American History- The Reconstruction Era

Radical Republicans

Congressmen who identified with the abolitionist cause and sought swift emancipation of the enslaved, punishment of the rebels, and tight controls over former Confederate States.

Freedmen’s Bureau

A Federal Reconstruction agency established to protect the legal rights of formerly enslaved people and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and land ownership.

Presidential Reconstruction Plan

President Andrew Johnson’s plan to require Southern States to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, disqualify wealthy former Confederates from voting, and to appoint a Unionist governor.

Black Codes

Laws passed in southern states to restrict the rights of formerly enslaved people.

Fourteenth Amendment (1866)

An amendment to the U.S. constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens, including formerly enslaved people.

Congressional Reconstruction

A phase of Reconstruction directed by Radical Republicans in Congress and based on the Military Reconstruction Act; primary goal was to protect citizenship rights of freed people.

Fifteenth Amendment (1870)

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbidding states to deny any male citizen the right to vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

sharecropping

A farming system developed after the Civil War by which landless workers farmed land in exchange with the landowner for farm supplies and a share of the crop.

Ku Klux Klan

A secret terrorist organization founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, In 1866 targeting formerly enslaved people who voted and held political offices, as well as people the KKK labeled as carpetbaggers and scalawags.

greenbacks

Paper money issued during the Civil War that sparked currency debates after the war.

Panic of 1873

The financial collapse triggered by President Grant’s efforts to withdraw greenbacks circulation and transition the post- Civil War economy back to hard currency.

Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)

A pivotal Supreme Court decision that limited the “privileges and immunities” secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and thus eroded the federal government’s power to protect the citizenship rights of Black Southerners.

Compromise of 1877

A secret deal forged by congressional leaders to resolve the disputed election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for his pledge to remove federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.