In the twelve years after the Civil War—the era of Reconstruction—there were massive changes in American culture, economy, and politics. These were the years of the “Old West,” of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts, of cattle drives, railroads, and...
The last federal troops were withdrawn from the southern states, bringing Reconstruction to an end.
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) won the presidency in 1877 on the Republican ticket after an embattled election. Charges of voting fraud and disputed electoral votes led to the Compromise of 1877 in which the Democrats accepted Hayes’s presidency and Hayes removed federal troops from the South. Hayes’s first year in office was marked by the Great Railway Strike of 1877, when he called in federal troops to help suppress rioters in strike regions. The next year Hayes vetoed the Bland-Allison Act, which restored coinage of the silver dollar....