AP US History Period 5: Chapters 14-15

Ten Percent Plan

Plan proposed by Lincoln during the Civil War, but never implemented, that would have granted amnesty[pardon] to the most ex-Confederates and allowed each rebellious state to come back into the Union IF ONLY 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. Confederate states reject this plan even amid to defat. This was one of the first hint as to how difficult Confederates were when it came to reconstruction.

Wade-Davis Bill

Bill proposed by Congress in July 1864 required an oath of allegiance by a majority of each state's adult white men, new govts. formed only by those who never went or beared arms against the Union, and permanent disfranchisement[ The act of taking away a person’s or group’s right to vote or legal rights] of Confederate leaders. Plan was passed but unsigned, because of Lincoln’s pocket pocket veto

Black Codes

Laws passed by southern states after the Civil War to restore slavery in all but name. These laws were designed to deny ex-slaves civil rights enjoyed by whites, punished[or imposed severe penalties] blacks for vague crimes or failing to have labor contracts; tried to force African Americans back to the plantation labor systems that closely mirrored those in slavery times. One example of this is that they would set up procedures to take black childern away from their parents and apprenticing[hire or employ(someone as an apprentice)] them to former slave masters. They were first enacted in 1865 and they reflected plantation owners’ economic interests.

Freeman's Bureau

Govt. organization created March 1865(Before Lincoln’s assassination) It was to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees establish a place in postwar society. Active until the early 1870s, [In the early 1866, that Congress voted to extend the bureau and give it funding and was the first federal agency in U.S. history it provided direct payments to assist those in poverty and to foster social welfare]. Congress also allowed the bureau to authorized agents to investigate southern abuses or abusers. The Bureau helped develop social institutions, such as schools and immediate problems of survival like food and housing for refugees and newly free black people.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

Legislation passed by Congress nullifying Black Codes and affirming that African Americans should have equal benefit of the law. It declared that formerly enslaved people. The act declared that all black or formerly enslaved people were citizens and would be granted equal protection and right of contract with full access to the courts. This bill was vetoed by Johnson along with the Freedmen’s Bureau but both were overrode by Republicans in Congress passing the Act in April 1866.

14th Ammendment (1868)

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 making all native-born or naturalized persons were U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging(cutting or taking away) the rights of national citizens(these is the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness(property)), The 14th Amendment also declared that when people’s rights were at stake, the national citizenship usurp the citizenship in a state. Meaning that the national government was more powerful than the state when it came to citizenship.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

An act dividing 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(black men) and deny voting rights to leading ex-Confederates. Military commanders of each district was required to register all eligible adult males, black as well as white; supervise state constitutional conventions; and ensure that new constitutions guaranteed black suffrage.

15th Amendment (1870)

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870 forbidding states to deny the citizens the rights to vote on grounds of race, color, or "previous condition of servitude(former enslaved people or any form of servitude)". The amendment left room for a poll tax(paid for the privilege of voting) and literacy requirements.

Minor v. Happersett

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

sharecropping

A system used on southern farms after the Civil War(or during the Reconstruction years) in which farmers/freedmen(both white and black farmers) worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops. Landwoners would provide tenants with the seed and other needed farm supplies to farm their rented land and the tenants would pay the landowner with a “share’ of their crops. The new form of servitude failed because

Scalawags

A derogatory term for Southerners who were working with the North to buy up land from desperate Southerners

Carpetbaggers

A derogatory term applied to Northerners who migrated south during the Reconstruction to take advantage of opportunities to advance their own fortunes by buying up land from desperate Southerners and by manipulating new black voters to obtain lucrative government contracts.

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 Right 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

The political ideology of individual liberty, private property, a competitive market economy, free trade, and limited government. The idea being that the less government does, the better, particularly in reference to economic policies such as tariffs and incentives for industrial development. Attacking corruption and defending private property, late-nineteenth-century liberals generally called for elite governance and questioned the advisability of full democratic participation.

Credit 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.

"Redemption"

The name given to the political movement in the South when Democrats worked to undo gains by Republican Party and gain back control of the Southern govt. during the Reconstruction Era of the Civil War.

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 KKK 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. interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment's "privileges or immunities" clause, essentially limiting the federal government's ability to protect individual civil rights against state infringement

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.

Andrew Johnson (incl. Impeachment)

17th President of the United States, A Southerner form Tennessee, as V.P. when Lincoln was killed, he became president. He opposed radical Republicans who passed Reconstruction Acts over his veto. The first U.S. president to be impeached, he survived the Senate removal by only one vote. He was a very weak president.

Charles Sumner

A leader of the Radical republicans along with Thaddeus Stevens. He was from Massachusetts and was in the senate. His two main goals were breaking the power of wealthy planters and ensuring that freedmen could vote

Hayes and the end of Reconstruction

federal troops were pulled out of the South after reconstruction but some of the old habits continued

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. The crop-lien system worked because

• Farmers would borrow money from local merchants or landlords

• The farmers would use their future crops as collateral(an item of value that secure a loan so that lender if the borrower does not pay for the loan can sell that value and recoup its losses) for the loan

• When the crops were harvested, the farmers would give the crops to the merchant landlord to pay off the loan

• The system trapped farmers in a permanent debt

• The system led to an overproduction of cotton and further declines in the price

• The system was used to oppress poor white southerners and newly freed slaves

• Sharecroppers once indebted became easy targets for exorbitant prices, unfair interest rates, and crooked bookeppine

Transcontinental Railroad

The railway line completed on May 10, 1869, that connected the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines, enabling goods to move by railway from the eastern United States all the way to California.

protective tariff

A tax duty on foreign producers of goods imported into the U.S.: tariffs gave US manufacturers competitive advantage in America's gigantic domestic market.

Burlingame Treaty

An 1868 treaty that guaranteed the rights of U.S. missionaries in China and set official terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers to work in the United States.

Munn v. Illinois

An 1877 Supreme Court case that affirmed that states could regulate key businesses, such as railroads and grain elevators, if those businesses were "clothed in the public interest."

Gold Standard

The practice of backing a country's currency with its reserves of gold. In 1873 the United States, following Great Britain and other European nations, began converting to the gold standard.

Crime of 1873 (IF IM WRONG TAKE IT UP WITH THE ULTIMATE VOCAB LIST)

A term used by those critical of an 1873 law directing the U.S. Treasury to cease minting silver dollars, retire Civil War-era greenbacks, and replace them with notes backed by the gold standard from an expanded system of national banks.

Homestead Act

The 1862 act that gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property. This policy led to the rapid development of the American West after the Civil War; facing arid conditions in the West, however, many homesteaders found themselves unable to live on their land.

land-grant colleges

Authorized by the Morrill Act of 1862, these were founded to broaden educational opportunities and foster technical and scientific expertise. They were funded by the sale of federal lands to raise money for higher education.

Comstock Lode

A vein of silver ore discovered in Nevada in 1859, leading to one of the West's most important mining booms. The lode was so rich that a Confederate expedition tried unsuccessfully to capture it during the Civil War; its output significantly altered the ratio of silver in circulation, leading to changes in monetary policy.

Long Drive

the practice of herding cattle over long distances, typically from Texas ranches to railroad hubs in Kansas, where the cattle could then be transported to eastern markets for slaughter, a key part of the westward expansion and the development of the American cattle industry in the late 19th century. 

"rain follows the plow"

now-discredited theory from the late 19th century that claimed that cultivating land in semi-arid regions, like the American Great Plains, would increase rainfall by adding moisture to the soil and thus humidifying the atmosphere, essentially believing that farming could directly cause more rain to fall

Exodusters

African Americans who walked or rode out of the Deep South following the Civil War, many settling on farms in Kansas in hopes of finding peace and prosperity.

Yellowstone National Park

Established in 1872 by Congress, Yellowstone was the United States's first national park.

Sand Creek Massacre

The November 29, 1864, massacre of more than a hundred peaceful Cheyennes, largely women and children, by John M. Chivington's Colorado militia.

Dawes Severalty Act

The 1887 law that gave Native Americans severalty (individual ownership of land) by dividing reservations into homesteads. The law was a disaster for native peoples, resulting over several decades in the loss of 66 percent of lands held by Indians at the time of the law's passage.

Battle of Little Big Horn

The 1876 battle begun when American cavalry under George Armstrong Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Indians who resisted removal to a reservation. Custer's force was annihilated, but with whites calling for U.S. soldiers to retaliate, the Native American military victory was short-lived.

Wounded Knee

The 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians by American cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Sent to suppress the Ghost Dance, soldiers caught up with fleeing Lakotas and killed as many as 300.

Chief Joseph (NOT IN BOOK FILL IN LATER MAYBE?????)

a prominent Native American leader of the Nez Perce tribe who is most recognized for leading his people on a desperate retreat across the Rocky Mountains in 1877 to avoid being forced onto a reservation

Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull" refers to a prominent Native American leader of the Sioux tribe, most notably known for his role in leading the Native American forces against General George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, marking a significant victory against the U.S. military during the Great Sioux Wars; he is considered a symbol of resistance to white settlement on Native American lands. 

George Armstrong Custer

Former General during the Civil War, he set out in 1874 with his Seventh Cavalry to return the Plains Indians to the Sioux reservation. Defeated by an army that outnumbered his men 10 to 1.

Buffalo Bill Cody

This former pony express rider and Indian fighter and hero of popular dime novels for children traveled around the U.S. and Europe and put on popular Wild West shows. The shows included re-enactments of Indian battles and displays of horsemanship and riflery

Fredrick Jackson Turner (and his "Frontier Thesis")

Historian during the 1890s who wrote the frontier thesis, which argued that the continuous existence of the American frontier had shaped the character of the nation, and the end of this frontier marked the end the first chapter in American history.

Seward's folly

Secretary of State William Seward's negotiation of the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. At the time everyone thought this was a mistake to buy Alaska the "ice box" but it turned out to be the biggest bargain since the Louisiana purchase

trade with Japan and China

cattlemen

They were essentially cowboys. They would herd cattle from one location to another seasonally. They were usually blacks and latinos who would work for hours with little pay. They brought the cattle to rail lines so they could be shipped. They would become the vision of what the west was like.

women in the west (pg. 520)

women in the west had more rights than those in the east such as voting writes similarly to the west they were expected to have family stubilalte

bison (Indians and railroads)

Bison were animals that the Indians used for food, clothings. Railroads conductors hated these bison becuase they were distributing them. So they killed many of them which hurt the Natives. the construction of the transcontinental railroad significantly contributed to the near extinction of the bison population, which was a critical part of the Plains Indians' way of life, ultimately forcing them onto reservations and disrupting their traditional culture; essentially, the railroad enabled large-scale bison hunting, decimating their herds and severely impacting Native American tribes who relied on them for sustenance and survival.

Indian boarding schools

Indians were forced to attend to learn new customs, religions and language of the "white men"

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock

A 1903 Supreme Court ruling that Congress could make whatever Indian policies it chose, ignoring all existing treaties.

Ghost Dance Movement

Religion of the late 1880s and early 1890s that combined elements of Christianity and traditional Native American religion. It fostered Plains Indians' hope that they could, through sacred dances, resurrect the great bison herds and call up a storm to drive whites back across the Atlantic.

Geronimo

Apache leader who fought U.S. soldiers to keep his land. He led a revolt of 4,000 of his people after they were forced to move to a reservation in Arizona.