Reconstruction Era Lecture Flashcards

Vocabulary terms, definitions, and key concepts covering the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 as outlined in the lecture.

Appomattox, Virginia

The site where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, settling that the Union would be preserved and slavery was dead.

Reconstruction

A national experience and political period lasting over ten years after the Civil War during which the South's power structure, land use, labor systems, and citizenship rights were contested.

General Sherman's Field Order No. 15

An early 1865 order that temporarily allowed 20,000 ex-slaves in coastal Georgia and South Carolina to farm confiscated plantation land, originating the slogan '40 acres and a mule'.

Freedmen's Bureau

A federal agency established to assist freed people with supplies, medical aid, and schools, and to oversee one-year labor contracts while moving the South toward a wage labor system.

Sharecropping

A compromise labor system where individual families farmed family-sized plots in exchange for a fixed share of the crop, which frequently led to deep debt peonage.

Ten Percent Plan

President Abraham Lincoln's December 1863 readmission proposal requiring 10% of a state's 1860 voters to take a loyalty oath to the Union and abolish slavery.

Andrew Johnson

The 17th U.S. President and former Tennessee senator who offered full amnesty to former Confederates, granted thousands of pardons, and opposed Republican civil rights measures.

Thirteenth Amendment

The constitutional amendment passed during the Civil War that officially abolished slavery across the United States.

Black Codes

Laws passed by post-war Southern state governments in late 1865 designed to force freed people into landless agricultural labor by penalizing vagrancy and limiting civil rights.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

Federal legislation passed over President Johnson's veto in April 1866 that defined all persons born in the U.S. as citizens and guaranteed basic legal rights such as suing, testifying, and inheriting property.

Fourteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in June 1866 granting full citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.

Reconstruction Act of March 1867

Law passed over Johnson's veto that placed former Confederate states under military rule until they framed new state constitutions granting black men the right to vote and ratified the 14th Amendment.

Union League

A Civil War veterans' organization that expanded across the South into a major Republican support network, building schools and churches, organizing militias, and advocating fair labor contracts.

Scalawags

A disparaging term for Southern white yeoman farmers from upland areas who aligned with the Republican Party during Reconstruction.

Carpetbaggers

A disparaging term for Northerners, including ex-military officers and reformers, who moved South after the Civil War for political or economic reasons.

Fifteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870 prohibiting federal or state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Ku Klux Klan

An organization founded in Tennessee in 1866 by Confederate veterans that functioned as a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, using political terrorism to subvert Reconstruction.

Enforcement Acts

Federal laws passed by Congress in response to Klan violence that established severe penalties for politically motivated acts of terrorism.

Colfax Massacre

An 1873 violent attack in Louisiana where a white militia attacked black men defending a parish courthouse on Easter Sunday, leaving up to 100 black men dead.

Bargain of 1877

An agreement resolving the disputed 1876 presidential election in which Democrats allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to become president in exchange for withdrawing all remaining federal troops from the South.

Exodusters

Tens of thousands of freed people who migrated out of the South to states like Kansas and Oklahoma following the end of Reconstruction.