Edwards, America's History for the AP® Course 10e - Chapter 14

Ten Percent Plan

Ten Percent Plan

A plan proposed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, but never implemented, that would have granted amnesty to most ex-Confederates and allowed each rebellious state to return to the Union as soon as 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved the Thirteenth Amendment.

Wade-Davis Bill

A bill proposed by Congress in July 1864 that required an oath of allegiance by a majority of each state's adult white men, new governments formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the Union, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. The plan was passed but pocket vetoed by President Abraham Lincoln.

Black Codes

Laws passed by southern states after the Civil War that denied ex-slaves the civil rights enjoyed by whites, punished vague crimes such as "vagrancy" or failing to have a labor contract, and tried to force African Americans back to plantation labor systems that closely mirrored those in slavery times.

Freedmen's Bureau

Government organization created in March 1865 to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees. Active until the early 1870s, it was the first federal agency in history that provided direct payments to assist those in poverty and to foster social welfare.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

Legislation passed by Congress that nullified the Black Codes and affirmed that African Americans should have equal benefit of the law.

Fourteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that made all native-born or naturalized persons U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging the rights of national citizens, thus giving primacy to national rather than state citizenship.

Radical Republicans

The members of the Republican Party who were bitterly opposed to slavery and to southern slave owners since the mid-1850s. With the Confiscation Act in 1861, Radical Republicans began to use wartime legislation to destroy slavery.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

An act that divided the conquered South into five military districts, each under the command of a U.S. general. To reenter the Union, former Confederate states had to grant the vote to freedmen and deny it to leading ex-Confederates.

Fifteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870 that forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or "previous condition of servitude."

American Woman Suffrage Association

A women's suffrage organization led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others who remained loyal to the Republican Party, despite its failure to include women's voting rights in the Reconstruction amendments. Stressing the urgency of voting rights for African American men, AWSA leaders held out hope that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women's turn.

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

A suffrage group headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony that stressed the need for women to lead organizations on their own behalf. The NWSA focused exclusively on women's rights — sometimes denigrating men of color in the process — and took up the battle for a federal women's suffrage amendment.

Minor v. Happersett

A Supreme Court decision in 1875 that ruled that suffrage rights were not inherent in citizenship and had not been granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, as some women's rights advocates argued. Women were citizens, the Court ruled, but state legislatures could deny women the vote if they wished.

crop-lien laws

Nineteenth-century laws that enforced lenders' rights to a portion of harvested crops as repayment for debts. Once they owed money to a country store, sharecroppers were trapped in debt and became targets for unfair pricing.

convict leasing

Notorious system, begun during Reconstruction, whereby southern state officials allowed private companies to hire out prisoners to labor under brutal conditions in mines and other industries.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

A law that required "full and equal" access to jury service and to transportation and public accommodations, irrespective of race.

classical liberalism, or laissez-faire

The political ideology of individual liberty, private property, a competitive market economy, free trade, and limited government. The ideal is a laissez faire or "let alone" policy in which government does the least possible.

Crédit Mobilier

A sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit. Organizers of the scheme protected it from investigation by providing gifts of its stock to powerful members of Congress.

Ku Klux Klan

Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans in the South after the Civil War but was reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.

Enforcement Laws

Acts passed in Congress in 1870 and signed by President U. S. Grant that were designed to protect freedmen's rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Authorizing federal prosecutions, military intervention, and martial law to suppress terrorist activity, the Enforcement Laws largely succeeded in shutting down Klan activities.

Slaughter-House Cases

A group of decisions begun in 1873 in which the Court began to undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect African American rights.

Civil Rights Cases

A series of 1883 Supreme Court decisions that struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, rolling back key Reconstruction laws and paving the way for later decisions that sanctioned segregation.