy as Lincoln one yeah
yeah they wanna make them pay for it yeah they wanna and I'm getting a little ahead of myself here but
they wanna re reshape the South to make sure that this ship will never happen again we'll get a little bit
more into that with the specific person who's really pushing for that but good OK good we're on the
same page so as he mentioned in the video the capture of Atlanta which at that point in time was a
major southern railroad and manufacturing center in September of 1864 electrified the northern voters
uh Lincoln ran away with the election he received 55% of the popular vote versus just 21% from
McClellan so this is not even close no competition also John Fremont with the radical Republicans were
running he backed out of the race a month before the election so basically everybody coalesced so in
March in the March of that same year of 1864 so we're kind of taking a few steps back in March of 1864
Lincoln had turned over control of the union forces to Ulysses S grant and when grant took control of
the forces he vowed to Lincoln that he would end the war within a year and so to do that he launched
three separate major offenses he has Phillip Sheridan general Sheridan his task is to destroy all the
farmland in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia is all around Richmond
if you guys remember when I was talking about the unions first attempt to take Richmond we have
Robert E Lee in Richmond itself and then he has a Stonewall Jackson doing those lightning rates from the
Shenandoah Valley which is nearby so now the union strategy has shifted and there it's essentially a
scorched earth policy they're gonna destroy all the farmland around Richmond as part of this larger
Anaconda plan to really strangle the confederacy they're taking no prisoner while they're they're literally
taking thousands of prisoners but no holds barred let's put it that way so we have Sheridan is I'm just
gonna say he's ******* **** up in the farmland in the Shenandoah Valley around Richmond then we
have general William Tecumseh Sherman he is starting a March from Chattanooga down to Atlanta and
then Ulysses S grant himself is tasked with chasing down Robert E Lee's army again near Richmond and
the ultimate goal of both the you know scorched earth policy in the Shenandoah Valley and then also
grant chasing down leave is to finally after four or five years to finally capture Richmond because the
union still has not done that after three attempts so grant is pursuing Lee grant starts his pursuit of Lee
with 120,000 troops and that starts in I believe March by early June grants forces have been halved he
has 60,000 troops but in losing those 60,000 troops they also reduced Lees force to 40,000 troops and
the huge difference there is that grant he can lose as many troops as he needs to because they have
black troop regiments they are enlisting new men every single day they are allowing immigrants to enlist
they have and seemingly inexhaustible supply of people to throw in the line of fire and what happens is
that Lee on the confederate side they can't enlist anybody else literally the soldiers that they have
enlisted is all they have so when Lee loses those 20,000 men very quickly you know grant in the press is
called the butcher because 60,000 of his men died 20,000 of Lee's men died that's 80,000 men in the
span of like four months it's insane right so he is painted as the butcher and what happens from there is
that they fight a series of battles Lee and Grant's forces fight a series of battles they fight at the ballot
battle of the wilderness in that battle Lee's army suffers another 11,000 casualties soon thereafter they
it's spotsylvania and spotsylvania Lee loses another 10,000 and then at cold harbor he loses another
12,000 so these army is reduced to almost nothing and they kind of uh sort of back down into the city
center of Richmond and they sort of hunker down there Lee's forces do and there is a 9 month siege of
Richmond so at the same time that this is happening around Richmond we have William Tecumseh
Sherman starting in Chattanooga in marching S essentially along what is today you know I75 going down
through Dalton Calhoun and then they get to cut us off there's the battle for Kennesaw mountain which
you can go out there today they got the battlefields and you can check them out cannon lines you can
see the farm houses end the battle of Kennesaw was a big strategic point because if you are scouting
either Tennessee to the north or Atlanta to the South have you all ever climbed Kennesaw mountain you
can see Chattanooga pretty clear you can see Atlanta clear as day so for scouting their approach on
Atlanta it was everything also they capture Marietta very very quickly Marietta which has rail lines
running through it I know this cause I hear them every ******* day and what happens in that area with
the rail lines is that's where it starts to turn West and so capturing Mary kasai and Marietta in north
Georgia on the March to Atlanta essentially severs that rail line because the importance of Atlanta as a
railroad was not for shipping North and South it was for shipping east and West because Savannah and
Charleston are two of the biggest ports in the world and those rail lines converge in Atlanta and then
they go north and then W to places like Birmingham Montgomery Mississippi I want to the Mississippi
River it is the arterial bane of the southern supply lines going from Charleston and Savannah to the
western territories of the confederacy and so in marching on Atlanta the whole point is to sever that
and also Atlanta had already started to emerge as a manufacturing hub so there are multiple different
strategic necessities to taking Atlanta and so they capture Atlanta on September 2nd 1864 have
Sherman tells his men as they're marching into Atlanta destroy the railroad lines remove all the houses
and burn every factory to the ground this work and then park was for State Park was burnt down
everything in Atlanta was burnt down everything you said burn the houses for the factories everything
in Atlanta was burnt to the ground the entire cityscape as we know it today was completely different
back then the only thing that's the same are the railways so but that's that was the purpose of
sherman's campaign he summed it up himself quote if we here we cannot change the hearts of those
people but we can make more so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass before
they would ever appeal to it again so the terror is the point that destruction is the point it's not
dissimilar from the strategy of the US army in World War Two when they fire bomb Dresden they
wanted to make it so devastating that they would never try to go to war again and so Atlanta is
destroyed and sherman's forces continued their March they'd say milledgeville and they continue South
to Savannah and Savannah at this point had basically already been taken by the union that blockade had
completely cut it off from the outside world so Savannah had already de facto been taken and at a very
quick order what we see is sherman's forces continue marching north they take Charleston Columbia
then they marched through North Carolina and on through Virginia and they've just lay waste to all the
plantations in their path and in doing so they also are freeing enslaved populations we'll circle back to
that in just a minute so on at noon on April 14th 1865 so Friday it was actually Good Friday Major
General Robert Anderson raised the US flag over Fort Sumter does anybody remember that name
Robert Anderson he was the commander in charge of the union troops at Fort Sumter when the
confederacy started the civil war so this is Robert Anderson returning to Fort Sumter the flag he raises
over Fort Sumter is the very flag that was flying when the confederacy fired that first shot so this is a
very symbolic moment for the union sort of tying the bow on the narrative knot So what we have is sort
of this symbolic step towards the conclusion of the civil war that same evening a few minutes after
10:00 o'clock a young actor entered the presidential box at Ford's theater in Washington DC and shot
Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head as John Wilkes Booth was attempting to flee he jumped off the
balcony he had spurs on his boots spur caught in a flag he fell to the ground broke his leg as he was
fleeing well hobbling on one broken leg he screamed out supposedly 6 separate tyrannis which means
thus always to tyrants which was the state motto of of Virginia at the same time booths accomplice
Lewis Payne was attempting to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and what Payne did as he
attacked Seward in his own home with a knife well by sheer luck couple weeks before Seward had
suffered a neck injury he was wearing a very rudimentary early version of a neck brace and then the
construction of the neck brace was metal so when Louis Payne tried to cut the throat of Seward the
metal neck brace saved his life that's the only reason he wasn't assassinated at that same night he
suffered some very deep wounds but he recovered and that wasn't it it wasn't just them there's
evidence that it was a wider conspiracy said that they wanted supposedly there's a information that
they wanted to assassinate Andrew Johnson the vice president they also wanted to assassinate Ulysses S
grant amongst others and So what this did at this moment where we have this sort of symbolic on this
very same day the symbolic sort of gesture that the war is coming to an end you know Lincoln is about
to usher in this new era this post civil war era he has killed dies he was pronounced dead at 7:22 AM on
April 15th and his secretary of war Edwin Stanton stepped outside and announced to the crowd he
belongs to the ages now John Wilkes Booth fled it took many days to corner him in a barn multiple state
lines away when they did they set fire to the barn that he was hiding out in and when the fire dissipated
they found booth dead and he had killed himself by gunshot 8 individuals were eventually captured for
this conspiracy and four of them were hanged of the remaining 4 one died in prison in 1867 and the
other three were pardoned by the president in 1869 wow so now we're gonna watch a 3 minute videos
about 3 minutes and 20 seconds we're gonna get back to Sherman now we're gonna talk about
sherman's special field order #15 you guys ever heard of the phrase 40 acres in a mule yeah we're gonna
talk about that and then we're gonna do a deep dive on andrew johnson find out what he's all about and
that video so we're gonna do 3 minute and 22nd video and then 6 minute video. April 2nd 1865 officials
in the confederate government including the confederate president Jefferson Davis fled week later the
confederacy formally surrendered at the appomattox courthouse one thing that I want to sort of
emphasize from the video what I like is that it really fleshes out like what was so radical about the
radical Republicans was there anything super radical about the radical Republicans what was what was
the radical thing that they were doing anybody want to get stabbed so you really wanted to keep the
Emancipation Proclamation they really wanted to keep the man to piece of proclamation more than that
though what else yeah they wanted to extend the same rights and suffrage to African Americans yeah
the extreme radical position that they took is that they wanted to extend equal rights to free people
they wanted to extend the right to vote to free people freed men of course not women go patriarchal
and what happens is that you know Johnson is not at all aligned with that so Johnson is doing everything
in his power to undermine this radical republican win because he is far more aligned with the peace
faction I talked about before that they wanna just bring it into the war they want they don't wanna
change southern society because in Johnson's desire to remove the like wealthy planters well he's not
reshaping the way that the economy works he's not changing the very sort of racialized class structure in
the cell no he just wants to do away with the people that put those light ginger Johnson himself in the
way of in the line of fire yeah so overall he really didn't like care for like slavery no use like a real *****
** **** now Andrew Johnson undermined everything that Lincoln wanted to do I'm not saying that he
wasn't going to abolish slavery when the civil war was ended because by that point it had almost
everywhere and I have a little bit more to say about that had been had been abolished through the
efforts of individuals like he didn't want it to end the war he wanted that the war yeah he didn't want
any more people to die yeah but he did not care about the rights or the lives of black people at all yeah
lincoln's vice president Yep so how can you vice president I mean it's not too different from political
strategies that we see nowadays right I mean why didn't why didn't I mean to be real why did Obama
choose Biden as his vice president strategy yeah strategy exactly it's political strategy I'm not saying it's
right or wrong or it's you know good or bad it's just a strategy when you know you have someone that is
representing like Lincoln this sort of what many voters consider to be this radical idea well if it's a
National Union party then the whole idea is to maintain the union well you gotta water that down a little
bit with this super racist ***** ** **** from Tennessee who doesn't wanna do anything that we can
wants to do yeah exactly Yep to to appeal to voters that aren't really interested in linking himself yeah
there's no evidence that he ever had anything to do with the assassination no not not as far as I'm aware
I know you really benefited from it yeah so that he died just before the civil war ended or is that Lincoln
Lincoln yeah Lincoln died on that day when they raised the flag at Fort Sumter so the war itself hadn't
completely ended but symbolically it had yeah anyone else no OK so really you know we've got we're
now in 1865 Lee eventually surrenders to Ulysses S grant and we start to see all the different
confederate generals surrender so the war is drawing to a close but we still have the issue of
emancipation so January 1st 1863 Lincoln and apps the Emancipation Proclamation any enslaved person
in the confederacy is thereby free so why is it then in 1865 and that not everybody's free they were
states in the evening well not just slave states in the union but just because Lincoln cent so do you think
they felt compelled to free their enslaved populations no absolutely not no what happened is in many
instances black soldiers took it upon themselves to go through the South you go to individual plantations
throughout the force of the butter begun to free enslaved people from these plantations not too
dissimilar from what the Soviet forces in the US forces had to do at the end of World War Two in
liberating concentration camps they had to go through and liberate individual plantations and they had
to do it all the way across the South and then in June of 1865 a union force of 2000 troops entered
Galveston Bay in Texas and declared all of the remaining 250,000 enslaved people in the western
portion of the state of Texas were freed by executive authority and that day became known as
Juneteenth this is a photograph taken from an emancipation day celebration in Richmond VA which is
obviously extremely symbolic given the fact that it was the capital of the confederacy for the most for
the large portion of the civil war and by early 1866 so we're saying less than a year later congressional
Republicans had to start taking action because they started getting word of the institution of black codes
throughout the South and mass killings of formerly enslaved people the black codes pictured here in a
Harpers weekly from 1874 were things that restricted black people's rights to own property conduct
business finally sland and to move freely through public spaces and a central element of the black codes
for vagrancy laws turning homelessness into a criminal offense where else did that happen that we've
studied this semester yeah England and London with the enclosure movement when they start to
institute vagrancy laws they jail people and those people are offered indenture contracts right short
term labor contracts but really it amounts to slavery well what's happening in the South is people are
being thrown into jail they're not allowed to own property so they are forced into accepting
employment contracts that are what we know now as sharecropping which is essentially paying a white
male landowner to plant crops on his land so you are paying rent to do all of the work and then you also
don't have access to the marketplace so in every possible way that they could restrict the ability of black
people in the South to make any kind of ******* living on their own they did so they they wanted to
make life miserable that's why when you talk about the black codes you also have to talk about those
who enforce the black codes who's that on the right Ku Klux Klan rises to prominence in this era on the
left we have the white league and it's just ever so interesting that it just so happens that the KKK always
seems to be made-up of so many police officers and so many politicians in the South because what it
was was a way to enact a program of racial segregation pseudo apartheid we're talking about a full
separation of society based on race and so Congress Republicans in Congress hear about this and they're
infuriated what they do is they act immediately they deny congressional seats to representatives from
southern states they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 they write the 14th amendment into the
constitution 14th amendment extends citizenship citizenship to all black Americans guaranteeing them
equal protection under the law also it was intended to if any state was not equally protecting all people
under the law that it would reduce their congressional representation and in 1870 the country at large
went even further by ratifying the 15th amendment which extended which enshrined in the constitution
the right to vote for black men which it was enshrining something that was actually put into effect in
1867 the reconstruction act of 1867 actually first gave black men the right to vote the problem though is
that to enforce these things oh sorry wrong way to be able to vote at a polling station in 1868
presidential election of 1868 U.S. Federal troops had to be stationed at every single polling station to
protect black men while they tried to vote because white mobs and militias the KKK the white league
were organizing to forcibly deny them the ability to vote and so we have Johnson who when he entered
office he had been empowered with the ability that if any southern office folder any southern state if
they go against the sort of letter of the law of reconstruction that they can deny them seats in Congress
and Johnson had this power do you think he enforced it no if he refused to he also forbade the army
from doing things like this for protecting people at polling stations and he and people in Congress were
saying that the president was systematically trying to Fort the will of Congress and of the nation at large
and So what happened is that Congress starts to turn against Johnson hard and what they do is they
start passing laws to prevent him from stopping reconstruction they start restricting his presidential
powers he can't appoint Supreme Court justices they reduced his authority over the army we're not
there yet and the tenure of office act barred him from removing anybody from his cabinet without
congressional approval that talking about secretary or Secretary of State secretary of treasury he can't
remove any of them from office unless Congress says so so in August of 1867 Johnson decides to remove
his secretary of war from office and the Republicans in Congress respond by impeaching his acts so
Johnson is impeached on the sort of the eve of the 1868 presidential election and what Congress does is
it enforces military reconstruction military reconstruction is then essentially saying once they limit the
president's power over the army they say we are instituting this this military reconstruction plan where
each sort of grouping of states is under the direction of a different military general so we see Sheridan
over in Texas and Louisiana sickles is in North Carolina and South Carolina and so forth and what they're
doing is enforcing things like the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment but this only lasts a short
period of time and this is sort of this brief window in which there are these really radically progressive
opportunities that are just not seized we have the ability to take all of that southeastern Georgian and
Florida floridian plantation or coastal territory which used to be plantations and giving it to the people
who have been enslaved on those plantations but of course Johnson doesn't want to do that because
he's racist and all throughout the S Johnson could have very easily enforced any kind of law that would
have prevented southern legislatures from passing things like the black code but Johnson refused So
what this does is it sets the stage for the rest of the 19th century so we are essentially right now where
we're at we're this lecture is at is 1870 and unit 8 as you should know if you've taken a look by now is
1870 to 1910 so there is a ton of material covered in your unit this week if you haven't started yet I
recommend getting started but so what i'm going to be lecturing on on wednesday is going to be sort of
this sets the stage really well so after the war what we're talking about is we're gonna talk about farmers
alliances that is what black farmers racist farmers now we're gonna get into things like the
transcontinental railroad which brings in immigration specifically from China to the West Coast the
Chinese exclusion act we're gonna talk about industrialization we're gonna talk about the Spanish
American war we're gonna talk about so many different things on Wednesday so come prepared to be a
lot get started on your units and i will see
Power these you need water so they spring up in the northeast pretty quickly because what is there a lot
of in the northeast not lakes rivers moving water specifically yeah creeks streams rivers canals that sort
of stuff so it makes sense why there's so much industry in the northeast because that is necessary at the
very beginning and then what happens is the concentration of industry in that area and that area also
necessitates new methods of transportation so we have the development of a fairy in the Hudson River
valley or I'm sorry in the Hudson River and then we also have the pioneering of railroad technologies in
the northeast because you gotta transport raw materials and you also have to transport those finished
goods you also need to transport people and so the technological innovation that would come to mark
the United states in the 19th century really began with like I said that that commuter service on the
Hudson River we've got the invention of the Telegraph by Samuel Morse this is actually the first
Telegraph ever transmitted it says this sentence was written from Washington by me at the Baltimore
terminus at the eighth hour and 45th minute of the morning on Friday May 24th 1844 and we also have
the invention of the sewing machine so all of these things and this this sewing machine is powered with
that pedal so we have all of these things that are making both the production of goods quicker and also
the transportation of goods and ideas much quicker as well following the civil war the industrialization
of the United states increased at a breakneck pace this. Which encompasses most of the second-half of
the 19th century I'm going to refer to as the American industrial revolution and over the first half of the
19th century we see an expansion of the United states what do I mean by that what I mean by an
expansion of the United states can anybody answer that territory yeah so the literal borders are
expanding tell me how are we acquiring these new territories tell me specifically Cortana what
purchases white Louisiana Louisiana purchase great this is the first class but that was the first answer
what else how else did we acquire territory Spanish Mexican American war we acquire what states
Texas yeah the new Mexican territory which is New Mexico Arizona and then parts of Utah and Colorado
and then California so literally like the the country is expanding like from coast to coast so this is a ton of
new territory these are a ton of new natural landscapes and with these new natural landscapes come
new natural yes those natural resources need to be transported to what centers manufacturer
manufacturing centers industrial centers in the northeast so this is really what's spurring the building of
the first inner interconnect us sorry from railroad and century we also have a vast expansion in human
resources 14 million immigrants come to the United states during this. So we have a huge supply of
workers for these industries to draw from and the American industrialist overseeing this expansion
because remember when we talked about the homestead act on Monday who is acquiring the vast
amount of this territory in places like Nebraska and Iowa yeah railroad companies are one of the the
group's named we also talked about loggers cattle drivers land speculators not individual farmers so
American industrialists are really the ones driving this expansion westward and we see two very
important industrialists in this. That I wanted to discuss there are two methods they apply so first let's
talk about Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie established the first steel mills in the US to use a a
production process known as the Bessemer process Bessemer the Bessemer process allows you to very
quickly mass produce very high quality steel and what happens is Carnegie very quickly dominates the
steel industry in America but that's not enough he also pioneers a business business practice a process
known as vertical integration vertical integration refers to when a company spies or acquires every part
of the process from extraction of the natural resources to sail So what do I mean by that when I'm
talking about steel and by the way his company was US steel So what Carnegie did is he acquired
interest in the mines where they were taking out that iron ore he acquired the mills and the ovens that
shaped and created the final product and he also bought the railroads and shipping lines that
transported the goods to sail he controlled every single part of the steel making process that's vertical
integration from the ground to the sail you're pulling it out of the earth you control every single step to
sale so in that construct who was it that Carnegie is painting here for overhead close maybe the workers
the workers that's it so when Carnegie wants to make more of a profit after he's vertically integrated
what does he have to do no pay the workers less turn the screws on the workers because the less you
pay workers the more that money you keep that's always the solution guys and now we have the other
example John D Rockefeller he had company Standard Oil and he employed a process known as
horizontal integration horizontal integration should look and sound somewhat familiar if you've been
following the news this week it is where someone in an industry in this case Standard Oil they buy out all
of the competition require such a large share of the market that new competitors can't enter it they
controlled that industry. Does anybody know what current event I'm talking about anybody even
following what Kroger has been doing the new stresses me out they just they just acquired Albertsons
and now control a huge percentage of the grocery industry in the United states I've been wondering
about that all week how was that not considered a monopoly who's saying it's not considered a
monopoly well I thought monopolies were against the federal law you have to bring up an antitrust case
you have to try them in court the government has to come to a decision on whether or not you meet
the definition of what a monopoly is before any action is taken Yep so Rockefeller he came to
monopolize 90% of the industry it's not 100% but 90% means that you set the price you set the price for
yourself and what you can do is set the price so low your sale price for your good so low that it forces all
the rest of the competition out because people will just come to you because you have the lowest prices
because you sell in bulk so these smaller producers they can't take that loss so they have to leave the
market so even though standard oil didn't actually acquire 100% of the industry their influence in
controlling 90% of it was this competitors and run them as though they are an independent entity while
all the while they are actually just being run as a shell corporation therefore Walmart does to do
sometimes yeah Walmart does a whole lot of stuff or what through monopolies W are they owned by
yeah but they're not monopolies because they have competitors like Johnson and Johnson there's
GlaxoSmithKline but they're both they're competitors really owned by the same people not necessarily
GlaxoSmithKline is not owned by the same people as Johnson and Johnson yeah can you name an
example of welcome to Microsoft order kroger's verging on a monopoly Walmart I I wouldn't say
Walmart is because there's target and there's also oh have you have you ever saw your household
you're not going to Publix to buy your fruit and your produce and Publix has a great big publicity
everywhere Publix go back let's bring it back OK so let me answer the question kroger's or you know
another example of a monopoly we could talk about Amazon yeah Amazon literally controls all web
hosting try to start up trying to start a website and find out who you have to go through for your web
hosting it's Amazon and people have been saying this for a while but what happens is all these laws and
regulations get bent to the whim of these really powerful corporations and billionaires like Jeff Bezos
and Elon Musk and all these people that have this outsized influence over the economy and thereby the
government and policy and regulation so we do have functioning monopolies today but they are not
called such in the media or by our politicians because it's loaded with a certain amount of meaning and
Amazon has billions if not trillions of dollars to work with and can fight that legislation to death so if
you're going to have a serious antitrust case it has to be airtight completely airtight and there's
arguments that you can throw like you just did Kroger well there's Publix Amazon Oh well there's eBay
but there's always another argument but when you control enough of that market of that industry you
are functioning as a de facto monopoly even if you don't actually control 100% of it you have enough
influence that you set pricing and you influence supply doesn't it also have to do with shutting down the
local market like so for example the reason I thought about Walmart was because Walmart has shut
down a lot of modern pots and a lot of rural communities they forced people out of business but I mean
there's still Dollar General still operating in those areas food lions still operate in those areas piggly
windy still operate in those areas so there's still competition so they can still make the argument that
we're not a full monopoly yeah yeah so doesn't it kind of come back to the fact that you know there's
not a lot of laws around the executive pay like there's like no laws around executive that yeah yeah so
like when you're saying like oh you know people get money put in their pockets it's because that
company doesn't have any laws about Citizens United you can just form some ******** C pack and say
hey this is for special interest group it's a bunch of divorced dads who want lower taxes or whatever you
wanna make up and you could just say that when really all the money's coming from like whatever
interest you wanna fill in the blank with I don't wanna get specific but yeah absolutely 100% there's
ways in which always that you can you can circumvent these pieces of legislation they're built into them
look at the homestead act which we talked about on Monday right the homestead act was purposefully
written ambiguously to allow larger corporations to acquire that land that was the point outwardly they
didn't say was the point and it's abused that weight to the tune of 420 million acres and the legislators
that wrote it will say well we didn't need to do that but that's what happens that's the effect that it has
OK I've had enough time on this let me keep going we got a lot of material OK so we also at this time
have actual inventions real innovation from some more than others with Alexander Graham bell Thomas
Edison so Edison wasn't so much an inventor let's just get that out of the way he loved to acquire all of
these different sort of working theories or unpatented inventions and then put his own twist on them to
take to market so that's what he did here with the light bulb light bulb technology had already been
invented it was the thing there was already patent for it but you see all these individual things that is
patenting and thereby patenting all these little tiny pieces of this light bulb he can then take it to market
as a new invention whereas when we're talking about Alexander Graham bell he actually did invent the
telephone so we have the light bulb the telephone moving pictures this is a revolution in the way that
people interact with one another it is hard to understate how much is changing in this. You're going
from just 10 years prior where to communicate with a loved one in California from let's say Georgia
would take you months months at least there's no railroad snail mail is like literal snail mail like it's taken
forever and then to get word back like good luck it's Telegraph right no Telegraph is invented in 1844
but the Telegraph is not widely available you have to go to a post office to use their telegram send that
then the person has to go to their post office to receive it so it's a convoluted process whereas the
telephone is available widely very very quickly it's very cheap to produce too and those telephone lines
they travel along with the transcontinental river lines and so for millions of working Americans this
industrial revolution changed the nature of not just their daily work but their daily lives before all of this
change they might have worked for themselves at home in a small shop outdoors working on raw
products turning them into finished goods to sell or growing a crop from seed to table but as the entire
country starts to shift towards industry we see people taking jobs in the cities that's where they see
opportunity and when they work factory jobs you're working for a large company with tons of
employees and you are one small step in a long and arduous production process so you're not seeing
some task from start from beginning to completion you're not seeing the the product of your labor
you're alienated from that production you only know that one tiny part of it so you don't really have any
pride in that there's no connection to the actual thing you're producing so it's a very it's a very alienating
shift for people and we also see because of this very uh we see very very dangerous working conditions
very unsanitary working conditions there are no labor protections at all at all whatever you sign up for
that's it women start entering the workforce in greater numbers as do children child labor becomes a
major issue those dangerous working conditions those long hours imagine a child doing the same thing
as an adult and do you think they're paying the child as much as the adult no but they're in no less
danger so workers begin to organize around this child labor kind of galvanizes it we start to see union
movements we start to see labor uprisings like this one here the great railroad this is in Morgantown
WV what this was is the railroad industry decided that they were gonna cut wages at a time when they
were raking in profits hand over fist they are writing the laws they are taking the land they are building
the railways just printing money and at this time they decide we're gonna cut wages why because it's
vertically vertically integrated so if you want to increase your profit margins you need to cut wages
that's how it works So what happened in this case with the great Ronald strike of 1877 is workers began
to protest this wage cut and it starts to spread spreads to three additional states last 45 days until the
militia consisting of vigilantes national guardsmen and federal troops violently and this strike movement
in all three states sorry all four states but we start to see similar episodes of Labor uprising for the rest
of the century and into the 20th century new jobs at this time within the United states specifically within
the economy or really growing exponentially but those jobs are located in the cities so we see the
country itself transforming from a rural country or people are sort of living out on individual plots of
land sort of unto themselves as transforming into a rapidly urbanizing country with millions heading to
city centers where industry is and it's not just young people from farming families who see this
opportunity and leave the farm and head to the cities there's also millions of European immigrants at
this time and providing housing for all of these new residents of these cities was impossible there wasn't
near enough housing and really there was no money to build it unless these industrialists wanted the
fork over some money to support their employees they're not gonna do that So what happens is that
conditions deteriorate rapidly we have people living in open air urban slums open sewers right next to
where they're living all the water supply is tainted and it's because of these conditions that we see the
rise of what is known as the progressive movement in the early 20th century we'll circle back to that
next week but let's continue sort of breaking down how the country is changing so at the beginning of
the 19th century a majority of the population is engaged in agriculture whether they're invested in it
they own plantation they own land etcetera by the end of the 19th century just a third of America is
engaged in agriculture today it's about 4% after the civil war there were ways of drought plagues of
grasshoppers bollweevils we have rising costs falling prices and high interest rates which make it
extremely difficult to live as a farmer and in the South 1/3 of all land holdings so that's all the privately
held land is worked by tenant farmers not by the landholder themselves approximately 75% of black
farmers and 25% of white farmers were working land that they did not own we're talking about
sharecropping and every year the prices at the farmers are receiving for their crop harvests or
decreasing corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to just $0.30 in 1897 farmers made less money
planning 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did by planting 9,000,000 acres of cotton in 1873
when 20 years the value of cotton had more than half they also were facing high interest rates we're
talking about upwards of 10% a year and farmers are finding this impossible to pay back because what's
happening is each harvest because the value of what they're producing is decreasing overtime they then
can't afford the next year's harvest so they have to take out a loan but they can't afford the machinery
for the next year's harvest so they take out that loan and they're really taken by the balls with these
loans because they need the money they need the materials they need the fertilizer the seed whatever
new technology they're implementing but they plant that harvest they sell those crops and guess what
they get less money than they did the year before and then guess what they can't afford to pay off the
loans and they also can't afford to plant the harvest for next year you see how people fall further and
further and further into debt by no fault of their own so while all of this is happening we also see the
reason for these prices continuing to drop have to do with the fact that in the 1870s alone just within
the United states 190 million new acres were put into cultivation it's a ton of supply also transportation
is taking technological leaps forward so we're talking about things like steamships which make that trip
across the ocean way faster so not only is the cotton being produced in the United states facing
competition from within they're also facing competition from outside the country from places like Egypt
and Australia were these agricultural technological innovations are also being implemented it's not just
in the United states it's all over the world and so all of this competition means what for the sale price of
things like cotton goes down so the first major rule protest movement was the patrons of husbandry
probably the worst name I've ever heard hatreds of husbandry which was founded in 1867 and had 1.5
million members by 1875 this is also known as the Granger movement and these were embattled
farmers who came together and formed buying and selling cooperatives and they demanded state
regulation of rail lines because they were charging exorbitant fees and also grain elevator fees do you
guys know what a a grain silo is it's like that big cylindrical thing kind of looks like a penis yes on a farm
Yep so you someone owns that and to store your grain in there you have to pay a fee and they were
being gauged left and right both by the railroads and by these grain elevator operators what was the
name of the movement the Granger Granger so this movement while not explicitly racist was de facto
racist there wasn't there were no black members as you can see here they say I feed you all some
conspicuous absences right anybody not white so early in the 1870s we see the growth of these kinds of
organizations we also seen farmers alliances we have the National Farmers alliance and industrial union
the southern farmers alliance which is formed in Texas in 1875 and the southern farmers alliance did
become explicitly racist after pressure was applied by white supremacists in the South they made the
decision to cut out all black membership and they advanced as a white farmers alliance essentially and
these alliances what they did they formed these buying and selling collectives and what they wanted to
do was they wanted to compete with these industrialists they thought by coming together they're
collective sort of economic power would allow them to counterbalance these industrialists who are kind
of dictating everything by the late 1880s they realized that it didn't matter how much cooperation they
had between one another it was never gonna work because the game is fixed the tax code is rigged
there is rampant corruption in favor of these industrialists and So what these farmers alliances realize is
that hey we need to start applying political pressure the short little minute clip it the picture itself
freezes halfway through so Texas in the late 1870s and that really spreads across the South in the 1880s
so one of the things that the alliance has to do is build on a tradition of cooperative undertakings to
enable farmers to collect their crops to hold crops back until the market improves and to buy in bulk so
that they can invite lower interest rates and lower prices what they discover is that because rural areas
are feeling the strains of the post civil war agricultural economy they don't have the capital to do this
effectively that's kind of the movement populism as it becomes clear that the farms reliance on the state
and local basis doesn't have the means in order to accomplish the ends that it needs and they also
discovered that running farmers alliance candidates and state legislatures even if the Congress doesn't
get him anywhere so they and some of them begin to feel political party to represent the so these
farmers alliances enter politics by about 1890 and in 1892 they form the People's Party also known as
the populist party uh among other things with the populace wanted to do was to create a commodity
credit system and that would allow farmers to store their grain in federal warehouses and they could
store them there until the market price became more favorable and at which point they would sell but
while it was being held in that warehouse they could borrow against the value of it based on those
current prices so that will allow them to continue producing these harvests it the populist platform also
saw a graduated tax income tax public ownership of utilities like water voter initiatives and referendums
and they also are fighting for an 8 hour work day but on the flip side they're also they're also opposing
immigration because the populist platform is working for the interests of American laborers so we will
see how xenophobia this sort of fear of the other comes into play but in the presidential election of
1892 the populist running candidate James Weaver and he receives more than a million votes which is
about 8.5% of the total popular vote he wins 22 electoral votes and the populist party overall Alex tend
to the House of Representatives 5 senators for governors and 345 state legislators so they're trying to
sort of flex their political night because just because this sort of collectivization of buying and selling
power just because that doesn't work it doesn't mean that their collectivization of sort of voting power
won't their influence over the electorate and now i'm gonna flip to about a one minute and 45 second
video on another kind of farmer align farmers alliance to them and they chose racism so 2019 marked
the 150th anniversary of the building of the transcontinental railroad as the West Coast of the United
states is becoming more and more populated of course aided by the gold rush in California the really
vast geographic distance between population areas became a huge barrier to the movement and not
just people but also information and the idea of uniting the country with the railroad was obviously born
in the middle of the 19th century and put into effect by Congress in the middle of the civil war and when
this decision was made there were two companies put in charge of building the transcontinental
railroad we have the Union Pacific Railroad which starts in Omaha NE it's that blue line there and heads
West and then we have the central Pacific railroad which starts in Sacramento CA and heads E and very
very early on the idea of hiring Chinese migrant labor was kicked around because all of this is happening
amidst the civil war so there's a depressed supply of Labor because what are the what is the American
workforce doing at this time yeah kill each other fighting a war So what happens is that they start to
turn towards Chinese immigration as a solution and really Chinese immigration to the West Coast had
begun in the early 1850s so before the transcontinental railroad became an idea we already had influxes
of Chinese immigration and that had a lot to do with the availability of agricultural jobs factory jobs but
also warfare and I'm not talking only the civil war there is some internal conflict in China and then recent
research has actually revealed that most of the Chinese railroad workers that came over to the United
states to build the railroad for young single men who actually came from a very specific part of China the
Pearl River delta in chinas quandong province which is today Hong Kong and it was at this time that
Britain was engaged in the opium wars against China specifically and Hong Kong and what was going on
is Britain was trying to force supplies of opium into China to create dependence to create a market for
them to flood with opium because they had acquired territories like Afghanistan in the Middle East
where they produce poppy AK opium and so because of this we have all this conflict going on in China
we see young able bodied men fleeing because they don't wanna be put in the front lines makes a lot of
sense they're drawn by the gold mines that gold rush in California and almost immediately when the
central Pacific starts kicking around the idea of hiring Chinese laborers we see extremely xenophobic
racially driven protests from both the white workers and the foreman and because of Chinese migration
as a result of wars in China imperial wars etcetera over the course of the 19th century 2.5 million
Chinese people leave China and go to places like the West Coast of the United states so the central
Pacific rower that red line there was tasked with constructing that western half and they began hiring
Chinese workers in 1864 so we're talking about in the midst of the civil war they were nervous that if
they didn't continue building uninterrupted that the project would be aborted and it would never reach
completion the Chinese laborers actually at the height of the building of the transcontinental railroad
made-up 90% of the workforce for the central Pacific line and recent research has also shown that
contrary to what people believed at that time and up until very very recently these Chinese workers
were not only literate there were also very well organized in 1867 about 3000 Chinese laborers went on
strike and they were protesting for higher wages because white workers were getting paid almost more
than double what they were getting paid for the same jobs not just the same jobs the Chinese were
actually subjected to much more dangerous conditions they were the ones that were tasked with
blowing holes in the side of the Sierra Nevada mountains using pickaxes very unstable dynamite and
black powder and explosives sort of gunpowder like substance so the railroad would go through yeah
not for fun yeah yeah yeah yeah they're pretty cool though so shifting back to serious estimates are
between 1000 and 2000 Chinese laborers died doing this work at the same time the Chinese American
population is expanding very very quickly at the peak of the building of the transcontinental railroad
there were between 10 and 15,000 Chinese American workers employed so we're talking about large
population of Chinese migrants in and around what is today San Francisco OK now i've got this beginning
in California and then more nationally what we see is that Chinese are being targeted by legislation in
California we see laws being passed that forced the Chinese to have specific business licenses we also
see them targeting Chinatown as a place of ill repute So what we see is American objections took many
forms we see you know this economic and cultural resentments but it's really misplaced because it's not
the Chinese aren't taking their job the Chinese are coming and taking any job they can possibly find
because the Chinese young men that are coming over to work are sending most of their money back
home trying to pay off their transportation to the United states in the first place so they are stuck in
another never ending cycle of debt and what happens is that this industrialists are hiring Chinese labor
because they can pay them less because they have no rights so non Chinese labor white labor costs
more because these are white families these are community members local people but with the Chinese
immigrants with these laborers when they come over they create their own communities we're talking
about chinatowns and he's trying to tell her where you see the cultural expression of Chinese traditions
and beliefs and practices holidays gatherings religious observances special events there's also gambling
and drinking there's opium dens anything that you would associate with a big city there's that just within
these chinatowns but advocates of these of anti Chinese legislation in places like California argue that
admitting Chinese people into the United states quote lowers the cultural and moral standards of
American Society they also use the more overtly racist argument for limiting immigration from China
saying that they were concerned about the integrity of the American racial composition no different
than today with people talking about this ******** about replacement white men just scared because
they're no longer the majority the majority and so to address the concerns these these social concerns
being expressed by xenophobic white laborers like I said California passes a series of measures requires
a Chinese person to hold a special business license and it prevents the Chinese from being naturalized as
citizens but in 1868 the federal government had signed a treaty with China so from 1868 until the end of
the 1870s a lot of these xenophobic anti Chinese laws that are being instituted in California are being
nullified by federal law and they're saying no you can't enforce this this is violating our treaty but
priorities change and as the railroads are completed the need for these laborers becomes less and less
so in 1882 Congress passes what's known as the Chinese exclusion act the Chinese exclusion act
suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for a span of 10 years that doesn't matter if they're
skilled or unskilled whatever the act required every Chinese person traveling in or out of the country to
carry a certificate which identified them as a laborer a scholar a diplomat or a merchant this is the first
act in American history as they said in the video to place broader restrictions on immigration itself and
like I said up until the Chinese exclusion act we see presidents and Congress people saying hey we're not
going to violate this treaty that we have with the Chinese but eventually those quote UN quote domestic
concerns that white working class their concerns trump those international concerns but 1888 Congress
takes the Chinese exclusion act one step further they passed the Scott act and that made reentry into TV
to the United states after just a visit to China impossible so you could not come back if you were a
Chinese person who had been living in the United states let's say for a decade if you went back to visit
your family in China they would not let you back in and the Chinese government considered this a direct
insult and they tried to organize a boycott of American goods but it ultimately failed after a few years
and then in 1892 Congress voted to renew the Chinese exclusion act for another 10 years and then in
1902 they expanded the Chinese exclusion act to include Hawaiian people and Filipino people the
Chinese exclusion act was not repealed until 1943 so this lasted well into the 20th century yeah like its
own independent it had not been colonized by the United states yet OK but it it would be soon yeah so
why are they doing this for what well they want to exclude them they they want to prevent them from
doing anything except for doing the bidding of the white landowner so far like because they can't sleep
yeah I mean because now slavery has been abolished so they have to find a new way to exploit labor
right that's what they're doing yeah that's I mean I understand what you're saying and that's exactly
what they're doing yeah absolutely and so the last thing that i have here is about a 9 minute video that
goes over the chinese exclusion act first decade of the 1900