Chapter 15: The Era of Reconstruction (1865-1877)

Freedmen's Bureau

Federal Reconstruction agency established to protect the legal rights of formerly enslaved people and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and land ownership

Johnson's Restoration Plan

Plan to require southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, disqualify wealthy ex-Confederates from voting, and appoint a Unionist governor

Congressional Reconstruction

Phrase of Reconstruction directed by Radical Republicans through the passage of three laws: the Military Reconstruction Act, the Command of the Army Act, and the Tenure of Office Act

Panic of 1873

Financial collapse triggered by President Grant's efforts to withdraw greenbacks from circulation and transition the economy back to hard currency

redeemers

Postwar White Democratic leaders in the South who supposedly saved the region from political, economic, and social domination by Northerners and Blacks

Radical Republicans

Congressmen who identified with the abolitionist cause and sought swift emancipation of the enslaved, punishment of the Rebels, and tight controls over former Confederate states

Black codes

Laws passed in southern states to restrict the rights of formerly enslaved people

Fourteenth Amendment (1866)

Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all US citizens, including formerly enslaved people

Fifteenth Amendment (1870)

Amendment to the US Constitution for forbidding states to deny any male citizen the right to vote on grounds of "race, color or previous condition of servitude"

sharecropping

A farming system developed after the Civil War by which landless workers farmed land in exchange with the landowner for farm supplies and a share of the crop

Ku Klux Klan

A secret terrorist organization founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 targeting formerly enslaved people who voted and held political offices, as well as people the KKK labeled as carpetbaggers and scalawags

greenbacks

Paper money issued during the Civil War, which sparked currency debates after the war

Compromise of 1877

Secret deal forged by congressional leaders to resolve the disputed election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for his pledge to remove federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction