History Week: History Lecture

History Lecture: Dr. Elaine Frantz,

"Martha's Vineyard, 1877: A

Season of Unrest", Tabernacle

Lecture Description: In 1877, those attending the Martha’s Vineyard Campmeeting probably felt relieved to get away from the mainland. Things were chaotic after the 1876 presidential election, which hadn't had a clear winner. In early 1877, the Republicans made a deal to give the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes. In exchange they had given up the work of Reconstruction, the work of rebuilding the South after the Civil War and protecting the newly freed African Americans. This left former slaves and their supporters without the federal help they’d had before. For Methodists from New England and New York, the end of Reconstruction was especially hard. They had been working for years to help freed people, but 1877 marked the end of that mission. This political upheaval was in the context of massive social unrest. In July, the nation was shaken by a national Railroad Strike. It frightened many Americans. They feared a revolution. Then the federal response was frightening too. Hayes violently suppressed the strike. The death toll was in the dozens.

Drawing on a weekly journal heavily read by Martha’s Vineyard goers — Zion’s Herald— and

other sources, Frantz will discuss how the Campgrounders on the Vineyard read and discussed

how to keep the faith in their work for social justice during this difficult summer.

Lecturer Bio: Elaine Frantz is a Professor of History at Kent State University. Her work focuses on how Americans perpetrated, suffered, and understood violence in the United States in the post-Civil War period. She had published two books: Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (UNC Press) and Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and various articles. Her current book in progress uses the example of the Pittsburgh police to explore how both police officers and the people they policed understood state violence in the period from the Reconstruction era through the end of Prohibition.