Unfinished Nation - Chapter 15 Key Terms

Andrew Johnson

Democrat from Tennessee who served as Lincoln's vice president and, upon Lincoln's assassination, became the seventeenth president; opposed Radical Republican policies on Reconstruction

Atlanta Compromise

this term describes Booker T. Washington's philosophy, stated in an 1895 speech, that blacks should forgo agitation for political rights and concentrate on self-improvement and preparation for equality

Black Codes

state laws that developed after the Civil War in the former Confederate states to limit the political power and mobility of black Americans

Booker T. Washington

the chief spokesman for a commitment to black education and the founder and president of Tuskegee University

carpetbagger

slang term used by white Southern Democrats to describe white men from the North, many of them veterans, who settled in the South as hopeful planters, businessmen, and professionals and supported Republican policies

Charles Sumner

United States Senator from Massachusetts who was a leading voice against slavery and for black liberties

Compromise of 1877

Rutherford B. Hayes's promise to withdraw federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, in exchange for the support of Southern delegates in the disputed election of 1876 presidential election

crop-lien system

a credit system widely used in the South after the Civil War in which farmers promised a portion of their future crops in exchange for supplies from local merchants

Enforcement Acts

aka the Ku Klux Klan Acts, these congressional acts in 1870 and 1871 prohibited states from discriminating against voters on the basis of race and gave the national government authority to prosecute crimes by individuals under federal law

Fifteenth Amendment

an 1870 constitutional amendment that forbade the states and the federal government from denying suffrage to any male citizen on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude

Fourteenth Amendment

an 1868 constitutional amendment that granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States and prohibited states from denying "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" or equal protection under the law

Freedmen's Bureau

U.S. bureau established in 1858 that aimed to help former enslaved people forge independent lives

Ida B. Wells

African American journalist whose reporting in the late nineteenth century on racial violence launched what became an international antilynching movement

impeachment

the process of charging a public official with misconduct, with the potential for punishment including loss of office

Jim Crow laws

a dense network of state and local statutes that institutionalized an elaborate system of racial hierarchy

Ku Klux Klan

one of many secret societies that used terrorism and physical violence to intimidate former slaves and undercut their constitutional rights, especially the right to vote

minstrel show

form of popular theater and entertainment from the early 1800s to the early 1900s that openly mocked and degraded African American culture

New South

a term referring to the economic modernization and industrialization of the South after Reconstruction

Plessy v. Ferguson

an 1896 Supreme Court decision that ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were legal so long as they were equal

Radical Republicans

a wing of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century that aggressively opposed slavery and, after the Civil War, fought to expand and protect African American civil rights

Reconstruction

the process by which the federal government, between 1865 and 1877, controlled the former Confederate states and set the conditions for their readmission to the Union

Redeemers

coalition of white southern landowners, business interests, and professionals who sought to "redeem" the South after the Civil War by limiting the influence of the Republican Party and violently overthrowing federal reconstruction policies and African American citizenship rights

scalawag

slang term referring to Southern whites who supported the Republican Party and federal Reconstruction policies after the Civil War

sharecropping

a farming system in which large landowners rent their fields to farmers, usually families, in return for a share of the crop's production

Thaddeus Stevens

U.S Representative from Pennsylvania who was an abolitionist and a leader of the Radical Republicans

Ulysses S. Grant

chief of the Union armies (at the beginning of 1864) and eighteenth president who supervised much of Reconstruction

Wade-Davis Bill

the 1864 bill stipulating that all Confederate states seeking readmission to the Union have a majority of its voters take a loyalty oath to the federal government; it never passed because Lincoln refused to sign it

William H. Seward

secretary of state in both President Lincoln's and President Johnson's administrations who negotiated purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867