NAME: _________________________
Reconstruction Study Guide
Vocab:
secede- to withdraw from a group or government
US Treasury- makes the money of our country
desolation- a wasteland
cultivate- to help something grow
Reconstruction- after the Civil War, our country was trying to unite the regions of
the North and South.
Some of the ways that people modified the environment after the Civil War were:
-They burned buildings.
-They set fire to farms.
Understand Lincoln’s Assassination:
- President Lincoln had plans to make Reconstruction a success. He did not
want the South to be punished.
- Lincoln wanted the North to forgive the South. He planned to have the
Post Office and U.S. Treasury return to the South and keep working as if the
South had never seceded.
- John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln in 1865. Booth thought that he
was helping the South by killing President Lincoln. Instead, the North lost a
leader and the South lost a true friend.
Ask: Do you think the South have been better off if President Lincoln had lived?
(Explain your point of view to another person.)
Geography:
The Prime Meridian is found on a longitude line.
The Equator is found on a latitude line.
Absolute Location shows exactly where a place is located. (Example: 15 degrees
North latitude, 45 degrees West longitude)
Relative Location shows where places are in relation to other places. (Example:
Vermont is West of New Hampshire)
Be able to draw a compass rose.
After the War:
Life for White Southerners after the Civil War meant:
-They no longer owned slaves. They had to hire people to work for them.
-Some were homeless after their houses were burned.
-They did not have money for luxuries. Instead, their money was spent on
crops and paying workers.
-Cotton crops were destroyed by flooding and worms, so they had even less
money.
Life for slaves meant:
-They had to work at least 6 days a week. Sunday was the only day off, and
some slaves had to work even on Sunday.
-A “Master” completely controlled their lives.
-They had only the bare necessities in life.
-They could be sold, or their family members sold, without any warning.
-There was no hope of anything changing.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help address the needs of poor White
Southerners and former slaves.
The Bureau provided:
- shelter
- food
- help finding jobs
- contracts so that workers were fairly paid
- supervised court cases so that African Americans were treated fairly
- established Black colleges like Howard University
The Freedmen’s Bureau was disbanded in 1872.
Sharecroppers were former slaves who were hired by White farmers to grow
crops. Sharecropping was an unfair trap that kept former slaves in a cycle of
poverty. They ended up owing land owners money after selling the crop because
they started off in debt. Since slaves started their new lives with no money to
begin with, anything they needed to buy had to be charged to the land owners.
Sharecropping was a new form of slavery.
The Amendments:
13th: The thirteenth amendment freed the slaves.
14th: The fourteenth amendment gave everyone the right to a trail with a jury. It
also helped freed slaves become citizens.
15th: The fifteenth amendment gave all men age 21 and older the right to vote.
**BUT, Southern states used their state laws to make voting extremely
difficult for Black citizens, like having to take a hard test before they could vote.
BONUS:
The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.