Reconstruction

Reconstruction

A period that began from the end of the Civil War (1865) to the beginning of the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. This was a possible turning point in American history, as federal troops occupied the South to insure full citizenship and voting rights to African Americans. However, southern resistance combined with the withdrawal of federal troops returned the South to "home rule." The South slowly returned to the de jure segregation of African Americans and near full disenfranchisement.

Ku Klux Klan

A white terrorist organization that emerged during reconstruction to terrorize African Americans in order to prevent them from voting or exercising their rights of free citizens.

Vagrancy Laws

After the abolition of slavery, there became a fear from whites that African Americans would stop working as long or strike for more wages. These fears created vagrancy laws which allowed local authorities to arrest freedpeople for minor infractions and commit them to forced labor.

Poll Tax

After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights. The laws often included a grandfather clause, which allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote without paying the tax. These laws, along with unfairly implemented literacy tests and extra-legal intimidation, achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising African-American and Native American voters..

Literacy Test

Between the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the Southern United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes and extra-legal intimidation, were used to deny suffrage to African Americans.

Convict lease program

Convict leasing was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations such as the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners. This targeted recently freed African-Americans, and was called "slavery by another name."

Grandfather Clause

Grandfather Clause, The (1898-1915) The Grandfather Clause was a statute enacted by many American southern states in the wake of Reconstruction (1865-1877) that allowed potential white voters to get around literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tactics designed to disenfranchise southern blacks. They did this by stating if your grandfather could vote in a certain election, before the abolition of slavery, you were exempt from certain voting restrictions.

Robert Smalls

He was an enslaved African American who, during and after the American Civil War, gained freedom and became a ship's pilot, sea captain, and politician. He freed himself, his crew and their families from slavery on May 13, 1862, by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, and sailing it from Confederate-controlled waters to the U.S. blockade. His example and persuasion helped convince President Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. Smalls was born in Beaufort, South Carolina. After the American Civil War, he returned there and became a politician, winning election as a Republican to the South Carolina State legislature and the United States House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era. As a politician, Smalls authored state legislation providing for South Carolina to have the first free and compulsory public school system in the United States. He founded the Republican Party of South Carolina.

Radical Republicans

Radicals strongly opposed slavery during the war and after the war distrusted ex-Confederates, demanding harsh policies for punishing the former rebels, and emphasizing equality, civil rights, and voting rights for the "freedmen" (recently freed slaves). They bitterly fought seventeenth President Andrew Johnson; they weakened his powers and attempted to remove him from office through impeachment, which failed by one vote in 1868

Freedman's Bureau

U.S. federal government agency established in 1865 to aid freedmen (freed slaves) in the South during the Reconstruction era of the United States. Bureau's powers were expanded to help African Americans find family members from whom they had become separated during the war. It arranged to teach them to read and write, considered critical by the freedmen themselves as well as the government.Bureau agents also served as legal advocates for African Americans in both local and national courts, mostly in cases dealing with family issues. The Bureau encouraged former major planters to rebuild their plantations, urged freed Blacks to gain employment above all, kept an eye on contracts between the newly free labor and planters, and pushed both whites and blacks to work together as employers and employees rather than as masters and as slaves

Southern Democrats

WHITE SOUTHERNERS, BELIEVED FARMING, CONTROLLED THE SOUTH BEFORE DURING AND AFTER CIVIL WARIn the 19th century, Southern Democrats comprised whites in the South who believed in Jeffersonian democracy (empowering farmers and agriculture. They hated big cities and manufacturing that existed largely in the North) . In the 1850s they defended slavery in the United States, and promoted its expansion into the West against northern Free Soil opposition. The United States presidential election, 1860 formalized the split, and brought war. After Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s they controlled all the Southern states and disenfranchised blacks (who were Republicans). The "Solid South" gave nearly all its electoral votes to Democrats in presidential elections. Republicans seldom were elected to office outside some Appalachian mountain districts.

Reconstruction Amendments

b amendments to the constitution. These amendments ended slavery, established citizenship for African Americans, and granted all males voting rights regardless of race. This was slowly undermined after Federal Reconstruction ends and troops withdrew from the South.

Black Codes

laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom, and of forcing them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Southern whites trying to suppress the new freedom of emancipated African American slaves, the freedmen.

Voting Rights

opportunity to be able to participate in the election process of a country...chance to vote

Voter Disenfranchisement

to prevent a person or group of people from voting.