1868 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
Congress makes retention of black suffrage forever a "fundamental condition" for readmission of the seven former Confederate states to the Union (see Fifteenth Amendment, 1870).
Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is proclaimed July 28 by Secretary of State Seward: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." But suffrage is limited to male citizens, despite the pleadings of Susan B. Anthony, whose cause has been rejected by former allies.
The (second) Fort Laramie Treaty signed April 29 by Lieut. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and other U.S. officials with leaders of the various Sioux tribes will be ratified in mid-February of next year and proclaimed a week later (see 1867). Oglala chief Red Cloud's strategies have succeeded in having the treaty contain provisions mandating withdrawal of U.S. troops from forts along the Bozeman Trail and ceding to the Sioux all of the country north of the North Platte and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains, with no whites allowed to occupy land in that country without tribal permission (but see gold discovery at Deadwood Gulch, 1875). The government agrees to provide clothing (or materials from which to make clothing), schools, and money to the tribes, who agree to cease opposition to construction of railroad tracks across the plains. Red Cloud agrees to lay down his arms, pledge himself to peace, and allow federal troops to escort him to the Red Cloud Agency in his native Nebraska (see Pine Ridge, 1878).
Cherokee scout Jesse Chisholm of Chisholm Trail fame dies of food poisoning at his trading camp in Left Hand Spring April 4 at age 61 (approximate) near what later will be Geary, Oklahoma; former Indian agent Kit Carson at Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory May 23 at age 58.
U.S. military authorities force Navajo chiefs to sign a treaty August 12 agreeing to live on reservations and cease their opposition to whites (see 1867). The treaty establishes a 3.5 million-acre reservation within the Navajo Nation's old domains (a small portion of the original Navajo holdings), and while the main reservation will grow to embrace nearly 14.5 million acres (25,000 square miles) reaching out from the Four Corners to include northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Utah, most of it will be desert and semidesert with only 68,000 acres of farmland. The Navajo population has declined from 10,000 to 8,000 during 5 years of military internment; when the survivors return on foot to their homeland, they find that their 200,000 sheep have dwindled to just 940 and that they must learn a new way of life if they are to endure.
The first meeting of Britain's National Society for Woman Suffrage (NSWS) convenes October 30.
Karl Marx writes to a friend December 12, "Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included."