Chapter 16 Flashcards
(18 cards)
Lost Cause
The phrase many white southerners applied to their Civil War defeat. They viewed the war as a noble cause and their defeat as only a temporary setback in the South’s ultimate vindication.
Freedmen’s Bureau
Agency established by Congress in March 1865 to provide social, educational, and economic services, advice, and protection to former slaves and destitute whites; lasted 7 years.
Field Order No. 15
Order by General William T. Sherman in January 1865 to set aside abandoned land along the southern Atlantic coast for 40-acre grants to freedmen; rescinded by President Andrew Johnson later that year.
Southern Homestead Act
Largely unsuccessful law passed in 1866 that gave black people preferential access to public lands in 5 southern states.
Sharecropping
Labor system that evolved during and after Reconstruction whereby landowners furnished laborers with a house, farm animals, and tools and advanced credit in exchange for a share of the laborers’ crop.
Black codes
Laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free blacks before the Civil War. Also, during the Reconstruction era, laws passed by newly elected southern state legislators to control black labor, mobility, and employment.
14th amendment
Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in April 1866 incorporating some of the features of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It prohibited states from violating the civil rights of their citizens and offered states the choice of allowing black people to vote or losing representation in Congress.
Congressional Reconstruction
Name given to the period 1867-1870 when the Republican-dominated Congress controlled Reconstruction era policy. It is sometimes known as Radical Reconstruction, after the radical faction of the Republican Party.
Tenure of Office Act
Passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1867 to limit presidential interference with its policies, the act prohibited the president from removing certain officeholders without the Senate’s consent. President Andrew Johnson, angered at what he believed to be an unconstitutional attack on presidential authority, deliberately violated the act by firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The House responded by approving articled of impeachment against a president for the first time in American history.
15th amendment
Passed by Congress in 1869, guaranteed the right of American men to vote, regardless of race.
Scalawags
Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers and well-off merchants and planters, who supported the southern Republican Party during Reconstruction for diverse reasons; a disparaging term.
Carpetbaggers
Pejorative term to describe northern transplants to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who stayed in the South after the war.
Union League
A Republican Party organization in the northern cities that became an important organizing device among freedmen in southern cities after 1865.
Ku Klux Klan
Perhaps the most prominent of the vigilante groups that terrorized black people in the South during Reconstruction Era, founded by Confederate veterans in 1866.
Redeemers
Southern Democrats who wrestled control of governments in the former Confederacy from Republicans, often through electoral fraud and violence, beginning in 1870.
Compromise of 1877
The congressional settling of the 1876 election that installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and gave Democrats control of all state governments in the South.
Slaughterhouse cases
Group of cases resulting in one sweeping decision by the US Supreme Court in 1873 that contradicted the intent of the 14th amendment by decreeing that most citizenship rights remained under state, not federal, control.
United States v. Cruikshank
Supreme Court ruling of 1876 that overturned the convictions of some of those responsible for the Colfax Massacre, ruling that the Enforcement Act applied only to violations of black rights by states, not individuals.
