Chapter 15 Vocabulary

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

The historical period in which the United States grappled with the question of how to integrate millions of newly freed African Americans into social, political, and labor systems.

A time of significant transformation within the United States.

Lincoln’s 10 percent Plan

A Reconstruction program that would allow Confederate states to establish new state governments after 10 percent of their male population took loyalty oaths and the states recognized the permanent freedom of formerly enslaved people.

13th Amendment

Ratified in December 1865, it abolished slavery in the United States.

John Wilkes Booth

Assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre

Andrew Johnson

Lincoln’s successor.

He was propelled in the executive office in April 1865. He was a states’-rights, strict-constructionist, and unapologetic racist from Tennessee, offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union.

Black Codes

Laws passed to regulate the behavior and impose social and economic control over African Americans.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

The 1st federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native peoples) as citizens. This law also prohibited any curtailment of citizens’ “fundamental rights”

14th Amendment

Ratified in July 1868, it granted citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States including formerly enslaved people and providing all citizens with “equal protection under the laws,”

Reconstruction Act of 1867

It dissolved state governments and divided the South into 5 military districts. the terms of this Act were: states had to ratify the 14th Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish repressive “Black Codes” before joining the union.

Hiram Revels

One of two Black U.S. senators from Mississippi.

Ulysses S. Grant

He was the former Union General who ran on a platform, in the 1868 presidential election, that proclaimed, “Let Us Have Peace,” in which he promised to protect the new status quo.

Freedmen’s Bureau

An organization that provided assistance to tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people and impoverished white in the Southern States and the District of Columbia in the years following the war.

Oliver O. Howard

The Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner General.

He tried to help rehabilitate former slaves during the period of Reconstruction.

15th Amendment

Ratified in February 1870, it guaranteed that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

NWSA

Known as the National Woman Suffrage Association

An American organization founded in 1869 and based in New York City, that was created by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton when the women’s rights movement split into two groups over the issue of suffrage for African American men.

New Departure

The political strategy used by the US Democratic Party after 1865 to distance itself from its pro-slavery and Copperhead History in an effort to broaden its political base and to focus on issues on which it had more of an advantage, especially economic ones.

KKK

Organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Drawn heavily from the antebellum southern elite and sometimes overlapped with criminal gangs or former Confederate guerrilla groups. It committed horrendous violent crimes against black people. In Panola County, Mississippi, between August 1870 and December 1872, the group killed 24 people, and in Lafayette County, 30 Black Mississippians were drowned in a single mass murder.

Enforcement Acts

Passed by the United States Congress between 1870 and 1871. They were criminal codes that protected African Americans’ right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws.

Greenbacks

An inconvertible legal-tender US currency note originally issued during the Civil War in 1862.

Morrill Land Grant

An Act donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.

Signed into law in July 1862.

Redeemers

The Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce White supremacy. Their policy of Redemption was intended to oust the Radical Republicans, a coalition of freedmen, “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.”

Depression of 1873

A six-year depression that occurred after Jay Cooke and Company declared bankruptcy in September 1873. It crushed the nation’s already suffering laboring class and destroyed whatever remaining idealism northerners had about Reconstruction. Many farms were capitalized entirely through loans in the South, and sources of credit vanished, many landowners defaulted, and farmers entered an already over-saturated labor market. The economic turmoil enabled the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives after 1874 elections, blunting the legislature’s capacity to any longer direct Reconstruction.

Compromise of 1877

Known as the Wormley Agreement or the Bargain of 1877.

An unwritten political deal to settle the intense dispute over the results of the 1876 presidential election, ending the filibuster of the certified results and the threat of political violence in exchange for an end to federal Reconstruction

Sharecropping

A system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop.