Reconstruction Amendments
These three amendments were added after the Civil War to expand civil and political rights.
What are the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?
This system replaced slavery and trapped many farmers in cycles of debt.
What is sharecropping?
This 1896 case established “separate but equal.”
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This 1862 law encouraged western settlement by granting 160 acres of land to individuals willing to farm and improve it.
What is the Homestead Act?
This immigrant group played a major role in building the transcontinental railroad.
Who were Chinese immigrants?
This amendment abolished slavery.
What is the 13th Amendment?
This group was the primary target of poll taxes and literacy tests.
Who were African Americans?
This constitutional principle was used by the Supreme Court to justify state segregation laws in the late 1800s.
What is states’ rights?
This federal policy helped farmers in the Midwest and West by supporting agricultural and technical education.
What is the Morrill Land-Grant Act?
This 1882 law restricted immigration from China.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
This amendment guarantees due process and equal protection under the law.
What is the 14th Amendment?
These laws restricted the rights of African Americans during Reconstruction.
What are Black Codes?
This amendment became the constitutional basis for later challenges to segregation and discrimination.
What is the 14th Amendment?
This factor most directly encouraged Americans to migrate west during the 19th century.
What is the availability of cheap or free land?
This type of discrimination targeted both Chinese immigrants and Native Americans in the late 19th century.
What is nativism?
This amendment was designed to protect African American voting rights but was later undermined by literacy tests and poll taxes.
What is the 15th Amendment?
This federal agency provided education, food, and legal assistance to freed people.
What was the Freedmen’s Bureau?
This Supreme Court decision ruled that segregation in public education violates the Equal Protection Clause.
What is Brown v. Board of Education?
This 1862 law promoted westward expansion by funding a transcontinental railroad through land grants and government loans.
What is the Pacific Railway Act?
This law divided tribal lands into individual plots to weaken tribal identity.
What is the Dawes Act?
This political group strongly supported Reconstruction amendments and federal enforcement and punishment of the South after the Civil War.
Who were the Radical Republicans?
This compromise led to the official end of Reconstruction.
What was the Compromise of 1877?
This effect of Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson allowed segregation to continue legally for decades.
What is the legal justification of segregation under “separate but equal”?
One major consequence of westward expansion for Native Americans in the late 1800s.
What is the forced removal of Native Americans / loss of tribal lands / reservation system?
Despite guarantees in an 1848 treaty, this group often lost land and legal rights after the U.S. expanded west.
Who were Mexican Americans (former Mexican citizens)?