CHAPTER 16 THE CRISES OF RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877

ISSUES TO UNDERSTAND

    After reading the chapter, you should be able to discuss the following:

1. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction and what he hoped to accomplish with it
2. Andrew Johnson's plan of reconstruction, what he hoped to accomplish with it, why it failed
3. Why the Republican-dominated Congress rejected Johnson's reconstruction efforts and what plan it enacted instead
4. Why the Republicans impeached President Johnson and then failed to convict him
5. The provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and why some feminists opposed the Fifteenth Amendment
6. The accomplishments and failures of the Republican Reconstruction governments in the South, who participated in them, who opposed them and why, and why they lasted less than a decade
7. Developments in the black family and black institutions during Reconstruction
8. Why land was not redistributed in the South and the consequences of leaving land concentrated in the hands of white planters
9. The sharecropping and crop-lien systems; why they developed and what their economic impact was on blacks, poor whites, and southern agriculture
10. Why the Liberal Republicans broke with President Grant and how this party splitweakened Republican Reconstruction
11. How Supreme Court decisions undermined Republican Reconstruction
12. Why, by the 1870s, the Republicans had lost interest in remaking the South
13. What southern Democrats meant by "redemption" and the policies they put into effect when they returned to power
14. Why the election returns in 1876 were in dispute and how the problem was settled by
the Compromise of 1877
15. How historians have viewed Reconstruction in the past and at present and what its legacy is

IDENTIFICATIONS

    After reading Chapter 16, you should be able to identify and explain the historical significance of each of the following:

Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and the Radical Republicans
10 percent plan versus Wade-Davis bill
Thirteenth Amendment
black codes
Freedmen 's Bureau
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Joint Committee on Reconstruction
Fourteenth Amendment
Reconstruction Act of 1867
Tenure of Office Act
Fifteenth Amendment
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
carpetbaggers and scalawags
Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce
Knights of the White Camellia, regulators, and Ku Klux Klan
Enforcement Acts and Ku Klux Klan Act
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Jay Gould and Jim Fisk
Credit Mobilier
William M. Tweed
"Seward's Ice Box"
Liberal Republicans and Horace Greeley
greenbacks and the Greenback party
Bland-Allison Act of 1878
Slaughterhouse cases
Mississippi Plan and redemption
"Exodus" movement
Rutherford B. Hayes
Samuel J. Tilden
Compromise of 1877

Return to Assignment page