ANOTHER BAD TIME IN OUR HISTORY (WITH SOME PROLOGUE)

The 1890s were an awful time quite a lot like now.

The prologue to the 1890s can be said to begin in 1877. Three things happened in 1877 that cast a long shadow over the subsequent years, even unto this very day. First, an election commission declared Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, the presidential victor of the 1876 election — by a single electoral vote.

And he was so declared with the understanding that the last Federal troops would be withdrawn from the remaining ex-Confederate states that allowed their votes to go for Hayes. And, indeed, shortly after Hayes’s inauguration, those troops were withdrawn, leaving the freedmen to their own devices to fight their disenfranchisement, and the terror unleashed upon them by the white peckerwoods, as best they could.

In 1896, after nearly two decades of lynchings and other terroristic methods (and stout resistance from African-Americans and a few white allies), Plessy v. Ferguson allowed the states to make Jim Crow (and the disenfranchisement of people of color) law in all the old slave states, Union and Traitor (yes, including Delaware).

I am ashamed to say such a noteworthy jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the G.A.R. himself, actually wrote, “If the majority of the population is determined to disenfranchise the Negroes among them, there is nothing this Court can do about it.” There were three dissenters, led by John Harlan, himself a Southerner.
The third occurrence in 1877 was what became known as the Great Strikes…