HISTORY EXAM ONE REVIEW
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- Yeoman farmers
- Non-slave-owning landowners who operated small family farms; primarily subsistence farmers
- Special Field Order No. 15
- General Sherman's order to confiscate 400,000 acres of land along the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and divide it into parcels which would be distributed among recently-freed black families
- Port Royal Experiment
- During the Civil War, a program in which slaves worked on land abandoned by plantation owners (specifically the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina); ended by President Andrew Johnson
- The Freedmen's Bureau
- An agency established during Reconstruction which was supposed to aid former slaves through legal food and housing, oversight, education, health care, and employment contracts with private landowners
- Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction
- Based on forgiveness--a southern state could be readmitted into the Union if ten percent of its voters swore allegiance to the Union
- Wade-Davis Bill
- Made admittance to the Union contingent upon a majority within each southern state claiming they never once supported the Confederacy in any form
- Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction
- Wanted to reunite the Union with the support of white southerners, and so offered amnesty to former Confederates who took an oath of loyalty to the Union; abandoned black southerners in the process
- Black Codes
- Unofficial laws put in place in the United States to limit the basic human rights and civil liberties of blacks; denied them the rights to testify against whites, serve on juries or in state militias, or vote
- Radical Republicans
- Pushed for the abolition of slavery and supported civil rights for freedmen, including the right to vote
- The Fourteenth Amendment
- Declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, and their rights are protected accordingly
- "Carpetbaggers" and "scalawags"
- Carpetbaggers--white northerners who supported the Republicans' cause; "scalawags"--white southerners who were viewed as traitors to their race and region
- The Klu Klux Klan
- Dedicated itself to maintaining white supremacy; a militaristic wing of the Democratic Party that warned and killed white and black men who associated with Republicans or supported black rights
- The Fifteenth Amendment
- Prohibits each government in the United States from denying an American citizen suffrage based on his race, color, or previous condition of servitude
- The Klu Klux Klan Act
- Claimed that any person deprived of rights by any party acting supposedly under the protection of the law could bring their issue to federal court; also granted the president the power to put down rebellions with the federal military; was primarily used to protect blacks against legal abuses in the south
- Wade Hampton III
- A Democrat who ran for governor of South Carolina; vehemently opposed Radical Republican Reconstruction policies; was declared the victor of the gubernatorial election by the South Carolina Supreme Court, a victory which apparently marked the end of Reconstruction in the south
- Red Shirts
- White paramilitary groups that worked actively and openly; wanted to restore Democrats to power by suppressing Republicans; sought to repress civil rights and the possibility of black suffrage
- The Hamburg Massacre
- A racially-motivated incident in South Carolina in which seven men died; indirectly led to nearly a century of black disenfranchisement
- Samuel Tilden
- The Democratic candidate for presidency in 1876 who won the popular vote but lost the election
- Rutherford B. Hayes
- The Republican candidate for the election of 1876 who had a good military record in the Civil War and a good record in public office; promised the South that Republican rule would not be maintained through federal military intervention
- The Compromise of 1877
- Hayes's promise that he would not use the federal military to maintain Republican rule in the south
- The James brothers
- Confederate guerillas, train robbers, and murderers who became heroes of the Wild West after their deaths despite having committed numerous atrocities against Union soldiers
- Public assistance to railroads
- The federal government loaned almost $65 million to the rail lines along with millions of acres of land grants; the state also provided loans, tax reductions, and the issuing of bonds
- Transcontinental railroads
- Union Pacific/Central Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Southern Pacific
- "Robber barons"
- A term applied to viciously competitive entrepreneurs during the railroad construction period
- Horatio Alger stories
- Wrote novels for youth that often described "rags to riches" tales; his works had a large impact on literature during the Gilded Age
- John D. Rockefeller
- The founder of Standard Oil who symbolized monopoly power and economic concentration; sought to dominate his business through rebates, other secret payments from railroads, and price-cutting; was one of the first visible achievers of "horizontal integration" in industry
- Trusts and Standard Oil
- Under state law, Standard Oil could not legally own stock in other oil companies or conduct its business in other states; as a response, it created a board of trustees who could set policies for Standard Oil subsidiaries in other states
- Andrew Carnegie
- Moved from telegraph clerk to private secretary of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad; became the dominant figure in steel manufacture
- Vertical integration
- Manipulation of all the steps used in the process of making a product
- Sharecropping and tenant farming
- Freedmen became tenants of planters or landowners, receiving a small tract of land as well as food, shelter, and farming equipment; when it came time to harvest, the planter would take the crops, sell them, and give half of the proceeds to the tenant
- Crop-lien system
- A way for farmers to get credit before the planting season by borrowing against the value for anticipated harvests
- The Knights of Labor
- A national labor organization that combined fraternal ritual, the language of Christianity, and belief in the social equality of all citizens; advanced the cause of labor through unions and strikes and sought to use the government to protect workers
- Terence V. Powderly
- The leader of the Knights of Labor and a highly visible national spokesman
- The Haymarket Riot
- An escalation of the Knights' second strike against the Gould railroad company, in which anarchists were accused of throwing a bomb and sparking a riot
- The American Federation of Labor
- An alliance of craft unions and skilled workers; though anti-immigrant, the Federation achieved considerable benefits for its members through strikes and negotiations with employers
- Samuel Gompers
- The head of the American Federation of Labor, who believed labor should accept corporations as a fact of life; sought concrete and limited improvements in living and working conditions without the involvement of politics
- The Farmers' Alliance
- An organized economic movement that sought to end the crop-lien system and wanted to promote higher prices through collective action by groups of individual farmers; the precursor to the Populist Party
- The "subtreasury" plan
- Proposed that the federal government allow farmers to deposit imperishable goods in storage facilities and then loan the farmers money for up to eighty percent of their crops' value; was seen by the Farmers' Alliance as a potential fix for the farming credit issue
- The Southern Farmers' Alliance
- Demanded abolition of national banks and monopolies, free coinage of silver, paper money, loans on land, establishment of sub-treasuries, income tax acts, and revision of tariffs
- Colored Farmers' National Alliance
- Formed when the Southern Farmers' Alliance wouldn't allow black people to join; had the same general goals as the Southern Farmers' Alliance
- The People's Party
- A party consisting primarily of poor white farmers in the South that represented a radical belief in the moral superiority of farming and open hostility to big businesses and corporations