The Era of Reconstruction (1865-1877)

Question 1

Senators and congressmen who, strictly identifying the Civil War with the abolitionist cause, sought swift emancipation of the slaves, punishment of the rebels, and tight controls over the former Confederate states after the war.

Answer 1

Radical Republicans

Question 2

Reconstruction agency established in 1865 to protect the legal rights of former slaves and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and landowning.

Answer 2

Freedmen’s Bureau

Question 3

Plan to require southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, disqualify wealthy ex-Confederates from voting, and appoint a Unionist governor.

Answer 3

Johnson’s Restoration Plan

Question 4

Laws passed in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to combat the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment and set up military governments in the southern states that refused to ratify the amendment.

Answer 4

Black Codes

Question 5

Guaranteed rights of citizenship to former slaves, in words similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Answer 5

Fourteenth Amendment (1866)

Question 6

Phase of Reconstruction directed by Radical Republicans through the passage of three laws: the Military Reconstruction Act, the Command of the Army Act, and the Tenure of Office Act.

Answer 6

Congressional Reconstruction

Question 7

This amendment forbids states to deny any person the right to vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Former Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment before they could be readmitted to the Union.

Answer 7

Fifteenth Amendment (1870)

Question 8

Poor, mostly black farmers who would work an owner’s land in return for shelter, seed, fertilizer, mules, supplies, and food, as well as a substantial share of the crop produced.

Answer 8

Sharecroppers

Question 9

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 stressed white, Anglo-Saxon, fundamentalist Protestant supremacy; the Klan revived a third time to fight the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the South.

Answer 9

Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

Question 10

A financial calamity in the United States brought on by a dramatic slowdown in the British economy and exacerbated by falling cotton prices, failed crops, high inflation, and reckless state banks.

Answer 10

Panic of 1873

Question 10

Post-Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy.

Answer 10

Redeemers

Question 11

Deal made by a special congressional commission on March 2, 1877, to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.

Answer 11

Compromise of 1877

Question 12

Paper money issued during the Civil War. After the war ended, a debate emerged on whether or not to remove the paper currency from circulation and revert back to hard-money currency (gold coins). Opponents of hard-money feared that eliminating the greenbacks would shrink the money supply, which would lower crop prices and make it more difficult to repay long-term debts. President Ulysses S. Grant, as well as hard-currency advocates, believed that gold coins were morally preferrable to paper currency.

Answer 12

Greenbacks