When General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General U. S. Grant on April 9, 1865, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, he was taken aback by the sight of Lieutenant Colonel Ely Parker, an engineer on Grant’s staff. Then Lee realized that Parker was an Indigenous American, a member of the Seneca Nation. “I am glad to see one real American here,” Lee allegedly said. Parker responded: “We are all Americans.”[1]
Parker’s reply, even if—maybe especially if—it was apocryphal, captured an important truth. Many Americans thought the bloodshed of the battlefields had paid for the blood drawn by the lash, freeing the nation to realize its full potential. For a few years it seemed they might be right: the nation might protect civil rights in the states and make sure people had access to the vote to guarantee that laws reflected the will of the majority.
Although elite white men fell back into believing that they alone should have power, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments had created the possibility that the United States could become a multicultural and even perhaps multigendered democracy. For the next several generations, those excluded from an equal seat at the table would redefine what it meant to be an American, keeping a dream of human equality alive.
The Fourteenth Amendment had expanded citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time. While it left the states to determine who could vote, that insertion suggested that members of Congress were not inclined to end the nation’s patriarchal system.
Women had just backed the U.S. government with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending their sons and husbands and fathers off to war; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the U.S. government. Women like Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” claimed the right to have a say in the postwar nation.
When Congress did not explicitly include women in the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, suffragists decided simply to assert their right to vote. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen. If so, women were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In 1872, they held a vote-in across the nation, and in New York state, suffragist Susan B. Anthony successfully cast a ballot. She was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.[2]
Meanwhile, in Missouri, a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued him, and the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. In 1875, the justices handed down the unanimous Minor v. Happersett decision agreeing that women were indeed citizens . . . but saying that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.[3]
Minor v. Happersett was a profound blow to the idea of equality. In the South, it paved the way for white supremacists to keep Black Americans from the polls in 1876, returning white supremacists to power that would not be broken until after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eighty-nine years later. In the West, it justified the practice of excluding nonwhite people from voting by using naturalization laws from the early nineteenth century that limited naturalization to “free white” immigrants.
Soon the nation’s lawmaking was back in the hands of elite white men. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China, and in 1884, the Supreme Court ruled that unassimilated Indians were not U.S. citizens. In 1889, an attempt to protect Black voting made lynching spike, and in 1890, Mississippi wrote a new constitution preventing Black men from voting, on grounds other than race. All but one state in the country, Massachusetts, followed suit, adding poll taxes, literacy clauses, and so on to limit participation in government by immigrants as well as by Black and Brown Americans.[4]
The attempt to disenfranchise Black, Brown, poor, and female Americans was, in part, a response to their demonstration that they embraced the characteristics of the American dream as the Republicans had set it out during the war. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century marginalized people increasingly defined that dream for white Americans. When Black southerners began to move to the West after the “redemption” of the South by white supremacists, they explained to the Senate that they wanted not only physical safety but also education, fair wages, property, and the right to have a say in the government under which they lived. Excluded from rights by their states, the Exodusters, as they were called, publicly articulated a national identity based in the old vision of the Lincoln Republicans.
After the war, Americans who could not vote deliberately wrote themselves into a worldview that called for education, hard work, and prosperity. Books like Horatio Alger’s 1868 bestselling Ragged Dick, the rags-to-riches story of a bootblack who studies and works hard to become a prosperous businessman, presented these characteristics as a model for rising white boys. Those seeking a foothold in the postwar world used their mastery of those same characteristics to demonstrate how much they, too, belonged.[5]
Key to this belonging was education. Before the war, educating enslaved people had been a crime in southern states. After emancipation, formerly enslaved Americans recognized that their inability to read and write placed them at the mercy of men who could, and they made education a priority. Indigenous Americans eager to adapt to the white man’s world did the same, a drive that had tragic consequences when government officials insisted on educating children away from their parents.
Those claiming a stake in the new country centered their personal histories around education. Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, famously told of how he worked in a salt mine and a coal mine before enrolling at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, where he worked as a janitor to pay for his room and board. Ohiyesa, a Santee Dakota, and Yankton Dakota Zitkála-Šá also highlighted their education in their writings. Ohiyesa worked his way up through medical school at Boston University, from which he got his degree in 1890, the first Indigenous American certified in Western medicine. Zitkála-Šá became a well-known writer and musician.[6]
When formerly enslaved minister George Washington Williams published his groundbreaking two-volume The History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 in 1882, he devoted two chapters to the attempts of white Americans to keep Black Americans uneducated. He concluded with a section extolling the Black population’s “Wonderful Achievements as a Laborer, Soldier, and Student.” “This remarkable people have now 14,889 schools, with an attendance of 720,853 pupils! And this does not include the children of color who attend the white schools of the Northern States,” he added.[7]
Women, too, pushed for the right to attend school. Postwar prosperity gave more families the resources to educate their daughters, and quiet girls like Laura Jane Addams of Rockford, Illinois, the motherless daughter of a prominent businessman and politician, set off to class with their books. Mary Church of Memphis, who went by “Mollie,” did the same. Three years younger than Addams, Church was the daughter of a prosperous businessman father and an entrepreneurial mother, both of whom had formerly been enslaved.
By the end of the nineteenth century, women made up more than half the country’s high school graduates. This steady stream of newly educated young women headed to newly opened women’s colleges, where previously isolated young women like Addams and Church learned higher mathematics, history, theory, and law and, crucially, made lifelong friendships.
Education represented a commitment to work hard. Black leaders constantly emphasized the hard work of Black Americans, sometimes noting that they had, after all, produced the extraordinary wealth of the Old South. Black newspapers made much of a rising Black middle class in border states and the West, downplaying the grinding poverty that characterized much of the late-nineteenth-century South. And businesspeople like hair-care product mogul Madam C. J. Walker and Wall Street broker Jeremiah Hamilton rose to prosperous heights. Among Indigenous Americans, Comanche cattle rancher Quanah Parker did the same.
Once people were educated and prosperous, the next stage of the Lincolnian vision was for them to take part in the cultural and scientific advancement of the nation. There, too, formerly excluded Americans shone. Hundreds of vibrant Black newspapers under the direction of people like George Ruby, T. Thomas Fortune, and Ida B. Wells explored the country from the perspective of its Black citizens. Asian and Mexican immigrants told their own stories, and new histories of women and of Black America by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and George Washington Williams made it clear that the country had never been exclusively white and male. Memoirs by labor leaders Terence V. Powderly and Samuel Gompers confirmed that it had never been exclusively wealthy, either.
Fine art by people like Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor of Black and Indigenous heritage, who carved into marble images of abolitionists and Indigenous Americans, and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner drew international attention. Scientists like George Washington Carver, who popularized southern crop rotation and experimented extensively with peanut crops, helped to address the problems of the new age.
Visibly disproving white supremacists’ racist and sexist characterizations of them, people who were unable to vote claimed their place in American society by publicly celebrating the characteristics of the American dream. But they never celebrated the individualism white politicians preached.
Instead, they repeatedly held up the nation’s promise of equality to demonstrate its failings. Indigenous Americans went to battle against a government whose ideology depended on the theft of their lands. When forced onto reservations, they published books and articles explaining their traditions and noting that so-called Christians seemed far less Christian than those practicing traditional religions. When government officials broke treaties, Indigenous men like Hunkpapa Lakota Sitting Bull and Comanche leader Quanah Parker visited Washington to demand the government honor them.
They sued for their rights. In Tennessee, for example, after the Supreme Court struck down civil rights legislation in 1883, Ida B. Wells tested the court’s decision by riding in a first-class railroad car. When the conductor physically dragged her out of her seat, Wells not only bit him—a potentially deadly act in an era before antibiotics—she sued. Initially, she won, but the Tennessee supreme court ultimately reversed the decision, claiming Wells was not acting in good faith. Shut out from the law, she turned to journalism to publicize the attacks on Black people.[8]
Twelve years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. In the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the Supreme Court determined that the children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.[9]
Those excluded from political power leveraged their networks and communities to change society. Mollie Church, who was now known by her married name of Mary Church Terrell, had become an educator. She worked with Black journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the newspaper The Woman’s Era, to bring together suffrage and civil rights. Along with Ida B. Wells and others, they fought lynching. Jane Addams and others established “settlement houses” in the immigrant areas of big cities that brought new and old Americans together to begin to clean up urban streets and tenements. These activists used their educations to document the lives of working women and men. They gathered information, looking at everything from factory conditions and pay to health and work-related injuries, and used it to pressure lawmakers to address those poor conditions, especially for women and children.[10]
Women were also coming to realize their power as consumers. In 1891, Florence Kelley (the daughter of a Civil War congressman) and Josephine Shaw Lowell (the sister of Union officer and abolitionist leader Robert Gould Shaw) organized the National Consumers League to pressure industrialists to treat their workers better. “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility,” Kelley said.[11]
Workingmen helped to reinforce the idea that the American system depended on those working their way up rather than on wealthy elites. When it turned out that wartime contracting and financial policy had privileged the wealthy, workers in 1866 organized the first national labor union. They called for the government to establish an eight-hour day, higher wages, and better working conditions.
In 1882, they organized the first Labor Day parade in New York City, carrying banners that read “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule It,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” and “The True Remedy Is Organization and the Ballot.” In 1894, President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday.
Workingmen forged connections that bridged the old world of rural communities and the new world of urban industry. Keeping alive the camaraderie of the war, they organized into fraternal organizations that established the idea of mutual aid and stability in an unstable era that championed individualism. The Grand Army of the Republic, the Knights of Pythias, the Patrons of Husbandry (also known as the Grange), and the Odd Fellows provided life insurance policies for their members and made sure that the widows and children of their unfortunate “brothers” didn’t starve. Members mixed together across class lines and sometimes even across racial lines.[12]
Even as white men limited suffrage, and murdered some of those who claimed their right to have a say in their government, Black Americans, people of color, women, and workers had never lost sight of the Declaration of Independence. At the turn of the twentieth century, Black cowboy Nat Love, who had become a Pullman porter, wrote the tale of his journey from enslavement to prosperity. In it he described a world in which even the racism and structural inequalities of the late nineteenth century could not hold him back: “This grand country of ours is the peer of any in the world, and . . . volumes cannot begin to tell of the wonders of it. . . . I have seen a large part of America, and am still seeing it, but the life of a hundred years would be all too short to see our country. . . . America, I love thee, Sweet land of Liberty, home of the brave and the free.”[13]
In an era of pervasive and violent repression, people who were legally excluded from equality kept the idea of American democracy alive for everyone. They also suggested a way forward.