History 132 Exam 1

Homestead Act of 1862

1862 act which granted a quarter section (160 acres) of the public domain free to any settler who lived on the land for at least five years and improved it.

First Reconstruction Act

1877 act that divided the South into five military districts subject to martial law.

Edmunds Act

1882 act that effectively disenfranchised those who believed in or practiced polygamy and threatened them.

Edmunds-Tucker Act

1887 act which disproved the temporal power of the Mormon Church by confiscating all assets over $50,000 and establishing a federal commission to oversee all elections in the Utah territory.

Sherman Silver Purchase Act

1890 act which directed the Treasury to increase the amount of currency coined from silver mined in the West and also permitted the U.S. government to print paper currency backed by the silver.

Forest Management Act

1897 act which, along with the National Reclamation Act, set the federal government on the path of large-scale regulatory activities.

National Reclamation Act

1902 act which added 1 million acres of irrigated land to the United States.

Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act

A law of 1883 that reformed the spoils system by prohibition government workers from making political contributions and creating the Civil Service Commission to oversee their appointment on the basis of merit rather than politics.

Populism

A mass movement of the 1890's formed on the basis of the Southern Farmers' Alliance and other reform organizations.

Grange

A national organization of farm owners formed after the Civil War.

Coxey's Army

A protest march of unemployed workers, led by Populist businessman Jacob Coxey, demanding inflation and a public works program during the depression of the 1890's.

Union League

Republican party organizations in Northern cities that became an important organizing device among freedmen in Southern cities after 1865.

Grandfather Clauses

Rules that required potential voters to demonstrate that their grandfathers had been eligible to vote; used in some Southern states after 1890 to limit the black electorate.

Jim Crow Laws

Segregation laws that became widespread in the South during the 1890's.

Scalawags

Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers and well-off merchants and planters, who supported the Southern Republican party during Reconstruction.

Granger Laws

State laws enacted in the Midwest in the 1870's that regulated rates charged by railroads, grain elevator operators, and other middlemen.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Supreme Court decision holding that Louisiana's railroad segregation law did not violate the Constitution as long as the railroads or the state provided equal accomodations

Radical Republicans

A shifting group of Republican congressmen, usually a substantial minority, who favored the abolition of slavery from the beginning of the Civil War and later advocated harsh treatment of the defeated South.

Segregation

A system of racial control that separated the races, initially by custom but increasingly by law during and after Reconstruction.

Morrill Act of 1862

Act by which "land-grant" colleges acquired space for campuses in return for promising to institute agricultural programs.

Tenure of Office Act

Act stipulating that any officeholder appointed by the president with the Senate's advice and consent could not be removed until the Senate had approved a successor.

Omaha Act of 1882

Act which allowed the establishment of individual itle to tribal lands.

General Land Revision Act of 1891

Act which gave the president the power to establish forest reserves to protect watersheds against the threats posed by lumbering, overgrazing, and forest fires.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Act which suspended the civil rights of resident Chinese, and forbade their neutralization.

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 seven years.

Dawes Severalty Act

An 1887 law terminating tribal ownership of land and allotting some parcels of land to individual Indians with the remainder opened for white settlement.

Women's Educational and Industrial Union

Boston organization offering classes to wage-earning women.

Liberal Republicans

Disaffected Republicans that emphasized the doctrines of classical economies.

Nativism

Favoring the interests and culture of native-born inhabitants over those of immigrants.

Tenements

Four- to six-story residential dwellings, once common in New York, built on tiny lots without regard to providing ventilation or light.

Great Sioux War

From 1865 to 1867 the Oglala Sioux warrior Red Cloud waged war against the U.S. Army, forcing the U.S. to abandon its forts built on land relinquished to the government by the Sioux.

Slaughterhouse Case

Group of cases resulting in one sweeping decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 that contradicted the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment by decreeing that most citizenship rights remained under state, not federal, control.

Conspicuous Consumption

Highly visible displays of wealth and consumption.

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 laborer's crop.

Knights of Labor

Labor union founded in 1869 that included skilled and unskilled workers irrespective of race or gender.

Black Codes

Laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free black people before the Civil War.

Congressional Reconstruction

Name given to the period 1867-180 when the Republican-dominated Congress controlled Reconstruction-era policy.

Carbetbaggers

Northern transplants to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who stayed in the South after the war.

Special Field Order 15

Order by General William T. Sherman in January 1865 to set aside abandoned land along the southern Atlantic coast for forty-acre grants to freedmen; rescinded by President Andrew Johnson later that year.

Hispanic-American Alliance

Organization formed to protect and fight for the rights of Spanish Americans.

Protective Association

Organizations formed by mine owners in response to the formation of labor unions.

Fifteenth Amendment

Passed by Congress in 1869, guaranteed the right of American men to vote, regardless of race.

Ku Klux Klan

Perhaps the most prominent of the vigilante groups that terrorized black people in the South during Reconstruction era, founded by the Confederate veterans in 1866.

Free Silver

Philosophy that the government should expand the money supply by purchasing and coining all the silver offered to it.

Sand Creek Massacre

Te near annihilation in 1864 of Black Kettle's Cheyenne band by Colorado troops under Colonel John Chivington's orders to "kill and scalp all, big and little."

Gilded Age

Term applied to late nineteenth-century America that refers to the shallow display and worship of wealth characteristic of that period.

Civil Rights Bill

The 1866 act that gave full citizenship to African Americans.

Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)

The 1887 law that expanded federal power over business by prohibiting pooling and discriminatory rates by railroads and establishing the first federal regulatory agency.

Compromise of 1877

The Congressional settling of the 1876 election which installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and gave Democrats control of all state governments in the South.

Vertical Integration

The consolidation of numerous production functions, from the extraction of the raw materials to the distribution and marketing of the finished products, under the direction of one firm.

Southern Farmers' Alliance

The largest of several organizations that formed in the post-Reconstruction South to advance the interests of beleaguered small farmers.

Horizontal Combination

The merger of competitors in the same industry.

Treaty of Fort Laramie

The treaty acknowledging U.S. defeat in the Great Sioux War in 1868 and supposedly guaranteeing the Sioux perpetual land and hunting rights in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

Gospel of Wealth

Thesis that hard work and perseverance lead to wealth, implying that poverty is a character flaw.

War Democrats

Those from the North and the border states who broke with the Democratic Party and supported Abraham Lincoln's military policies during the Civil War.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

Union formed in 1886 that organized skilled workers along craft lines and emphasized a few workplace issues rather than a broad social program.

Great Uprising of 1877

Unsuccessful railroad strike to protest wage cuts and the use of federal troops against strikers; the first nationwide work stoppage in American history.

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Women's organization whose members visited schools to educate children about the evils of alcohol, addressed prisoners, and blanketed men's meeting with literature.