SS Vocabulary - Reconstruction Era

Freedman

The men and women who had been enslaved.

Reconstruction

The rebuilding of the South after the Civil War.

Amnesty

A government pardon.

Freedmen’s Bureau

A government agency founded during Reconstruction to help former slaves.

Thirteenth Amendment

An 1856 amendment to the United States Constitution that banned slavery throughout the nation.

Black Codes

The southerner laws that severely limited the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

Radical Republicans

A member of Congress during Reconstruction who wante dto take power from the wealthy southerner plantation owners and ensure that freedmen received the right to vote.

Fourteenth Amendment

An 1868 amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantees equal protection of the laws.

Reconstruction Act

An 1867 law that threw out the southerner state government that refuse to ratify the Fourteenth amendment.

Impeach

To bring charges of serious wrongdoing against a public official.

Fifteenth Amendment

An 1869 amendment to the United States Constitution that forbids any state to deny African Americans the right to vote because of race.

Scalawag

A white southerner who supported the Republicans during the Reconstruction.  

Carpetbagger

An uncomplimentary nickname for a northerner who went to the South after the Civil War.

Ku Klux Klan

A secret society organized inthe South after the Civil War to resseat white supremacy by means of violence.

Sharecropper

A perosn who rents a plot of land from another person and farms it in exchange for a share of the crop.

Compromise of 1877

An agreement by Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes to end Reconstruction in return for congressional Democrats accepting his inauguration as President after the disputed election of 1860.

Poll tax

A tax required before a person can vote.

Literacy test

An examination to see if the person can read and write; used in the past to restrict voting rights. 

Grandfather clause

In the post-Reconstruction South, a law that excused a voter from voting from a literacy test if his grandfather had been eligible to vote in January 1, 1867.

Segregation

The legal separation of people based on racial, ethnic, or other differences.

Jim Crow laws

Laws that seperated people of different races in public places in the South.

Plessy v. Ferguson

An 1896 court case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public facilities was legal as long as the facilitie were equal.

“New South”

A term used to describe the South in the late 1800s when efforts were being made to expand the economy by building up industry.