Chapter 11: Post-Civil War Reconstruction - Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, figures, acts, and events from Chapter 11 on Post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Emanuel Fortune

A Florida Republican leader and former slave who testified before a congressional committee investigating white violence and threats against black voters in the postwar South.

Reconstruction

The twelve-year period following the Civil War during which the federal government deployed troops and agents to restore order and assist freed slaves in their transition to freedom.

Radical Republicans

A congressional coalition of northern representatives led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner that aimed to protect black rights and punish white Southerners for the Civil War.

Fourteenth Amendment

An 1868 constitutional amendment that affirmed full citizenship for black Americans and mandated reductions in congressional representation for states denying voting rights to citizens.

Tenure of Office Act

An 1867 law blocking the president from firing Senate-approved appointees without Senate approval, which served as the primary basis for Andrew Johnson's impeachment.

Ku Klux Klan

A white supremacist organization founded in Tennessee in 1866 that used terrorism, secret codes, and night raids to intimidate black Americans and block their political participation.

Fifteenth Amendment

A constitutional amendment proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870 prohibiting federal and state governments from denying the vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Hiram Revels

An AME minister, former Union recruitment officer, and advocate of black education who became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870.

American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)

An interracial organization founded by Lucy Stone that adopted a 'black men first' strategy, prioritizing black male enfranchisement over women's suffrage.

Colored Woman's Progressive Franchise Association

An organization established in 1871 by Mary Ann Shadd Cary to challenge the assumption that only men should be granted voting rights.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

A black poet, author, lecturer, and advocate of temperance and women's suffrage who joined the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

Blanche K. Bruce

A Mississippi politician born into slavery who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1874 and advocated full citizenship for Chinese and Native Americans.

Amnesty Act of 1872

Federal legislation ending political restrictions on former Confederates, supported by moderate Republicans and select black congressmen seeking political accommodation.

George Ruby

A black New York-born Texas state senator and Freedmen's Bureau worker who negotiated with white moderates for infrastructure, schools, and anti-Klan legislation.

Socialism

A political philosophy holding that government should distribute wealth equally among all citizens, prioritizing economic class over race.

Lynching

The practice by white supremacist groups of dragging black citizens or their allies from their homes to be whipped, tortured, mutilated, or hanged from trees.

Enforcement Acts

Also known as the Klan Acts, these 1870 and 1871 federal laws defined interference with a citizen's voting rights as a federal offense punishable by fine or imprisonment.

Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company

A bank chartered by Congress in 1865 for African Americans that collapsed in July 1874 after white board members made speculative real estate and railroad loans.

James Wormley

A free-born Washingtonian who opened an elegant hotel near the White House in 1871 where private meetings arranging the Compromise of 1877 took place.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

A lawyer, teacher, and activist who became Howard University's first female law student and advocated for job training in manual trades for black youth.

Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)

A U.S. Supreme Court decision distinguishing state citizenship from national citizenship, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment protected only federal citizenship rights.

Compromise of 1877

A political agreement conceding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the end of federal intervention in Reconstruction.

Exodusters

Thousands of black Americans who migrated from the South to Kansas in the late 1870s, likening their journey to the biblical exodus from Egypt.

Benjamin 'Pap' Singleton

A former Tennessee slave who established the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association to assist black families in settling in Kansas.

Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Company

An organization formed by Martin Delany, Henry McNeal Turner, and Richard Cain that bought the ship Azor in 1878 to transport black emigrants to Liberia.