Chapter 15

scalawags

Southern officials that hadn't supported the confederacy. They supported freedom for black slaves and held positions in government that wealthy southern planters would have normally held

Oliver O Howard

Union officer in the American Civil War (1861-65) who headed the Freedmen's Bureau (1865-72) to help rehabilitate former slaves during the period of Reconstruction.

Horace Greeley

United States journalist with political ambitions (1811-1872)

Presidential reconstruction

Upon Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who had been elected with Lincoln in 1864 as vice president, became president. Johnson rejected the Radical program of Reconstruction and instead appointed his own governors and tried to finish reconstruction by the end of 1865.

Civil service reform

is an 1883 federal law that abolished the United States Civil Service Commission. It eventually placed most federal employees on the merit system and marked the end of the so-called "spoils system."

The Wade-Davis Bill

of 1864 was a bill proposed for the Reconstruction of the South written by two Radical Republicans, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland.

The Civil Rights Act

of 1866, 14 Stat. 27-30, enacted April 9, 1866, was the first United States federal law to define US citizenship and affirmed that all citizens were equally protected by the law.[1] It was mainly intended to protect the civil rights of African-Americans, in the wake of the American Civil War.

The Liberal Republican Party

of the United States was a political party that was organized in Cincinnati in May 1872, to oppose the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant and his Radical Republican supporters in the presidential election of 1872.

James Buchanan Duke

was a U.S. tobacco and electric power industrialist best known for the introduction of modern cigarette manufacture and marketing, and his involvement with Duke University. Wikipedia

The crop-lien system

was a credit system that became widely used by cotton farmers in the United States in the South from the 1860s to the 1930s. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did not own the land they worked obtained supplies and food on credit from local merchants.

Henry Woodfin Grady

was a journalist and orator who helped reintegrate the states of the former Confederacy into the Union after the American Civil War. Grady encouraged the industrialization of the South. Wikipedia

Booker Taliaferro Washington

was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. Wikipedia

Joel Chandler Harris

was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years. Wikipedia

John Wilkes Booth

was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865.

The Atlanta compromise

was an agreement struck in 1895 between Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, and other African-American leaders, and Southern white leaders.

Andrew Johnson

was the 17th President of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson became president as he was Vice President at the time of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

Jim Crow

was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875

(18 Stat. 335-337), sometimes called Enforcement Act or Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction Era that guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and prohibited exclusion from jury service.

The Fourteenth Amendment

(Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War.

The Fifteenth Amendment

(Amendment XV) to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

A poll tax

(head tax or capitation tax, in U.S. English) is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount applied to an individual in accordance with the census (as opposed to a percentage of income). Head taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments from ancient times until the 19th century.

Plessy v. Ferguson

, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal."

New South

, New South Democracy or New South Creed is a phrase that has been used intermittently since the American Civil War to describe the American South, after 1877. Wikipedia

Tenure of Office Act 1866

- Enacted by radical Congress, it forbade the president from removing civil officers without consent of the Senate. It was meant to prevent Johnson from removing radicals from office. Johnson broke this law when he fired a radical Republican from his cabinet, and he was impeached for this "crime".

"Forty Acres and a Mule"

During the final months of the Civil War, tens of thousands of freed slaves left their plantations to follow General William T. Sherman's victorious Union Army troops across Georgia and the Carolinas.

Ida B. Wells

A daughter of slaves, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. A journalist, Wells led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s, and went on to found and become integral in groups striving for African-American justice. She died in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois.

carpetbaggers

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;

Whiskey Ring

During the Grant administration, a group of officials were importing whiskey and using their offices to avoid paying the taxes on it, cheating the treasury out of millions of dollars.

Lincolns plan for reconstruction

Because Lincoln believed that the South had never legally seceded from the Union, his plan for Reconstruction was based on forgiveness. He thus issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in 1863 to announce his intention to reunite the once-united states.

Grantism

Grants way of dealing with the presidency, which disillusioned many Northern Republicans, included his continuing support of Radical Reconstruction policies, and the corruption within the Grant administration itself.

the Redeemers

In United States history, the Redeemers were a white political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. Redeemers were the southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats, the conservative, pro-business faction in the Democratic Party, who pursued a policy of Redemption, seeking to oust the Radical Republican coalition of freedmen, "carpetbaggers", and "scalawags". They generally were led by the rich landowners, businessmen and professionals, and dominated Southern politics in most areas from the 1870s to the 1910.

Congressional reconstruction

In early 1866, Congressional Republicans, appalled by mass killing of ex-slaves and adoption of restrictive black codes, seized control of Reconstruction from President Johnson.

Working woman's association

Its stated purpose was to create "an association of working-women which might act for the interests of its members, in the same manner as the associations of workingmen now regulate the wages, etc., of those belonging to them."

Panic Of '73

Postwar years brought accelerated industrialization, rapid economic expansion and frantic speculation. Railroads led the speculative boom. The largest bank, run by Jay Cooke, shut down after Northern Pacific security bonds were outrun by construction costs. The stock market collapsed and smaller banks shut down. Devestating 5 year depression followed.

Sharecropping landowners

Sharecropping landowners divided their land and gave each worker a few acres, alond with seed and tools. When crops were harvested, each worker gave a share of his crop, usuallly half, to the landowner.

"Seward's Folly,"

Skeptics had dubbed the purchase of Alaska but the former Secretary of State was vindicated when a major gold deposit was discovered in the Yukon in 1896, and Alaska became the gateway to the Klondike gold fields.

thirteenth amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

freedmen's bureau

The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, popularly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established in 1865 by Congress to help former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-65).

Tenant

a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord. a person holding real property by private ownership.

Tuskegee University

a private, historically black university located in Tuskegee, Alabama, USA; established by Booker T. Washington. The campus has been designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark. Wikipedia

Credit Mobilier Scandal

a scandal that formed when a group of union pacific railroad insiders formed the credit mibilier construction company and then hired themselves to build the railroad with inflated wages. they bribed several congressmen and the vide president to keep the scandal from going public.

Ku Klux Klan

a secret society of white Southerners in the United States, White-supremacist group formed by six former Confederate officers after the Civil War. Name is essentially Greek for "Circle of Friends". Group eventually turned to terrorist attacks on blacks. The original Klan was disbanded in 1869, but was later resurrected by white supremacists in 1915.

Literacy test

an examination to determine whether a person meets the literacy requirements for voting, serving in the armed forces, etc.; a test of one's ability to read and write.

Lynching

an extra-legal trial and punishment by an informal group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob, often by hanging, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate a minority group

The Alabama Claims

were a series of claims for damages by the United States government brought in 1869 against the British government as a result of ships, such as the Alabama, it built that aided the Confederate cause in seizing American merchant ships during the American Civil War.

Black Codes

were the laws passed by Southern state legislatures to define the legal place of blacks in society after the Civil War. In Texas the Eleventh Legislature produced these codes in 1866.