CHAPTER 14 APUSH: RECONSTRUCTION (1865-1877)

Ten Percent Plan

A plan proposed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, but never implemented, that would have granted amnesty to most ex-Confederates and allowed each rebellious state to return to the Union as soon as 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved the Thirteenth Amendment.

Wade-Davis Bill

A bill proposed by Congress in July 1864 that required an oath of allegiance by a majority of each state's adult white men, new governments formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the Union, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. The plan was passed but pocket vetoed by President Abraham Lincoln.

Freedmens Bureau

Government organization created in March 1865 to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees. Active until the early 1870s, it was the first federal agency in history that provided direct payments to assist those in poverty and to foster social welfare.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

Legislation passed by Congress that nullified the Black Codes and affirmed that African Americans should have equal benefit of the law.

Fourteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that made all native-born or naturalized persons U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging the rights of national citizens, thus giving primacy to national rather than state citizenship.

Radical Republicans

The members of the Republican Party who were bitterly opposed to slavery and to southern slave owners since the mid-1850s. With the Confiscation Act in 1861, Radical Republicans began to use wartime legislation to destroy slavery.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

An act that divided the conquered South into five military districts, each under the command of a U.S general. To reenter the Union, former Confederate states had to grant the vote to freedmen and deny it leading ex-Confederates

Fifteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870 that forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or "Previous conditions of servitude."

Thirteenth Amendment

Prohibited Slavery

Tenure of Office Act

Required Senate consent for removal of any federal official whose appointment had required Senate confirmation

Ku Klux Klan Act

Authorized the president to use federal prosecutions and military force to suppress conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to vote and enjoy the equal protection of the law.

American Woman Suffrage Assoication

A women's suffrage organization led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others who remained loyal to the Republican Party, despite its failure to include women's voting rights in the Reconstructionn amendments. Stressing the urgency of voting rights for African American men, AWSA laders held out hope that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women's turn.

National Woman Suffrage Association

A suffrage group headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony that stressed the need for women to lead organization on their own behalf. The NWSA focused exclusively on women's rights-- sometimes denigrating men of color in the process -- and took up the battle for a federal women's suffrage amendment.

Minor v. Happersett

A supreme court decision in 1875 that rules that suffrage rights were not inherent in citizenship and had not been granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, as some women's rights advocates argued. Women were citizens, theCourt ruled, but state legislatures could deny women the vote if they wished

Crop-Lien Laws

Nineteenth-century laws that enforced lenders' rights to a portion of harvested crops as repayment for debts. Once they owed money to a country store, sharecroppers were trapped in debt and became targets for unfair pricing.

Convict leasing

Notorious system, begun during Recostruction whereby southern state offiials allowed priviate companies to hire out prisoners to labor under brutal conditions in mines and other industries

Civil Rights Act of 1875

A law that required "Full and equal" access to jury service and to transportation and public accomodations, irrespective race

Panic of 1873

Economic depression during Grant's second term

*Over-expansive, unregulated business during the post-Civil War years, the failure of American investment banking firms, and economic downturns in Europe all contributed to the panic

*Led to the retirement of greenbacks and a return to the gold standard

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

A large number of railroad workers went on strike because of wage cuts. After a month of strikes, President Hayes sent troops to stop the strike (example of how government always sided with employers over workers in the Gilded Age). The worst railroad violence was in Pittsburgh, with over 40 people killed by militia men

Classical Liberalism

The political ideology of individual liberty, private property, a competitive market economy, free trade, and limited government. The idea being that the less government does, the better, particularly in reference to economic policies such as tariffs and incentives for industrial development. Attacking corruption and defending private property, late-nineteenth-century liberals generally called for elite governance and questioned the advisability of full democratic participation.

Credit Mobilier

A sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit. Organizers of the scheme protected it from investigation by providing gifts of its stock to powerful members of Congress.

Whiskey Ring Scandal

Grant's administration; a corruption case involving uncollected taxes and bribes among whiskey distillers.

"Redemption"

The Ex-Confederate, Southern and violent way of tearing down the Reconstruction process through a surge of violent attacks against blacks and republicans.

Ku Klux Klan

Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans in the South after the Civil War but was reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.

Enforcement Laws

Acts passed in Congress in 1870 and signed by President U. S. Grant that were designed to protect freedmen's rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Authorizing federal prosecutions, military intervention, and martial law to suppress terrorist activity, the Enforcement Laws largely succeeded in shutting down Klan activities.

Slaughter-House Cases

A group of descisions begun in 1873 in which the Court began to undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect African American rights

U.S vs. Cruikshank (1876)

The Cruikshank case arose from the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which a group of armed whites killed more than a hundred African American men as a result of a political dispute. Three men convicted of violating the 1870 Enforcement Act - a law aimed primarily at curbing Ku Klux Klan violence that forbade conspiracies to deny the constitutional rights of any citizen - appealed on the grounds that their indictments were insufficient. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court sided with the defendants, holding that the rights they were alleged to have violated were not enforceable in this case. The First and Second Amendment rights to assembly and the bearing of arms were, according to the Court's ruling, intended only to restrict the actions of the federal government and did not apply to the states or private citizens, and the Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection applied only to state action and again, not to the actions of individuals.

Civil Rights Cases

A series of 1883 Supreme Court descisions that struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, rolling back key Reconstruction laws and paving the way for later descisions that sanctioned segregation

Andrew Johnson

17th President of the United States, A Southerner form Tennessee, as V.P. when Lincoln was killed, he became president. He opposed radical Republicans who passed Reconstruction Acts over his veto. The first U.S. president to be impeached, he survived the Senate removal by only one vote. He was a very weak president.

Ulysses S. Grant

an American general and the eighteenth President of the United States (1869-1877). He achieved international fame as the leading Union general in the American Civil War.

Robert Smalls

A sailor and later a Union naval captain, he was highly honored for his feats of bravery and heroism. He became a Congressman after the Civil War.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Confederate general who after the war formed the KKK

Charler Sumner

Leader of the Senate of the Radical Republicans

Victoria Woodhull

Radical feminist propagandist whose eloquent attacks on conventional social morality shocked many Americans in the 1870s

Blanche K. Bruce

Became a senator in 1874 -- the only black to be elected to a full term until Edward Brooke in 1966.

Sharecropping

A system used on southern farms after the Civil War in which farmers worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops.

By 1890, 3/4 of black farmers in the South were tenants or sharecroppers.

Poll Taxes

required citizens of a state to pay a special tax in order to vote

Literary Requirements

Unfair reading quizzes meant to deter freedmen and women from voting