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The Crisis of the American Republic c.1840-1877

Radical Reconstruction, the Klan and Redemption

  • 3 things to know
  • AS Unit 2 and A2 Unit 4

Overview

Terms carpetbagger and scalawag and sharecropping and explain why it spread.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Numbers

Why had Radical Reconstruction collapsed by 1877?

Key term

How have historians differed over Reconstruction?

Key term

Define the terms carpetbagger and scalawag.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Who won the presidential election of 1868, and what did the result show?

    Model answer

    Ulysses S. Grant won comfortably in the electoral college, but his margin in the popular vote was narrow enough to convince Republicans that they needed the Black southern vote secured by amendment.

  2. 2

    What does the Fifteenth Amendment provide?

    Model answer

    That the right to vote may not be denied on grounds of race, colour or previous condition of servitude; it was ratified in 1870.

  3. 3

    Define the terms carpetbagger and scalawag.

    Model answer

    Carpetbaggers were northerners who came south after the war and entered politics there; scalawags were white southerners who cooperated with the Republican governments. Both terms were insults coined by their opponents.

  4. 4

    What did the Reconstruction state governments achieve?

    Model answer

    They wrote more democratic constitutions, founded the South's first public school systems, rebuilt railways and courts, and brought Black men into office at every level, including two United States senators from Mississippi.

  5. 5

    How did the Ku Klux Klan operate, and how was it checked?

    Model answer

    Founded in Tennessee in 1866, it used night-riding, whipping and murder to terrorise Black voters, teachers and Republican officials; Congress replied with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, and federal prosecutions broke its organised power for a time.

  6. 6

    Define sharecropping and explain why it spread.

    Model answer

    Freedmen worked a portion of a landowner's land for a share of the crop, an arrangement that suited planters with land but no cash and freedmen who refused gang labour, but which combined with the crop-lien system to leave families in permanent debt.

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