Reconstruction Era Key Terms

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, legislation, and events from the Reconstruction era.

Reconstruction

The historical period (1865–1877) following the American Civil War focused on reintegrating Southern states and determining the legal status and rights of newly freed African Americans.

Radical Republicans

A political faction within the Republican Party that advocated for the total abolition of slavery, full civil rights and suffrage for freed Black people, and strict terms for readmitting Southern states.

Andrew Johnson

The 17th President of the United States who assumed office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination and favored a lenient Presidential Reconstruction policy that clashed with Congress.

13th Amendment

The constitutional amendment ratified in 1865 that officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, except as punishment for a crime.

Freedman’s Bureau

A federal agency established in 1865 to assist formerly enslaved people and poor whites in the South by providing food, shelter, medical care, schools, and legal assistance.

Carpetbaggers

A derogatory term applied by white Southerners to Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction to pursue political, social, or economic opportunities.

‘Forty Acres and a Mule’

A phrase stemming from General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 promising land and working animals to newly freed Black families, a plan later revoked by President Andrew Johnson.

Sharecropping

An agricultural system in which tenant farmers worked land owned by someone else in exchange for a portion of the crop yield, often resulting in debt cycles for Black laborers.

Black Codes

Laws enacted by Southern states after the Civil War to limit the freedom of African Americans and force them into restrictive low-wage agricultural labor.

Vagrancy Laws

Regulations included in Black Codes that permitted the arrest of unemployed African Americans, who were then fined or sentenced to forced labor.

14th Amendment

The constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteed equal protection under the law.

Ulysses Grant

The Civil War Union general who served as the 18th President of the United States (1869–1877) and worked to enforce federal civil rights and suppress white terrorist groups.

Union Leagues

Political organizations formed during the Civil War that expanded across the Reconstruction South to organize, educate, and mobilize newly enfranchised Black voters.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

Federal legislation that divided ten former Confederate states into five military districts and required new state constitutions granting Black male suffrage and ratifying the 14th Amendment.

Hiram Revels

An American politician, minister, and educator who became the first African American to serve in the United States Senate when elected to represent Mississippi in 1870.

Prince Rivers

A former slave who served as a soldier in the Union Army and later became a prominent African American politician and magistrate in South Carolina during Reconstruction.

Birth of a Nation

A 1915 silent film directed by D. W. Griffith that presented a racially biased depiction of Reconstruction and glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

Ku Klux Klan

A white supremacist terrorist network created in the South following the Civil War that used violence and murder to suppress Black political participation and restore white dominance.

Force Act

Federal statutes passed in 1870 and 1871 that empowered the federal government and military to enforce Black voting rights and dismantle terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

St. Landry Parish

A parish in Louisiana that was the site of the 1868 St. Landry Parish Massacre, in which white Democrats violently killed scores of Black Republicans to suppress voting.

Colfax Massacre

An 1873 violent conflict in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white Southern paramilitary group attacked and murdered scores of African American militia members defending a courthouse.

15th Amendment

The constitutional amendment ratified in 1870 that prohibited federal or state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Redeemers

A coalition of Southern white Democrats who sought to overthrow Republican control, disenfranchise Black voters, and re-establish white supremacy across the South.

Amnesty Act

An 1872 federal law that removed political disabilities and restored voting rights to most former Confederate leaders and officials.

Samuel Tilden

The Democratic presidential nominee in the disputed election of 1876 who won the popular vote but failed to secure the presidency after the Compromise of 1877.

Rutherford B. Hayes

The Republican candidate who became the 19th President of the United States through the Compromise of 1877, leading to the removal of federal troops from the South.

Compromise of 1877

An unwritten deal that resolved the contested 1876 U.S. presidential election by awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.