DE History: Reconstruction

Question 1

SHARECROPPING

Answer 1

Type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers—often former slaves—farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop.

Question 2

BLACK CODES

Answer 2

Laws passed from 1865 to 1866 in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment

Question 3

CIVIL RIGHTS BILL OF 1866

Answer 3

Along with the Fourteenth Amendment, legislation that guaranteed the rights of citizenship to former slaves.

Question 4

RECONSTRUCTION ACT 1867

Answer 4

law that established temporary military governments in ten Confederate states—excepting Tennessee—and required that the states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and permit freedmen to vote.

Question 5

TENURE OF OFFICE ACT 1867

Answer 5

law that required the president to obtain Senate approval to remove any official whose appointment had also required Senate approval; President Andrew Johnson’s violation of the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton led to Johnson’s impeachment.

Question 6

IMPEACHMENT

Answer 6

Bringing charges against a public official; for example, the House of Representatives can impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” by majority vote, and after the trial the Senate can remove the president by a vote of two-thirds. Two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached and tried before the Senate; neither was convicted.

Question 7

FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT

Answer 7

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from discriminating in voting privileges on the basis of race.

Question 8

KU KLUX KLAN

Answer 8

Group organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 to terrorize former slaves who voted and held political offices during Reconstruction; a revived organization in the 1910s and 1920s that stressed white, Anglo-Saxon, fundamentalist Protestant supremacy; revived a third time to fight the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the South.

Question 9

ENFORCEMENT ACTS

Answer 9

Three laws passed in 1870 and 1871 that tried to eliminate the Ku Klux Klan by outlawing it and other such terrorist societies; the laws allowed the president to deploy the army for that purpose.

Question 10

CROP LIEN

Answer 10

Credit extended by merchants to tenants based on their future crops; under this system, high interest rates and the uncertainties of farming often led to inescapable debts.

Question 11

Tenure of Office Act (1867

Answer 11

Law required president to obtain senate approval to remove any official whose appointment had also required senate approval (Johnson violated law by firing secretary of war, stanton, which led to johnson’s impeachment)

Question 12

Redeemers

Answer 12

post civil war democratic leaders who saved south from yankee domination and preserved rural economy