The Squatter and the Don

Content Warning: This section of the guide references racist policy, rhetoric, and violence (including allusions to chattel enslavement), sexist attitudes, animal death, gun violence, and possible death by suicide.

Following the American Civil War during the Reconstruction Era, railroad access was the economic force that dictated the growth or decline of a city. The Central Pacific Railroad, often known merely as “the transcontinental railroad” connected New York to Sacramento in 1869, providing exponential economic growth to the cities and towns along its length. Sacramento and San Francisco saw booms because of their fast connection to the industrialized Northeast. Meanwhile, the South, particularly in the eastern half of the country, grappled with economic devastation resulting from the destruction caused by the war itself and from the rapid restructuring of society in a post-enslavement era. Animosity roiled between Northern contingents that blamed the former Confederacy for the devastation and grief of the Civil War and Southern contingents that decried the hypocrisy of being “punished” for the war despite supposedly being equally and fully reintegrated into the country. Radical Republicans, the liberal political party at the time, took and held control of Congress and enacted laws that were wildly unpopular among white people in the South, who were predominantly Democrats.