Reconstruction Vocab

Impeach

To formally charge a public official with misconduct in office

Hiram Revels

- A clergyman and teacher who became the nation's first black senator in 1870. He completed the term of Jefferson Davis.

Andrew Johnson

17th President of the United States, A Southerner form Tennessee, as V.P. when Lincoln was killed, he became president. He opposed radical Republicans who passed Reconstruction Acts over his veto. The first U.S. president to be impeached, he survived the Senate removal by only one vote. He was a very weak president.

Freedmen's Bureau

1865 - Agency set up to aid former slaves in adjusting themselves to freedom. It furnished food and clothing to needy blacks and helped them get jobs

Fifteenth Amendment

1870 constitutional amendment that guaranteed voting rights regardless of race or previous condition of servitude

Rutherford B. Hayes

19th president of the united states, was famous for being part of the Hayes-Tilden election in which electoral votes were contested in 4 states, most corrupt election in US history

Thaddeus Stevens

A Radical Republican who believed in harsh punishments for the South. Leader of the Radical Republicans in Congress.

Fourteenth Amendment

A constitutional amendment giving full rights of citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, except for American Indians.

scalawag

A derogatory term for Southerners who were working with the North to buy up land from desperate Southerners, southern whites who supported republican policy throught reconstruction

carpetbagger

A northerner who went to the South immediately after the Civil War; especially one who tried to gain political advantage or other advantages from the disorganized situation in southern states;

Ku Klux Klan

A secret society created by white southerners in 1866 that used terror and violence to keep African Americans from obtaining their civil rights.

tenant farming

A system in which farm workers supply their own tools and rent farmland for cash.

sharecropping

A system used on southern farms after the Civil War in which farmers worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops.

redemption

A term used to describe a political alliance in the southern part of the US. Made up of people who wanted to drive out the freedmen, carpetbaggers and scalawags.

Radical Republicans

After the Civil War, a group that believed the South should be harshly punished and thought that Lincoln was sometimes too compassionate towards the South.

Compromise of 1877

Agreement to settle the disputed presidential elections of 1876; Democrats agreed to accept Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president in return for the removal of federal troops from the South

Samuel J. Tilden

Democratic candidate for the US presidency in the disputed election of 1876, the most controversial American election of the 19th century.

panic of 1873

Economic panic caused by over expansion and over speculation, causing the nation's largest bank to collapse (and bringing with it many smaller banks, business firms and the stock market)

home rule

Power delegated by the state to a local unit of government to manage its own affairs.

Wade-Davis Bill

an 1864 plan for Reconstruction that denied the right to vote or hold office for anyone who had fought for the Confederacy...Lincoln refused to sign this bill thinking it was too harsh.

black codes

laws passed in the South just after the Civil War aimed at controlled freedmen and enabling plantation owners to exploit African American workers.

Reconstruction

the period after the Civil War in the United States when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union