Reconstruction Era: Key Figures, Laws, and Social Changes in U.S. History

Andrew Johnson

Lincoln's successor; lenient Reconstruction; clashed with Radical Republicans; first president impeached.

Atlanta Compromise (1895)

Booker T. Washington's speech urging Black economic self-help in exchange for limited civil rights.

Black Codes

Southern laws restricting freedmen's rights; forced labor system similar to slavery.

Booker T. Washington

Black educator; advocated vocational training, gradualism, and the Atlanta Compromise.

Carpetbaggers

Northern Republicans who moved South during Reconstruction; often accused of exploiting conditions.

Charles Sumner

Radical Republican senator; advocate for civil and voting rights; famously beaten by Preston Brooks in 1856.

Compromise of 1877

Ended Reconstruction; Hayes became president in exchange for removing federal troops from South.

Enforcement Acts (1870-71)

Federal laws protecting Black voting rights and targeting Ku Klux Klan violence.

Fifteenth Amendment (1870)

Prohibited denying voting rights based on race.

Fourteenth Amendment (1868)

Defined citizenship, guaranteed equal protection and due process.

Freedmen's Bureau

Federal agency aiding former enslaved people with food, education, and labor contracts.

Jim Crow Laws

Segregation laws in the South after Reconstruction; enforced racial separation.

Ku Klux Klan

White supremacist terrorist group targeting Black people and Republicans; aimed to restore white Democratic control.

New South

Idea of modernizing the Southern economy through industry while maintaining white supremacy.

Panic of 1873

Severe economic depression; weakened Northern support for Reconstruction.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Upheld 'separate but equal' segregation; legalized Jim Crow until 1954.

Radical Republicans

Congressional group advocating harsh Reconstruction, civil rights, and punishment for Confederates.

Redeemers

White Southern Democrats who regained control of state governments by ending Reconstruction reforms.

Reconstruction Bills

Radical Republican measures dividing South into military districts and enforcing rights for freedmen.

Scalawags

Southern whites who supported Reconstruction and the Republican Party.

Sharecropping

Labor system where freedpeople farmed land for a share of the crop; often led to debt peonage.

Thirteenth Amendment (1865)

Abolished slavery in the United States.

Wade-Davis Bill (1864)

Radical Republican plan for strict Reconstruction; required majority loyalty oath; vetoed by Lincoln.

William Seward

Lincoln and Johnson's Secretary of State; purchased Alaska ('Seward's Folly'); key diplomatic figure.