The first of three Sioux wars (the War of the Bozeman Road [which by connecting the Oregon Trial with mining camps encroached on hunting grounds] from 1866 to 1868) ended with the U. S. Army pulling back from its posts along that road and with the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) creating the Great Sioux Reservation of western South Dakota, including the Black Hills. Several Sioux leaders, however, did not agree to that treaty. Prospectors suspected that there was gold in the Black Hills, and in 1874 a cavalry expedition under General George A. Custer—supposedly exploring a road route between Forts Abraham Lincoln (Bismarck) and Laramie—happened to have prospectors along who confirmed that there indeed was gold in those hills.
The news that summer that Custer’s expedition had discovered gold brought white prospectors flooding into
The Black Hills, trespassing on Sioux (Lakota) land in search of the valuable metal despite Indian hostility. In the winter of 1875-76, there were 15,000 miners at the town of Custer in the heart of the Black Hills. The federal government tried to purchase or lease the Black Hills, but the land was sacred to the Sioux, and the effort failed. Unable to control the swarms of miners descending on the Black Hills, federal officials in December 1875 ordered the uncooperative Lakota to relocate to distant reservations in six weeks (an impossibility in winter) or come under attack. When they failed to comply with the order, the army in March 1876 attacked the Oglala Sioux and their allies the Northern Cheyenne. But in June the Lakota, led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, struck back and defeated General George Crook on June 17, 1876, at the Battle of the Rosebud. Eight days later, on June 25, they annihilated Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, often referred to as Custer’s Last Stand. Despite this initial success, the Sioux resistance was soon broken. Crazy Horse surrendered and Sitting Bull fled to Canada.
The gold rush followed a classic pattern. Thousands rushed from Custer to new diggings at Deadwood Gulch in the summer of 1876. Both towns were plagued by violence, vice, and inflation. Initially, individual miners could do well, since the gold was located in “placer” gravel and easily extracted, but it was not long before large-scale mines appeared, and these required a considerable infusion of capital from financial centers. Nevertheless, many of the miners, attracted by their surroundings, remained in the area.
Further reading: Donald Jackson, Custer’s Gold: The United States Cavalry Expedition of 1874 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
—Scott Sendrow
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown (1825-1921) women's rights activist, ordained minister
Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first woman ordained a minister of a congregation in a regular Protestant denomination; she was also a prominent advocate for women’s rights. Antoinette Brown was born on May 20, 1825, in Henrietta, New York, where her father was a farmer and justice of the peace. She became a teacher at age 16 and entered Oberlin College at age 21. After graduating from the literary course (which did not award a bachelor’s degree) in 1847, she applied to study theology. The faculty refused to allow her regular enrollment, so she became a resident graduate and was not given a degree. After completing her studies in 1850, she decided to hold off on her ordainment until it could take place in a church in which she held pastoral responsibilities.
For the next three years she worked as a lecturer, speaking on women’s rights, antislavery, and temperance. In 1850 she attended and spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, of which Lucy Stone, a friend from Oberlin, was a primary organizer. In the summer of 1853 she gained national prominence at the World’s Temperance Convention in New York when she strove for three hours to be heard over the shouts of angry male delegates. That same year she was ordained as a minister at the Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, but growing doubts about some Congregational tenets led her to resign a year later. She eventually became a Unitarian.
In 1855 she worked as a volunteer in the slums and prisons of New York and wrote about her experiences in a series of articles in the New York Tribune. These were collected in a book, Shadows of Our Social System (1856). In 1856 she married Samuel Blackwell, whose sister Elizabeth was the first female doctor and whose brother Henry married Lucy Stone. They lived primarily in northern New Jersey and had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood.
Blackwell was more socially conservative than many of her suffragist colleagues. She was opposed to divorce, and when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony advocated liberalized divorce laws at the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1860, Blackwell led the opposition. In the late 1860s, when Anthony and Stanton’s opposition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (on the grounds that women should have been given the vote along with African-American men) caused a split between them and Stone, Blackwell sided with Stone, becoming active in Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association. Unlike Stone, though, Blackwell remained on friendly terms with both Anthony and Stanton.
Blackwell had wide-ranging intellectual interests. She helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873. In 1878 she requested and received recognition from the American Unitarian Association as a minister. An effective orator, she spoke frequently at suffrage meetings on both the state and national levels, usually on specific resolutions. Between 1869 and 1915, Blackwell wrote six books on theological and scientific issues. These books, including The Sexes throughout Nature (1875) and The Philosophy of Individuality (1893), were devoted primarily to reconciling her views on theology and feminism with the theories of Darwin and Spencer. She also published a novel and a book of poems.
Blackwell was the only pioneer suffragist to live to see the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920, at age 95, she cast her first vote and died a year later on November 5.
Further reading: Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Black-well: A Biography (Old Westbury, N. Y.: Feminist Press, 1983).
—Lynn Hoogenboom
Blackwell, Elizabeth (1821-1910) physician, educator
The first woman in modern times to earn a medical degree, Elizabeth Blackwell was born on February 3, 1821, near Bristol, England, and moved with her family to the United States in 1832. The Blackwells settled initially in New York, where her father, who had owned a sugar refinery in England, tried to develop the use of beet sugar. His efforts failed, and in 1838 they moved to Cincinnati, where her father died a few months later.
For the next four years Blackwell helped her mother and two sisters run a private school that supported the family. She then taught for a year in Henderson, Kentucky, where she developed a strong interest in pursuing a career in medicine. She continued to teach for two more years while pursuing private medical studies with doctors in Asheville, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1847 she began applying to medical schools. After she was turned down by every medical school in New York City and Philadelphia, she began applying to rural schools. She was finally accepted by Geneva College in central New York. The acceptance, she later learned, had been a fluke: The faculty referred her application to the students, confident that they would oppose her admission, and the students, thinking they were dealing with a hoax, voted to accept her.
Her early days in medical school were exceedingly rough. She was ostracized by the townspeople and was initially barred from classroom demonstrations. But her quiet persistence eventually won her a degree of acceptance. She graduated from Geneva on January 23, 1849, and continued her studies in Europe at La Maternite in Paris and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. In Paris, she lost sight in one eye after catching purulent ophthalmia from an infant she had treated. That ended her hopes of becoming a surgeon.
She returned to New York in 1851 and found herself barred from practicing in city hospitals and dispensaries. She had few patients, so she began a series of lectures on hygiene. (She had a particular interest in preventative medicine and public health.) Her message appealed to Quaker women, who attended her lectures, became patients, and eventually brought her to the attention of prominent Quaker men whose financial support helped her launch her more ambitious projects.
In 1853 she opened a dispensary in the tenement district. By the end of the first year, she had treated 200 women
There. In 1856 her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell joined her practice, and in 1857 she expanded her dispensary into a hospital, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. During the Civil War, both she and her sister contributed to the Union effort by selecting and training nurses.
In 1868 Blackwell opened the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. It was not the first medical school for women; by this point there were women’s medical colleges in Boston and Philadelphia. But Blackwell, knowing that women doctors would be under greater scrutiny, set unusually high standards, including entrance examinations, longer-than-usual terms, plenty of clinical experience, and an examining board that was independent of the faculty.
Once the college was operating successfully, Blackwell left it in the hands of her sister, and in 1869 she returned to England for good. She set up a successful practice in London, accepting the chair of gynecology at the New Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women in 1875. A year later she began to suffer health problems and reluctantly retired. She remained active in her retirement, however, writing a number of books and articles on medical and behavioral issues and involving herself in reform and in the antivivisection movement. She died on May 31, 1910.
Further reading: Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells: The Story of a Journey to a Better World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967).
—Lynn Hoogenboom
Blaine, James Gillespie (1830-1893) politician James G. Blaine, perhaps the most outstanding Republican politician of the Gilded Age, was born on January 31, 1830, in West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the son of Ephraim Lyon Blaine and Louise Gillespie. Blaine graduated from Washington and Jefferson College (1847) and taught school while studying law. In 1850 he married Harriet Stanwood, with whom he had six children. Blaine settled in Augusta, Maine, in 1854 and became the editor of the Kennebec Journal. In 1859 he became chairman of the Republican State Committee and began his first of three terms in the Maine legislature (1859-62), where he served as speaker (1861-62). In 1860 Blaine supported Abraham Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination even though several members of Maine’s Republican Party favored William Seward.
In 1862 Blaine was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and began a long and illustrious career in Congress. He served in the House until 1876 (as its Speaker from 1869 to 1875) and as a senator from 1876 to 1881. Blaine also held the office of secretary of state under Presidents James A. Garfield (1881) and Benjamin Harrison (1889-92).
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Rank-and-file Republicans, especially from the West, adored Blaine. He was a staunch party man but not an extremist. Although Blaine could “wave the bloody shirt” to attract voters, he was a moderate on Reconstruction. He advocated protective tariffs but also supported reciprocity agreements as a means of increasing American trade abroad. Blaine favored sound-money principles but did not lose the support of inflationary minded Republicans.
In 1876 Blaine emerged as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination. However, accusations that he had received $64,000 from the Union Pacific Railroad (which as Speaker of the House he was in a position to help) for some nearly worthless Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad bonds tarnished his reputation and cost him the nomination. Shortly thereafter he was elected by the Maine legislature to the U. S. Senate. At the deadlocked 1880 Republican National Convention, Blaine threw his support to James A. Garfield, who was nominated on the 36th ballot. After his election to the presidency, Garfield appointed Blaine secretary of state. In this office, Blaine pursued an aggressive foreign policy designed to expand American foreign trade and influence abroad. He was particularly interested in U. S. relations with Latin America and sought to block European influence in that part of the world. Among his foreign policy initiatives, Blaine promoted Pan-Americanism and attempted to gain exclusive control for the United States over any proposed isthmian canal. He resigned as secretary of state following the assassination of President Garfield in 1881.
Despite questions about his character, Blaine remained the most popular Republican in the United States. At the 1884 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Blaine was nominated on the fourth ballot. He faced a difficult battle, since the Democratic Party nominated reform-minded governor of New York Grover Cleveland for the presidency. Blaine’s questionable reputation and opposition to civil service reform led a small but influential group of reform-minded Republicans known as the mugwumps to bolt from the party and support Cleveland. The ensuing campaign focused more on personal attacks than on the issues. The Republicans charged that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child, which he courageously acknowledged. The Democrats answered by accusing Blaine of aiding the railroads at public expense, a charge he unconvincingly denied. Although he was popular in New York, Blaine lost the state by 1,149 votes along with its 36 electoral votes, giving Cleveland a victory of 219 to 182 in the electoral college.
Following the election, Blaine semiretired from public life. In 1888 he refused the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Instead, Blaine decided to support the nomination of Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. When Harrison defeated the incumbent Cleveland, he rewarded Blaine by returning him to the State Department. Blaine served under Harrison in that capacity from 1889 to 1892 and focused his attention on protecting American commercial interests overseas. Again he was particularly concerned with U. S. commercial relations in the Western Hemisphere. He organized the first Pan-American Conference (1889-90); tried to obtain a naval base in Haiti; favored the annexation of Hawaii; attempted to negotiate a treaty with Nicaragua for an isthmian canal; favored the Berlin Conference whereby the United States, Great Britain, and Germany agreed to a three-power protectorate over Samoa; tried to settle a dispute with Great Britain over seal hunting in the Bering Sea; secured a commercial reciprocity amendment to the McKinley Tariff of 1890; and was instrumental in negotiating reciprocity treaties with several Latin American nations. Thus, Blaine-Harrison policies initiated U. S. expansionism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
Blaine, however, fell ill after March 1891 and finally resigned from the cabinet in June 1892. He received mild support for the Republican presidential nomination that year, which President Harrison easily won. Blaine died on January 27, 1893, in Washington, D. C.
See also currency issue; tariff issue.
Further reading: Edward P Crapol, James G. Blaine: Archi-tect of Empire (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000); H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969); David S. Muzzey, James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934).
—Phillip Papas
World History
