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Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan
Lincoln's blueprint for Reconstruction included the Ten-Percent Plan, which specified that a southern state could be readmitted into the Union once 10 percent of its voters (from the voter rolls for the election of 1860) swore an oath of allegiance to the Union. -
Wade-Davis Bill
A bill proposed for the Reconstruction of the South written by two Radical Republicans, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. -
Special Field Orders Number 15
Military orders issued during the American Civil War, by General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi of the United States Army. -
Freedmen’s Bureau
Established in 1865, by Congress, to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. -
President Lincoln’s death
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. -
13th Amendment
Abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
Ku Klux Klan
Commonly called the KKK or simply the Klan and commonly misspelled as the Klu Klux Klan, refers to three distinct secret movements at different points in time in the history of the United States. They had the idea of white supremacy and were considered extremists. -
Radical Republicans
A faction of American politicians within the Republican Party of the United States that increasingly took control of Reconstruction, led by Sumner and Stevens. By 1866, the Radical Republicans supported federal civil rights for Freedmen, which Johnson opposed. By 1867, they defined terms for suffrage for freed slaves and limited early suffrage for many ex-Confederates. -
Black Codes
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. -
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Sharecropping
A form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. -
Civil Rights Bill of 1866
Declared that all persons born in the United States were now citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition. -
Reconstruction Act
Laid out the process for readmitting Southern states into the Union. -
Great Constitutional Revolution
The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly empowered national state, and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. -
Impeachment of President Johnson
The United States House of Representatives resolved to impeach U.S. President Andrew Johnson, adopting eleven articles of impeachment detailing his "high crimes and misdemeanors", in accordance with Article Two of the United States Constitution. -
14th Amendment
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. -
Sharecropping
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Enforcement Acts
Three bills passed by the United States Congress between 1870 and 1871. They were criminal codes which protected African-Americans' right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. -
15th Amendment
Prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". It was the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. -
Enforcement Acts
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Scalawags
A person who behaves badly but in an amusingly mischievous rather than harmful way; a rascal. -
Slaughterhouse Cases
The first United States Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment which had recently been enacted. -
Civil Rights Act of 1875
A United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction Era in response to civil rights violations to African Americans, "to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights", giving them equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and to prohibit exclusion from jury service. -
Bargain of 1877 (Compromise of 1877)
An informal, unwritten deal that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.
