Key Terms

Black codes

laws some southern states designed to maintain White supremacy by keeping freed people impoverished and in debt

carpetbagger

a term used for northerners working in the South during Reconstruction; it implied that these were opportunists who came south for economic or political gain

Compromise of 1877

the agreement between Republicans and Democrats, after the contested election of 1876, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the presidency in exchange for withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South

crop-lien system

a loan system in which store owners extended credit to farmers for the purchase of goods in exchange for a portion of their future crops

Freedmen’s Bureau

the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which was created in 1865 to ease Black peoples’ transition from slavery to freedom

Ironclad Oath

an oath that the Wade-Davis Bill required a majority of voters and government officials in Confederate states to take; it involved swearing that they had never supported the Confederacy

Ku Klux Klan

a White vigilante organization that engaged in terroristic violence with the aim of stopping Reconstruction

Radical Republicans

northern Republicans who contested Lincoln’s treatment of Confederate states and proposed harsher punishments

Reconstruction

the twelve-year period after the Civil War in which the rebel Southern states were integrated back into the Union

redeemers

a term used for southern White people committed to rolling back the gains of Reconstruction

scalawags

a pejorative term used for southern White people who supported Reconstruction

sharecropping

a crop-lien system in which people paid rent on land they farmed (but did not own) with the crops they grew

ten percent plan

Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan, which required only 10 percent of the 1860 voters in Confederate states to take an oath of allegiance to the Union

Union Leagues

fraternal groups loyal to the Union and the Republican Party that became political and civic centers for Black people in former Confederate states