Mass Grave for Lakotas slaughtered at Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890
From We’reHistory.org by Heather Cox Richardson
On November 13, 1890, troops moved into South Dakota, a military movement that would result six weeks later in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The president sent soldiers to South Dakota, the largest movement of troops since the Civil War, in the midst of a midterm election campaign that looked bad for his party.
In 1890, Republican president Benjamin Harrison was facing a revolt in the midterms. The Republicans had risen before the Civil War as the party of ordinary farmers and workers and had fought the Civil War to take control of America out of the hands of the nation’s wealthy slave owners. But after the war, Republicans had gradually swung behind the nation’s rising industrialists—men like Andrew Carnegie and J. D. Rockefeller—and propped up their industries with tariff walls that enabled them to keep consumer prices high. Voters, who hated the tariffs, increasingly backed the Democrats, who promised to lower them. Democrats had won the House of Representatives in 1874, and in 1884, Grover Cleveland became the first Democrat elected to the White House since the 1850s. Horrified Republicans had pulled out all the stops in 1888 to reclaim the government for their party.
In the 1888 election, they tapped large donors to fill the Republican war chest, then used the money to flood newspapers with pro-tariff arguments, warning that the Democrats were radicals who would destroy the economy, and promising that Republicans themselves would “reform” the tariff. But while Republicans’ strategy won the House of Representatives, it didn’t work for the presidency: Cleveland garnered about 100,000 more votes than the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison. So Republican operatives swung the election in the Electoral College, striking a backroom deal with the New York delegation to win an electoral victory.
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