Deck 15: Reconstruction and the New South

Question 1

In the 1860s, Black Codes were

A) holdovers from the antebellum era that were repealed by Southern state governments.
B) passed by Congress to govern former Confederate states.
C) enacted by the Freedmen's Bureau to give freed blacks voting rights.
D) vetoed by President Andrew Johnson.
E) designed to give whites control over freedmen.

Answer 1

designed to give whites control over freedmen.

Question 2

The Freedmen's Bureau

A) distributed food to millions of Southern blacks.
B) pushed for voting rights for former male slaves.
C) gave forty acres of land and a mule to millions of Southern blacks.
D) was created to operate for only five years.
E) created millions of federal public works jobs for former slaves.

Answer 2

distributed food to millions of Southern blacks.

Question 3

As president, Andrew Johnson

A) quickly sided with the Radical Republicans.
B) proposed delaying the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
C) long delayed presenting his own plans for Reconstruction.
D) offered amnesty to Southerners who pledged their loyalty to the United States.
E) argued the South should be readmitted to the Union without conditions.

Answer 3

offered amnesty to Southerners who pledged their loyalty to the United States.

Question 4

President Abraham Lincoln's "10 percent" plan for the South referred to the

A) area of land in each state that should be reserved for former slaves.
B) ratio of federal to state money to be spent in rebuilding the Southern economy.
C) ratio of federal troops to freed slaves in each Southern state.
D) percentage of freed slaves who must be given the vote before setting up a state government.
E) number of white voters required to take loyalty oaths before setting up a state government.

Question 5

As Republicans planned for Reconstruction,

A) Conservatives sought many conditions to readmit the former Confederate states.
B) Radicals sought a range of punishments for white Southerners.
C) President Lincoln suggested that no conditions be put on the former Confederate states.
D) they were hampered by the fact that no thought had been given to the task until the end of the war.
E) Moderates believed the South should be readmitted without any concessions on black rights.

Question 6

During Reconstruction, most "carpetbaggers" were

A) white Southerners who moved to the North.
B) freedmen who moved out of the South.
C) former confederates who moved to the West.
D) Northern white veterans who moved to the South.
E) Northern politicians who took offices in Southern states.

Question 7

At the conclusion of President Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial,

A) a majority of senators voted to acquit.
B) Johnson resigned from office just prior to the vote.
C) every Senate Republican voted to convict.
D) Johnson was convicted and then pardoned by the Senate.
E) Johnson was acquitted by a margin of one vote.

Question 8

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln

A) involved a larger conspiracy to kill other members of the administration.
B) saw John Wilkes Booth convicted of the murder of the president.
C) brought a Radical Republican to the presidency.
D) was intended to bring Andrew Johnson into the presidency.
E) had been planned at the highest levels of the Confederate government.

Question 9

The Tenure of Office Act

A) gave the Senate the power to appoint members of the president's cabinet.
B) was designed to limit President Andrew Johnson's authority.
C) was roundly condemned by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
D) was both designed to limit President Andrew Johnson's authority and roundly condemned by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
E) None of these answers is correct.

Question 10

In 1865, Southern blacks defined "freedom" as

A) an end to slavery.
B) an end to slavery and the acquisition of legal rights and opportunities that would allow them to live as did whites.
C) the ability to return to their ancestral homelands.
D) immediate representation in the U.S. Congress.
E) All these answers are correct.

Question 11

The Fourteenth Amendment

A) ended slavery throughout the United States.
B) gave voting rights to all male Americans.
C) gave citizenship rights to all people born in the United States.
D) was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
E) was written in such a way as to appease the woman's suffrage movement.

Question 12

In 1865, Southern whites defined "freedom" as

A) the right to use federal assistance to recover from the Civil War.
B) controlling their future without Northern interference.
C) the right of Southern states to remain outside of the Union.
D) the removal of freed blacks from their states.
E) monetary compensation for lost slaves.

Question 13

In 1867, congressional plans for Reconstruction

A) were rejected by every former Confederate state.
B) replaced federal military commanders in the South with civilian leaders.
C) granted forty acres of land to every adult male former slave.
D) required new state governments in the South to give voting rights to black males.
E) required that state legislatures ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.

Question 14

In the final days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln

A) insisted that the Confederacy had no legal right to exist.
B) argued it best to readmit the Confederate states to the Union without condition.
C) called on the Confederacy to negotiate a peace treaty with the United States.
D) met with Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia.
E) declared that the Confederate government must repudiate its constitution.

Question 15

As a result of the Supreme Court's ruling in Ex parte Milligan, some Radical Republicans

A) reduced the number of justices on the Court.
B) established military tribunals in additional Southern states.
C) proposed abolishing the Court.
D) tempered many of their Reconstruction plans.
E) ended military tribunals in favor of civil courts.

Question 16

At the end of the Civil War, the number of slaves that emerged from bondage was

A) about 800,000.
B) about 1 million.
C) about 2.5 million.
D) almost 4 million.
E) almost 6 million.

Question 17

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached because he

A) violated the Tenure of Office Act.
B) offered political opposition to Radical Republicans.
C) dismissed Edwin Stanton from office.
D) both violated the Tenure of Office Act and dismissed Edwin Stanton from office.
E) All these answers are correct.

Question 18

The Fifteenth Amendment dealt with the issue of

A) slavery.
B) citizenship.
C) cruel and unusual punishment.
D) income tax.
E) suffrage.

Question 19

During Reconstruction, the term "scalawags" referred to

A) Southern white Republicans.
B) free black Southerners.
C) Southerners who moved north.
D) white Southerners who still embraced their former affiliation with the Confederacy.
E) Northerners who moved south.

Question 20

The Wade-Davis Bill

A) essentially followed President Lincoln's Reconstruction plans.
B) was criticized by Conservative Republicans for being too mild.
C) sought to bring about the disenfranchisement of leading Confederates.
D) denied reentry into the Union by former Confederate states for 10 years.
E) quickly became the law of the land.

Question 21

During Reconstruction, per capita income for Southerners

A) rose for blacks.
B) rose for whites.
C) declined for whites.
D) rose for blacks and whites.
E) rose for blacks and declined for whites.

Question 22

The Panic of 1873

A) began after the Southern crop-lien system collapsed.
B) saw Republicans call on Grant to go off the gold standard.
C) saw President Grant favor putting more paper currency into circulation.
D) began after revelations of corruption in the Grant administration.
E) was the nation's worst economic depression to that time.

Question 23

The "redeemed" governments of the South

A) were so named when Democrats took back control of the government.
B) suppressed the activities of white supremacists.
C) saw the Republican Party win control of Southern state governments.
D) saw an end to occupation by federal troops, and suppressed the activities of white supremacists.
E) All these answers are correct.

Question 24

Black sharecropping

A) represented a continuation of the pre-Civil War gang-labor system.
B) differed sharply from the tenant system.
C) usually led to economic independence.
D) was a very common occupation of former slaves.
E) involved close white supervision, which recalled the days of slavery.

Question 25

Congressional passage of the Enforcement Acts in 1870-1871

A) was aimed at reducing white repression of blacks in the South.
B) was designed to support the Black Codes.
C) was vetoed by President Ulysses Grant.
D) gave legal protection to the Ku Klux Klan.
E) allowed white Southerners to maintain a police state.

Question 26

During Reconstruction, there was a dramatic improvement in Southern

A) transportation.
B) education.
C) industry.
D) banking.
E) agriculture.

Question 27

During Reconstruction, regarding land ownership in the South,

A) the Freedmen's Bureau distributed millions of acres of land to freedmen.
B) most plantations abandoned during the Civil War remained vacant.
C) ownership by both whites and blacks increased.
D) the federal government vigorously acted to confiscate land owned by former Confederates.
E) ownership by whites declined, while ownership by blacks increased.

Question 28

In the South, the crop-lien system along with the burdensome credit system

A) encouraged the planting of cash crops.
B) nearly disappeared during Reconstruction.
C) led to crop diversification.
D) was generally imposed on blacks, but not white farmers.
E) saw interest rates rise as high as 20 or 30 percent.

Question 29

During Reconstruction, the black labor force worked

A) approximately the same number of hours as during slavery.
B) significantly fewer hours than had been the case during slavery.
C) more hours than had been the case during slavery.
D) significantly more hours than the white labor force.
E) significantly less hours than the white labor force.

Question 30

The elections of 1876 saw

A) the Supreme Court decide the presidential election.
B) a Democrat become president for the first time since the Civil War.
C) the candidate with the most popular votes fail to get elected.
D) Ulysses Grant make an unsuccessful bid for an unprecedented third term.
E) the governor of New York become president.

Question 31

In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant

A) was nominated by both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
B) won a huge victory.
C) entered the White House with no political experience.
D) relied on many of his former military advisors to join his administration.
E) ran against Republican Reconstruction policies.

Question 32

During the Johnson administration, the United States acquired

A) Alaska.
B) Hawaii.
C) Guam.
D) the Virgin Islands.
E) Puerto Rico.

Question 33

During Reconstruction, Southern African American officeholders

A) filled as many as five seats in the United States Senate.
B) were excluded from state constitutional conventions.
C) did not serve in the federal Congress or Senate.
D) rarely engaged in illegal political activities.
E) underrepresented the total number of blacks living in the South.

Question 34

Schuyler Colfax, Grant's vice president,

A) was involved in a stock-fixing scandal.
B) was assassinated by a disgruntled former plantation owner.
C) opposed almost every one of Grant's policies.
D) was fired by Grant for incompetence.
E) None of these answers is correct.

Question 35

Northern commitment to Reconstruction waned as a result of

A) the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.
B) the growing political strength of Democrats.
C) the Panic of 1873.
D) perceptions of black-and-carpetbag misgovernment in the South.
E) All these answers are correct.

Question 36

The Alabama claims

A) saw the United States refuse to pay Alabama for losses incurred during the Civil War.
B) involved complaints by the United States against England.
C) ended an experiment in black landownership.
D) marked a renewed effort in asserting the rights of states over federal authority.
E) were found by the Supreme Court to invalidate Radical Reconstruction.

Question 37

By the end of Reconstruction,

A) most Southern black women did field work.
B) most Southern black women played a role in the family that was very different from that of white women.
C) roughly half of all black women were working for wages.
D) most black women did not hold a job.
E) black women still could not marry with any legal standing.

Question 38

During Reconstruction, the Southern school system

A) reached 40 percent of all black children by 1876.
B) did not allow blacks to be teachers.
C) initially were not segregated.
D) only offered primary instruction.
E) barely reached any children of former slaves.

Question 39

As president, Rutherford B. Hayes

A) refused to make political compromises with Democrats.
B) promised to serve only one term.
C) helped to unify Republicans and Democrats.
D) called for a modest expansion of Reconstruction programs.
E) promised to take the South back from the "Redeemers."

Question 40

After the Civil War, most poor rural Southerners relied on credit from

A) local banks.
B) the federal government.
C) Northern financial institutions.
D) country stores.
E) state governments.

Question 41

In his 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" speech, Booker T. Washington

A) called for political and civil rights for black Americans.
B) criticized the federal government for abandoning southern blacks.
C) argued that blacks should honor their African forebears.
D) stated that blacks should give up in seeking equality with whites.
E) called for tacit acceptance of the emerging system of racial segregation.

Question 42

Which of the following statements about the end of Reconstruction is accurate?

A) Given the context within which Americans of the 1860s and 1870s were working, it is surprising that Reconstruction did so little.
B) A lack of respect for private property and free enterprise prevented any real assault on economic privilege in the South.
C) The president and his party proved uninterested in supporting even modest acceptance of African American rights.
D) The president and his party had hoped to build up a "new Democratic" organization in the South.
E) Many white Southern leaders sympathized with Republican economic policies in the South but could not publicly support them.

Question 43

Among other ideas, Booker T. Washington

A) rejected the ideology of the "New South creed."
B) favored industrial over classical education.
C) called on the federal government to offer job training for blacks.
D) proposed an exodus of blacks from the South to the West.
E) argued that blacks spent too much time trying to impress the white middle class.

Question 44

The Freedmen's Bureau was envisioned as a semi-permanent institution that would take a major role in reconstructing the lives of freed slaves.

Question 45

The Freedmen's Bureau was a civilian agency under the control of the State Department.

Question 46

During Reconstruction, all adult male former slaves were given the constitutional right to vote.

Question 47

Jim Crow laws

A) imposed a system of state-supported segregation.
B) attacked the problem of lynching.
C) led immediately to a dramatic black exodus from the South.
D) challenged white Redeemer rule in the South.
E) did not apply to public parks, beaches, or picnic areas.

Question 48

Grandfather laws established that

A) African Americans could only vote if they could prove that they had been in the United States for at least two generations.
B) only African Americans above age fifty could vote.
C) certain levels of property holdings could exempt a potential voter from a literacy test.
D) men could vote if they met certain property qualifications.
E) men who could not meet the literacy and property qualifications could vote if their ancestors had voted before Reconstruction began.

Question 49

After Reconstruction, political power under southern "Redeemers"

A) was very often restricted and conservative.
B) typically relied on raising taxes for its funding.
C) increased state services for the poor.
D) ignored the interests of industrialists.
E) helped consolidate the "Solid South" for the Republican Party.

Question 50

By the 1890s, voting percentages in the South had

A) increased for blacks only.
B) increased for whites only.
C) declined for blacks only.
D) increased for whites and declined for blacks.
E) decreased for both whites and blacks.

Question 51

Radical Republicans favored a reconstruction process that would readmit the former Confederate states to the Union with fairly few restrictions.

Question 52

By the time of his death, Lincoln's sympathies had shifted from essential allegiance to the moderate wing of his party to casting his lot with the Radical Republicans.

Question 53

Even after the military fall of the South, Lincoln continued to insist that the Confederate government had no legal right to exist.

Question 54

After the Civil War was over, African Americans responded by leaving plantations in massive numbers.

Question 55

In the South during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century,

A) textile manufacturing increased ninefold.
B) southerners became more dependent on agriculture than ever.
C) per capita income fell sharply.
D) most industrial growth came from coal mining.
E) the average income reached 80 percent of that in the North.

Question 56

Reconstruction was neither a vicious tyranny, as white Southerners charged, nor a thoroughgoing reform, as many Northerners claimed.

Question 57

In the 1890s, the black journalist Ida B. Wells devoted her writing to attacking

A) the legality of segregation.
B) restrictions on black education.
C) the loss of black voting rights.
D) the crime of lynching.
E) the arguments of Booker T. Washington.

Question 58

Advocates of the "New South"

A) opposed using northern capital.
B) discouraged white women from working outside of the home.
C) promoted southern industry and railroad development.
D) challenged the assumptions of white supremacy.
E) in fact advocated a return to the plantation system of the antebellum South.

Question 59

The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that

A) communities could have schools for whites only if there were no schools for blacks.
B) the Fourteenth Amendment was unconstitutional.
C) racial segregation was legal if whites and blacks had equal "accommodations."
D) private institutions were exempt from laws against racial discrimination.
E) segregation by race in education was inherently unconstitutional.

Question 60

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, southern agriculture

A) saw a significant diversification of its crops.
B) saw a decline in absentee ownership of farmland.
C) regained the profitability it had had prior to the Civil War.
D) saw a deceleration of the processes begun in the postwar years.
E) saw the great majority of farmers live under the tenant system.

Question 61

Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi were among the first states to comply with congressional Reconstruction.

Question 62

President Johnson was impeached, but not convicted.

Question 63

The Panic of 1873 was the worst the country had faced to that point in its history.

Question 64

The Wade-Davis Bill sought to make it more difficult than Lincoln desired for those states which had left the Union to return.

Question 65

The most ambitious goal of the Radical Republicans was to reform landownership in the South.

Question 66

During Reconstruction, though the black share of profits were rising, the total profits of Southern agriculture were declining.

Question 67

"Seward's Folly" refers to a financial scandal involving Grant's secretary of state, William Seward.

Question 68

The congressional elections of 1866 resulted in a resounding victory for the Republicans.

Question 69

Without the support of black voters in 1868, Ulysses S. Grant would have had only a minority of the popular vote.

Question 70

Leaders of the Confederacy were found to have aided John Wilkes Booth to carry out the plan to assassinate President Lincoln.

Question 71

President Johnson vetoed both the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Question 72

Grant played a leadership role among the "Liberal Republicans."

Question 73

The most numerous Republicans in the South were the black freedmen.

Question 74

Despite defeat in the Civil War, white landownership actually increased during Reconstruction.

Question 75

During Reconstruction, black family roles soon came to resemble similar roles within white families.

Question 76

In the South as a whole, the percentage of black officeholders during Reconstruction was always far lower than the percentage of blacks in the population.

Question 77

President Johnson's plans for Reconstruction for the most part resembled the Wade-Davis Bill.

Question 78

"Scalawags" were Southerners who moved north after the Civil War.

Question 79

As sharecroppers, the black labor force in the South worked hours that were just as long as had been the case under slavery.

Question 80

State expenditures by Southern governments during Reconstruction were large, but only in comparison with the meager state budgets of the pre-Civil War years.