Legends and Realities: The South and the West (1865-1900)

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, legislation, and events from Chapter 17 on the Post-Civil War South and West.

Lost Cause legend

A sanitized version of Southern history fashioned by former Confederate leaders, poets, and writers that romanticized plantation culture, insisted secession was a defense of states' rights rather than slavery, and was grounded in White supremacy.

New South

A postwar vision championed by Henry Woodfin Grady and southern boosters calling for industrial development, agricultural diversification, and a displacement of the old planter elite to modernize the southern economy.

American Tobacco Company

A major corporation established in 1890 by James Buchanan 'Buck' Duke after forcing his four largest competitors into a merge, eventually controlling nine-tenths of the nation's cigarette production.

Sharecropping

An agricultural labor system in which landless farmers worked a landowner's land in exchange for shelter and a portion of the harvest, relying on credit from crossroads merchants and resulting in chronic indebtedness.

Mississippi Plan (1890)

A series of state constitutional amendments setting requirements for voting—residency, tax payment (including a poll tax), literacy tests, and crime disqualifications—designed to disenfranchise African American voters.

Grandfather clause

A constitutional provision created in Louisiana in 1898 that permitted illiterate White men to vote if their fathers or grandfathers were eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, prior to the enfranchisement of Black citizens.

Solid South

A political term describing the overwhelming dominance of the Democratic Party in the Southern states following the suppression and virtual elimination of Black voters and the Republican Party in the region.

Civil Rights Cases (1883)

A set of Supreme Court decisions ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination by state governments ('no State'), but did not prohibit private individuals or businesses from discriminating.

Separate but equal

A legal principle asserting that racially segregated public facilities were constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal in quality.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state laws mandating racial segregation in public accommodations, establishing the legal precedent of 'separate but equal.'

Jim Crow laws

Statutes enacted across the South requiring racial segregation in public facilities such as railcars, schools, parks, and restaurants, named after a 19th-century minstrel show caricature.

Wilmington Insurrection (1898)

An armed assault in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which White supremacists destroyed a Black-owned newspaper and forcibly ousted the elected biracial city government, replacing it with an un-elected White administration.

Atlanta Compromise

W.E.B. Du Bois's term for Booker T. Washington's 1895 speech in which Washington urged African Americans to focus on vocational education and economic self-sufficiency rather than demanding immediate civil rights and social equality.

Double consciousness

A psychological concept articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) describing the dual identity felt by Black Americans, split between being American and being Black in an oppressive society.

Exodusters

Thousands of Black southern migrants who moved westward to Kansas and other states in the late 1870s seeking refuge from southern racism, political disenfranchisement, and economic hardship.

Vaqueros

Spanish-speaking livestock herders in Mexico and the Southwest whose specialized skills in riding, roping, and ranching formed the basis for American cowboy culture.

Comstock Lode

A massive gold and silver lode discovered in 1859 near Gold Hill, Nevada, which yielded over $300 million in precious metals and accelerated western hard-rock mining.

Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

An attack led by Colonel John M. Chivington in which 700 militiamen slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated 165 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children at Sand Creek, Colorado.

Buffalo soldiers

The name given by Native Americans, specifically the Cheyenne, to the Black soldiers serving in the all-Black army cavalry regiments established by Congress on the western frontier in 1866.

Great Sioux War

A fifteen-battle military conflict in 1876-1877 between the U.S. Army and allied Sioux and Cheyenne forces, triggered by miners trespassing into the Black Hills gold fields.

Ghost Dance movement

A spiritual practice begun in 1888 by Paiute prophet Wovoka, involving ceremonial dances in sacred shirts believed to protect against bullets, reunite Native Americans with ancestors, and restore lost tribal lands.

Battle of Wounded Knee

A tragic massacre on December 29, 1890, in South Dakota where U.S. troops opened fire on a Lakota Sioux camp, killing over 150 unarmed Native American men, women, and children.

Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

Federal legislation sponsored by Senator Henry L. Dawes that divided tribal reservation land into individual homestead parcels, forcing Native American assimilation and leading to the loss of 86 million acres of tribal land.

Las Gorras Blancas

A resistance organization formed in New Mexico in 1889 by the Herrera brothers that engaged in night-riding tactics to cut barbed wire and destroy ranching property belonging to Anglo land grabbers.

Frontier thesis

A historical argument put forth by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 proposing that the continuous settling and taming of free western land had uniquely forged the American national character and democratic values.