Chapter 18 Study Guide

1. The Civil War has just ended, and the Southern economy is in ruins.

2. During Reconstruction, the president and Congress fought over how to rebuild the South.

3. After the Civil War, Thaddeus Stevens became a leader of the Radical Republicans.

4. The process the federal government used to readmit the Confederate states to the Union is known as Reconstruction.

5. To assist former slaves, the president established the Freedmen's Bureau.

6. When Lincoln was killed in April 1865, Vice-President Andrew Johnson became president.

7. Johnson believed that Reconstruction was the job of the president, not Congress.

8. The Southern states passed laws, known as black codes, which limited the freedom of former slaves.

9. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens.

10. Fourteenth Amendment in 1866. It stated that all people born in the United States were citizens and had the same rights.

11. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 gave Congress the power to controlled Reconstruction.

12. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts.

13. Carpetbaggers were white Northerners who had rushed to the South after the war.

14. Many seeking only to get rich or gain political power.

15. During Reconstruction, many African Americans served in state legislatures throughout the South.

16. President Johnson fought against many of Congress's reform efforts during Radical Reconstruction.

17. In February 1868, Johnson fired his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, over disagreements about Reconstruction.

18. Three days later, the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president.

19. The Trial of President Johnson was held by the Senate.

20. By removing Johnson from office, they hoped to strengthen Congress's role in Reconstruction.

21. In the end, President Johnson was acquitted by a single vote.

22. Robert B. Elliott was a U.S. congressman from South Carolina during Reconstruction.

23. The Union's victory in the Civil War spelled the end of slavery in America.

24. African Americans also traveled in search of family members separated from them during slavery.

25. Freedom allowed African Americans to strengthen their family ties.

26. In the years after the war, African-American groups raised more than $1 million for education

27. Some of today's African American colleges date back to Reconstruction.

28. General William T. Sherman suggested that abandoned land in coastal South Carolina be split into 40-acre parcels and given to freedmen.

29. In the end, however, most freedmen never received land.

30. Without their own property, many African Americans returned to work on plantations.

31. After the Civil War, planters desperately needed workers to raise cotton, still the South's main cash crop.

32. Under the sharecropping system, a worker rented a plot of land to farm.

33. As Reconstruction was ending, federal troops left the South.

34. After the Union Troops left white Southerners took back control of the region.

35. Once the white southerners took political control the quickly, they forced African Americans, out of office.

36. Radical Republicans worried that the Southern states might try to keep African Americans from voting in future elections.

37. The Fifteenth Amendment stated that citizens could not be stopped from voting "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

38. The Fifteenth Amendment did not apply to women.

39. Between 1870 and 1877, 16 African Americans served in Congress.

40. Despite gaining the vote, African Americans in the South continued to be terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan.

41. Under the Grant administration, support for the Republicans and Reconstruction weakened.

42. Grant's secretary of war, General William Belknap, left office after people accused him of taking bribes.

43. The Republicans, no longer unified, became less willing to impose tough Reconstruction policies on the South.

44. A financial panic further hurt the Republicans and turned the country's attention away from Reconstruction.

45. In the Panic of 1873, banks across the land closed and the stock market temporarily collapsed.

46. The depression, which lasted about five years, touched nearly all parts of the economy.

47. By 1875, more than 18,000 companies had folded and many American workers had lost their jobs.

48. Democrats won victories in the 1874 congressional and state elections.

49. Americans grew tired of hearing about the South's problems and the nation was losing interest in Reconstruction.

50. After Reconstruction, most African Americans still lived in poverty.