Politics of Reconstruction
This 1863 plan let a Confederate state rejoin the Union once 10% of its voters swore an oath of allegiance.
What is Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan?
Issued by General William T. Sherman, this order set aside coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina as homesteads for freedpeople—though it never fully took effect.
What is Special Field Order No. 15?
In 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed this organization that petitioned Congress for an amendment abolishing slavery.
What is the Women’s Loyal National League?
In 1865, congressional investigator Carl Schurz reported that many white southerners believed Black labor required this to make freedpeople work.
What is physical compulsion?
In 1859–1860, this cash crop produced record profits and anchored the South’s slave-based prosperity.
What is cotton?
This economic crisis beginning in September 1873 helped shift national attention away from Reconstruction and toward economic issues.
What is the Depression (Panic) of 1873?
These state laws, passed in places like Mississippi and South Carolina, restricted Black freedom through vagrancy rules and limits on juries and testimony.
What are the Black Codes?
Created during Reconstruction, this federal agency aimed to assist freedpeople and briefly attempted land redistribution and contract oversight.
What is the Freedmen’s Bureau?
Meeting in New York City on May 10, 1866, this convention (presided over by Stanton) highlighted the “opportunity…to base our government” on equal rights.
What is the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention?
After emancipation, southern whites reasserted control through these restrictive laws and a campaign of racial terror.
What are Black Codes?
In late 1861, Congress created this first U.S. fiat currency to help finance the war.
What are greenbacks?
These war-weary Republicans moved from civil rights idealism to economic and party practicality, gaining influence under Grant (1868–1872).
Who are the Stalwart Republicans?
Passed on January 31, 1865 and ratified by the end of that year, this amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.”
What is the Thirteenth Amendment?
For many freedpeople, this goal—often summarized as “homesteads” or land reform—was a major desire but was ultimately blocked when land was returned to ex-Confederates.
What is land ownership (land redistribution)?
Formed in 1866 by merging the National Women’s Rights Convention with the American Anti-Slavery Society, this group promoted “equal rights for all.”
What is the American Equal Rights Association (AERA)?
Organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, this group became the most infamous vigilante organization of Reconstruction-era violence.
What is the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)?
This Union strategy cut off Confederate access to international trade, preventing the South from financing the war through cotton sales to Europe.
What is the Union blockade?
In the South, New Departure Democrats were known by this name as they promised “local rule” by white Democrats.
Who were the Redeemers?
This 1866 law was the first federal effort to define American-born residents (except Native peoples) as citizens and protect “fundamental rights.”
What is the Civil Rights Act of 1866?
This deeply important pursuit led freedpeople to leave plantations, place newspaper ads, and search for relatives who had been sold away.
What is family reunification (reconstituting families)?
Women’s rights leaders protested this amendment because it introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.
What is the Fourteenth Amendment?
These 1870–1871 laws empowered the federal government to prosecute civil rights violations and use troops against Klan-style violence.
What are the Enforcement Acts?
After the war, many planters divided large farms into family-worked plots in exchange for a share of the crop, creating this labor system.
What is sharecropping?
This Mississippi strategy used intimidation and violence to suppress Black voters in the mid-1870s.
What is the Mississippi Plan?
In 1867, Congress passed this law that divided the South into five military districts and required new constitutions and ratification of the 14th Amendment.
What is the Reconstruction Act of 1867?
Booker T. Washington described “a whole race trying to go to school,” highlighting freedpeople’s intense push for this after emancipation.
What is education (literacy/schooling)?
After splits over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton and Anthony created this organization, which later promoted the “New Departure” strategy.
What is the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)?
The passage identifies these two cities as sites of the most notable Reconstruction riots in 1866.
What are Memphis and New Orleans?
This post-emancipation system used arrests and forced labor contracts to create a new form of unfree labor that lasted well into the twentieth century.
What is the convict-lease system?
This 1877 deal resolved the contested election by giving Hayes the presidency in exchange for removing remaining federal troops from the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?