Chapter 15

Redeemers

Post-Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy

The phrase "forty acres and a mule" is derived from

Sherman's Field Order 15.

"Scalawags" was a derogatory term used to describe southern white Republicans.

True

The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871

defined crimes that deprived citizens of their civil and political rights as federal offenses.

What did three amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee to former slaves shortly after the Civil War?

freedom from slavery; recognition as citizens; and the vote for adult black men

The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

prohibited federal and state governments from denying any citizen the vote because of race.

The Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution helped to create

the first national biracial democracy in world history.

Tenure of Office Act

1867 law that required the president to obtain Senate approval to remove any official whose appointment had also required Senate approval; President Andrew Johnson's violation of the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton led to Johnson's impeachment.

Fourteenth Amendment

1868 constitutional amendment that guaranteed rights of citizenship to former slaves, in words similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

impeachment

Bringing charges against a public official; for example, the House of Representatives can impeach a president for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" by majority vote, and after the trial the Senate can remove the president by a vote of two-thirds. Two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached and tried before the Senate; neither was convicted.

Fifteenth Amendment

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from discriminating in voting privileges on the basis of race.

crop lien

Credit extended by merchants to tenants based on their future crops; under this system, high interest rates and the uncertainties of farming often led to inescapable debts

Post-Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy

Deal made by a Republican and Democratic special congressional commission to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from involvement in politics in the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.

carpetbaggers

Derisive term for northern emigrants who participated in the Republican governments of the Reconstruction South

Ku Klux Klan

Group organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 to terrorize former slaves who voted and held political offices during Reconstruction; a revived organization in the 1910s and 1920s that stressed white, Anglo-Saxon, fundamentalist Protestant supremacy; revived a third time to fight the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the South.

Which statement accurately describes sharecropping?

It allowed a black family to rent part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year.

What was the significance of the Reconstruction Act of March 1867?

It divided the South into five military districts and called for the creation of new state governments, with black men given the right to vote.

Black Codes

Laws passed from 1865 to 1866 in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment

the Freedmen's Bureau

Reconstruction agency established in 1865 to protect the legal rights of former slaves and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and landowning.

scalawags

Southern white Republicans—some former Unionists—who supported Reconstruction governments.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

The last piece of Reconstruction legislation, which outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation such as hotels and theaters. Many parts of it were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.

In President Andrew Johnson's view, African-Americans ought to play what part in Reconstruction?

They should have no role in shaping policies

Enforcement Acts

Three laws passed in 1870 and 1871 that tried to eliminate the Ku Klux Klan by outlawing it and other such terrorist societies; the laws allowed the president to deploy the army for that purpose.

Black Codes sometimes assigned black children to work for their former masters without parental consent.

True

During Reconstruction, some 2,000 African-Americans held public office, among them fourteen in the U.S. House of Representatives and two U.S. senators.

True

The KKK was founded in 1866 as a secret society and served, in effect, as a military arm of the Democratic Party.

True

The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s is sometimes called the "Second Reconstruction."

True

sharecropping

Type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers—often former slaves—farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop.

A "carpetbagger" was

a northerner who settled in the South after the war.

One of the main purposes of the Freedmen's Bureau was to

ensure a working system of labor relations between former slaves and former slaveholders.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because

it outlawed discrimination in voting based on race but not gender.

The Black Codes were

laws that sought to regulate the lives of former slaves in the South.

Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era shared the view that

the Union victory created an opportunity to institutionalize the principle of equal rights regardless of race.

What activity made the postemancipation experience in the United States unique from other societies and became central to the former slaves' desire for empowerment and equality?

the right to vote within two years of the end of slavery

Black Americans who refused to sign labor contracts to work for whites during Reconstruction

were often arrested and hired out to white landowners.