Reconstruction Study Guide



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Reconstruction Study Guide

Results of the Civil War

Reconstruction – rebuilding of the South after Civil War

• 13th Amendment – Abolished slavery

• 14th Amendment – gave citizenship to former slaves

• 15th Amendment – gave African Americans the right to vote

• Freemen’s Bureau – federal agency established to offer food, clothing, and schooling to former slaves (called freedmen)

• Black Codes – laws limiting power of freedmen after the Civil War (example: didn’t allow blacks to vote, a way in which whites tried to regain control of Southern governments)

Lincoln’s Plan

• Lincoln wanted to welcome South back after the war (“with malice toward none, with charity for all”)

• 10% Plan – 10 % of the voters in a state had to swear an oath of loyalty to be readmitted to the South

• John Wilkes Booth – assassinated Lincoln in 1865

• Vice President Andrew Johnson (Democrat from the South) took over and tried to carry out Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction

I. Opposition to Presidential Reconstruction Plan (Radical Republicans)

• Radical Republicans – Northerners who controlled Congress and passed Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was very tough on the South. They wanted to protect freedmen

• Thaddeus Stevens – leader of the Radical Republicans

• Reconstruction Act of 1867 – Treated the south very harshly by creating 5 military districts in the south to enforce laws and protect freedmen; Allowed southern states to rejoin the U.S. once they (1) wrote a new state constitution (2) Ratified the 14th amendment (3) Allowed African Americans to vote

II. Johnson’s Impeachment

• Main reason behind impeachment was that Johnson upset Radical Republicans in Congress by disagreeing with them over Reconstruction

• Tenure of Office Act – law broken by Johnson when he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton; as a result, Johnson was impeached

• Impeachment – charging an officeholder with a crime, done by the House of Representatives. (President went on trial (Senate), but was not convicted)

III. Reconstruction Ends in 1877

• In a disputed election in which he lost the popular vote, Rutherford B. Hayes was elected as President; Hayes agreed he would end Reconstruction and remove the troops from the South; after Reconstruction, blacks lost power in the South and former Confederate leaders retook power.

• Scalawags – Southerners who supported the Reconstruction

• Carpetbaggers – Northerners who moved South to take advantage and gain power after Civil War

• Ku Klux Kan (KKK) – group that used violence to terrorize blacks in the South

• Segregation – separation by race

• Jim Crow Laws – segregation laws that separated blacks from whites

• Plessy vs. Ferguson – Supreme Court ruled that segregation was legal as long as facilities were equal (“separate but equal”); allowed segregated public facilities

• African Americans were denied voting rights by Black Codes (literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses)

• Sharecropping – way for poor to rent farmland from wealthy landowners in return for a share of their crops (many poor blacks made a living this way)

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