Unit #8 – Reconstruction and the New South

1) Reconstruction: The federal plan for bringing the South back into the United States and restoring the nation. 2) Radical Republicans: A group that came to dominate the U.S. Congress after the Civil War. They wanted harsh and punishing terms for the South.

3) Carpetbaggers: Term used to describe northern people who came to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who stayed in the South after the Civil War to gain a profit from the South’s misfortune. 4) Scalawags: Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers, who supported the Republican Party during Reconstruction.

5) Freedman’s Bureau: Agency established by Congress to provide social, educational, and economic services, advice, and protection to former slaves and poor whites. 6) Redeemers: Southern Democrats who wrested control of governments in the former Confederacy, often through electoral fraud and violence. 7) Solid South: The one-party Democratic political system that dominated the South from the 1880s to the 1950s.

8) 13 th Amendment: The law that banned slavery in the U.S. forever. 9) 14 th Amendment: The law that made African-Americans, including former slaves, citizens of the U.S. 10) 15 th Amendment: The law that gave all African-American males, including former slaves, voting rights.

11) Ku Klux Klan: Perhaps the most prominent of the vigilante groups that terrorized black people in the South during the Reconstruction Era, founded by Confederate veterans. 12) Disenfranchisement: The use of legal means to bar individuals or groups from voting. 13) Poll Tax: A tax imposed on voters as a requirement for voting. Most southern states imposed this as a way to disenfranchise blacks, but it also restricted the white vote. 14) Grandfather Clause: Rule that required potential voters to demonstrate that their grandfathers had been eligible to vote, used in some southern states to limit the black electorate.

15) Sharecropping: Labor system that evolved during and after Reconstruction whereby landowners furnished laborers with a house, farm animals, and tools and advanced credit in exchange for a share of the laborer’s crop. 16) Jim Crow Laws: A system of racial control that separated the races, initially by custom but eventually by law during and after Reconstruction.

17) Lynching: Executions, usually by a mob, without a trial. 18) NAACP: An interracial organization dedicated to restoring African-American political and social rights.