Chapter 17 Terms Ten
Percent Plan– When the number of Confederates reached 10 percent of the number who had voted in the 1860 election, this group could establish a legitimate state government. Focused on acceptance by the reconstructed governments of the abolition of slavery.
Radical Republicans– Advocated not only equal rights for the freed-men but a tougher stance toward the white south.
Wade-Davis Bill– Required 50 percent of a seceding states white male citizens to take a loyalty oath before elections could be held for a convention to rewrite the states constitution. Also guaranteed equality before the law for former slaves.
Forty Acres and a Mule– Each family would receive forty acres of land and the loan of mules from the army. Soon captured the imagination of African Americans throughout the South.
Freedmen’s Bureau– Provided food, clothing, and fuel to destitute former slaves. Charged with supervising and managing all the abandoned lands in the South and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen.
War Democrats– Nominated Johnson for vice president. Republicans in an appeal to northern and border states did this.
Black Codes– Outraged Northern republicans that was passed by South Carolina and Louisiana. Designed to restrict the freedom of the black labor force and keep freed people as close to slave status as possible. Civil Rights Act of 1866- Gave full citizenship to African Americans.
Congressional Reconstruction– Name given to the period 1867-1870 when the Republican- dominated Congress controlled Reconstruction-era policy.
The Credit Mobilier Scandal
Reconstruction Act– 1867 act that divided the South into five military districts subject to martial law.
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.
Ku Klux Klan– Founded as a Tennessee social club emerged as an instrument of terror. The most prominent of the vigilante groups that terrorized black people in the south during the Reconstruction era.
Sharecropping– Emerged as the dominant form of working the land. Represented a compromise between planters and former slaves. Arrangements were very detailed and families contracted with landowner to be responsible for a specific plot.
Union League– republican party organizations in northern cities that became an important organizing device among freedmen in southern cities after 1865.
Reconstruction Acts of 1867 / 1868– Carpetbaggers – Northern transplants to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who stayed in the south after the war.
Scalawags– Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers and well off merchants and planters, who supported the southern Republican Party.
Ku Klux Klan Act (1871)– fought an ongoing terrorist campaign against Reconstructions governments and local leaders. Powerful in nearly every southern state. It acted as a guerilla military force in the service of the Democratic Party, the planer class and all those who sought the restoration of white supremacy.
Civil Rights Act of 1875– outlawed racial discrimination in theaters, hotels, railroads, and other public places. Enforcement of laws required African Americans to take their cases to the federal courts, a costly and time consuming procedure.
Also issues onConstitutionality– court declared this act as unconstitutional, holding that the fourteenth amendment gave congress the power to outlaw discrimination by states, but not by private individuals.
Transcontinental Railroad– the railroad business symbolized and advanced the new industrial order.
Private companies took on huge and expensive job of construction, but the federal government funded the project, providing the largest subsidy in American history.
Chinese Exclusion Act– after thousands of Chinese were immigrated to the US to do tedious jobs and entered California, the Chinese exclusion act suspended any further Chinese immigration for ten years.
Credit Mobilier Scandal– Thomas Nast- grotesquely caricatured in him cartoons in Harpers weekly; tween emerged as the preeminent national symbol of increasingly degraded and dishonest urban politics.
Liberal Republicans– disaffected republicans that emphasized the doctrines of classical economics.
Depression of 1873– the postwar boom came to an abrupt halt as a severe financial panic triggered a deep economic depression. The collapse resulted from commercial overexpansion, especially speculative investment in the national railroad system. It lasted 65 months. Factories closed and unemployment rate soared. The depression prompted many workers and famers to question the old free labor ideology that celebrated harmony of interests in northern society.