Chapter 16: Reconstruction
The sharecropping system that came into being after the Civil War ultimately caused which of the following?
African Americans found themselves caught in an ever-increasing spiral of debts.
Which of the following is viewed by modern scholars as President Johnson' most serious and indictable offense?
His systematic efforts to block the enforcement of the Reconstruction Act of 1867.
Which of the following is true concerning African Americans who won public office during Reconstruction?
Many came from the prewar African American elite.
Which of the following was the most lasting failure of the southern Reconstruction governments?
They failed to alter the southern social structure or redistribute the region's wealth.
The compromises that produced the Fourteenth Amendment are most obvious in the section of the amendment that
allowed the southern states to decide whether to extend voting rights to African American men.
"Members (of Congress) joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country," This statement was made in response to
approval of the proposed Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
After the Civil War, most African American farmers eventually worked
as sharecroppers.
Andrew Johnson's initial plan for Reconstruction
attempted, at least temporarily, to deny power to wealthy southern planters.
The section of the Fourteenth Amendment that held the greatest legal significance in subsequent years was the section that
conferred citizenship on freedom and prohibited abridgment of their constitutional rights.
Many freedmen saw the emancipation as the opportunity to
create their own institutions free of white control.
The refusal of the South to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment
demonstrated public support for Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction program.
In his 1868 presidential campaign, Grant
endorsed African American suffrage in the South but not in the North.
The Radical Republicans in Congress believed that it was essential to
ensure the rights of freedmen.
Passed by Congress over President Johnson's veto, the Civil Rights Act of 1866
gave federal judges the power to remove from state court cases in which African Americans were treated unfairly.
In order to have the the truly independent, self-sufficient life they wanted, many freedmen sought
land of their own.
Congress's first Reconstruction plan, based on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the former Confederate states, was
rejected by the great majority of southern state legislatures.
Freed slaves, after the Civil War,
showed a great defense for education as the means of escaping the ignorance of slavery.
The black codes enacted in the South after the Civil War showed that southerners
sought to return African Americans to a position of servility.
The Fifteenth Amendment
stipulated that the states could not deny the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Congressmen who favored vigorous Reconstruction measures held
the Confederate states, by seceding and making war against the United States, lost their status as states and should now be treated as conquered territories.
The Wade-Davis bill stated the specific conditions under which southern states could be readmitted into the Union. One of those conditions was:
to vote for or be a delegate to state constitutional conventions, southern men had to swear that they had never aided the Confederate war effort.
The 1868 indictment handed down by the House Judiciary Committee against President Johnson concentrated on his
violation of the Tenure of Office Act.
