Unit 2 Study Guide
What was Reconstruction and to what extent was it a success and failure (1863-1877)?
I. Reconstruction
A. The period during which the United States began to rebuild after the Civil War
B. Process the federal government used to readmit the Confederate states
II. Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan
A. South would be readmitted to the Union if 10% of its voters swore an oath of allegiance to
the Union
B. Angered Radical Republicans, wanted majority of voters to swear an oath
III. Johnson’s Plan
A. Wished to prevent most high-ranking Confederates and wealthy Southern landowners from
gaining voting privileges
B. Failed to address the needs of former slaves
C. 13th amendment: abolished slavery, only criminals subject to slavery
IV. Congressional (Radical) Plan (Ulysses S. Grant)
A. Civil Rights Act of 1866: forbade black codes
B. 14th amendment: defined citizenship, all entitled to law and protection
C. 15th amendment: rights of citizens cannot be denied or abridged according to race
V. Outcomes
A. Social
1. Freedmen cautious to test limits of freedom
2. Whites angered by idea of educated black
3. Founded their own churches, schools
4. Searched for family
B. Economic
1. Difficult to get property
2. sharecropping/tenant farming
C. Political progress
1. African Americans could vote
VI. Southern Resistance
A. Black Codes
1. Laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 in the United States after the
American Civil War with the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans'
freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or
debt
B. Grandfather Clause
1. Allowed potential white voters to evade literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tactics
designed to disenfranchise southern African Americans
C. Poll Tax
1. A tax levied as a prerequisite for voting; many southern states required these to
prevent African Americans from voting
D. Literacy Test
1. A test administered for preventing African Americans from voting
E. The KKK
1. A white supremacist group that persecuted and ostracized African Americans
F. A credit system widely used by cotton farmers in the U.S. in the south between 1860s and
1930s. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who did not own the land they worked, obtained
supplies and food on credit from local merchants
VII. Reconstruction Ends
A. The Election of 1876/Compromise of 1877
1. Between 1869-75, the Democrats recaptured the state governments of Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Car., Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
2. As a result of redemption–as the Democrats called their return to power in the
South–and the national election of 1876, congressional Reconstruction came to an
end
.
3. After Grant decided NOT to run for a third term; the Republicans chose the governor
of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, as their candidate. Opposing him on the Democrat
side, was Samuel J. Tilden of New York.
4. Tilden won the popular vote as expect...
