ib hota chapter 15 vocab

Reconstruction

the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African Americans’ place in American society

Lincoln's 10 percent plan

a proclamation allowing southerners to take an oath of allegiance: when just 10 percent of a state’s voting population had taken such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments called Lincoln governments

13th Amendment

passed on January 31, 1865, the amendment legally abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Additionally, section two of the amendment granted Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”; State ratification followed, and by the end of the year the necessary 3/4 of the states had approved the amendment, and four million people were forever free from the slavery that had existed in North America for 250 years.

John Wilkes Booth

the person who shot and assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater.

Andrew Johnson

was Vice President to President Abraham Lincoln, but after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, he was propelled into the executive office in April; was a states’-rights, strict-constructionist, and unapologetic racist from Tennessee; offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union

black codes

South Carolina and Mississippi were the first to pass these laws that regulated Black behavior and impose social and economic control, and other states soon followed; the laws granted some rights to African Americans (like the right to own property, to marry, or to make contracts), but they also denied fundamental rights (like forbadimg Black men from serving on juries or in state militias, refused to recognize Black testimony against white people, apprenticed orphaned children to their former enslaver, and established severe vagrancy/homelessness laws, of which reasserted control over Black labor in what one scholar has called “slavery by another name); effectively criminalized Black people’s leisure, limited their mobility, and locked many into exploitative farming contracts.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

the first federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native peoples) as citizens. The law also prohibited any reduction of citizens’ “fundamental rights.”

14th Amendment

approved on June 13, 1866; section one of the amendment granted citizenship and repealed the Taney Court’s infamous Dred Scott (1857) decision. Additionally, it ensured that state laws could not deny due process or discriminate against particular groups of people; signaled the federal government’s willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights over the authority of the states; was ratified July 9, 1868, guaranteeing birthright citizenship and “equal protection of the laws”.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

dissolved state governments and divided the South into five military districts, and under these new terms, states would have to ratify the 14th Amendment, write new constitutions emancipating African Americans, and abolish repressive “Black Codes” before rejoining the union.

Hiram Revels

from Mississippi, he was one of, if not, the first African American U.S. senators (1870)

Ulysses S. Grant

a former Union general who ran in the 1868 presidential election on a platform that proclaimed, “Let Us Have Peace,” in which he promised to protect the new status quo; Black southern voters helped him win most of the former Confederacy votes, this proving that Black voters formed the backbone of the Republican coalition in the South

Freedmen's Bureau

originally started when General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, in which land in GA and SC was to be set aside as a homestead for the freedpeople, but bc Sherman lacked the authority to confiscate and distribute land, this plan never fully took effect; later on, the agency’s main purpose was to redistribute lands to formerly enslaved people that had been abandoned and confiscated by the federal government (this was short-lived bc in 1866, land that ex-Confederates had left behind was reinstated to them)

Oliver O. Howard

a general and the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner that went to Edisto Island to inform the Black population there of the policy change (the promise of land was not going to be honored)

15th Amendment

the amendment that ignored sex as an unlawful barrier to suffrage; prohibited discrimination in voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous status (i.e. slavery), but was not all-encompassing in that women were not included; caused the AERA (American Equal Rights Association) officially dissolved

NWSA

otherwise known as the National Woman Suffrage Association; was founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and consisted of suffragists who didn’t support the 15th amendment

New Departure

a new strategy/approach that interpreted the Constitution as already guaranteeing women the right to vote; argued that by nationalizing citizenship for all people and protecting all rights of citizens (including the right to vote), the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed women’s suffrage.

KKK

otherwise known as the Ku Klux Klan; was organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, and had spread to nearly every state of the former Confederacy by 1868; a vigilante group that arose after the war to terrorize African Americans and Republicans throughout the South; brought violence into the voting polls, the workplace, and the homes of Black Americans.

Enforcement Acts

passed between 1870 and 1871, these acts made it criminal to deprive African Americans of their civil rights; they also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the U.S. and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople

greenbacks

(created by Congress in late 1861) the US’s first fiat/decreed currency,

sharecropping

a system in which planters broke up large farms into smaller plots tended by single families in exchange for a portion of the crop; often led to cycles of debt that kept families bound to the land.

Morrill Land Grant

an act that donated public lands to the several states and territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts (helped create colleges such as the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin); signed into law July 1862.

Redeemers

a name used in the south and given to New Departure Democrats (focused on business, economics, political corruption, and trade) who gained strength by distancing themselves from pro-slavery Democrats and Copperheads; they won political control and ended Reconstruction in three important states (TN, VA, and GA) by 1871

Depression of 1873

a six-year depression that crushed the US’s already suffering laboring class and destroyed whatever remaining idealism northerners had about Reconstruction.

Compromise of 1877

(after Democrats threatened to boycott Hayes’s inauguration and recognize Tilden as the rightfully elected president) a compromise in which Democrats conceded the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes on the condition that all remaining troops would be removed from the South and the South would receive special economic favors; allowed for southern Democrats to return to power.