Unit 9: Reconstruction

Unit 9 Vocabulary:

Unit 9 Reconstruction (Ch. 16)

1. Reconstruction – the process of rebuilding the South after the Civil War
2. Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction – Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan that offered a full pardon to all but a few Southerners involved in the war. Southerners had to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and agree to abolish slavery
3. Amnesty – a pardon
4. Andrew Johnson – Lincoln’s VP who became President after assassination. He also believed in Reconstruction
5. Impeach – to charge someone with wrongdoing
6. Amendment - a change in a bill or law
7. 13^th Amendment – Passed in 1865, the amendment outlawed slavery
8. Black Codes – laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War that limited the freedom of formerly enslaved people. African Americans could not own guns, meet after sunset, could be jailed if they were unemployed
9. Joint Committee on Reconstruction – Made up of members of both houses (Senate & House of Representatives) who set out to draw up a Reconstruction plan to replace Johnson’s
10. Freedmen’s Bureau – a federal agency set up in 1865 to help both whites and African Americans in the South
11. 14^th Amendment – granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed.
12. 15^th Amendment - 1870 constitutional amendment declaring that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
13. Carpetbagger – insulting nickname for a Northerner who went South after the Civil War
14. Scalawag – Southern Republicans. Called scoundrels by those who believed that anyone who worked for the new governments was a crook or traitor
15. Ku Klux Klan – a secret society of ex-Confederates who used intimidation to return political power to white men
16. Civil Rights Act of 1871 – law that gave Americans the right to sue anyone trying to restrict their constitutional rights
17. Rutherford B. Hayes - President who withdrew troops from Southern states after the nation was united
18. Booker T. Washington – Born into slavery, he later founded one of the most famous industrial schools of all time—the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama
19. Kirk Holden War – incident in which Colonel George W. Kirk and his army of followers imprisoned men suspected to be members of the Ku Klux Klan
20. Compromise of 1877- Unwritten deal between the Democrats and Republicans following the election of 1876. This deal allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to become president after tying in the electoral college as long as he ended reconstruction by taking federal troops out of the South.