Reconstruction Facts USH-3.3/3.4

Directions: Create an organizational chart with four different categories of your choice. Then place each of the following facts into one of those categories.

  • Reconstruction was a time when the North and the South worked to become one nation again.
  • Grandfather clause allowed poor, illiterate whites to avoid the poll taxes and literacy test and still vote.
  • The Ku Klux Klan was a terrorist group that killed and tortured people they did not agree with, particularly African Americans.
  • Some white southerners tried to prevent African Americans from voting by using poll taxes, literacy tests, and having land ownership requirements.
  • Scalawags were southerners that supported Reconstruction.
  • Congress refused to allow former Confederates to enter Congress.
  • Because many cities were destroyed by the Civil War, many factories and businesses had to be rebuilt before people could begin earning money again.
  • The 14th Amendment guaranteed everyone “equal protection of the laws.”
  • After the war Confederate money was worthless and many Southerners were facing poverty.
  • During Reconstruction there was a lot of corruption in politics.
  • Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which created military zones in the South.
  • President Johnson was impeached but not removed.
  • Many plantation owners’ homes were destroyed in the war.
  • A sharecropping relationship between African Americans and whites in the South began.
  • Carpetbaggers were Northern immigrants who moved to the South after the Civil War.
  • Many African Americans were elected to both state legislatures and Congress.
  • The Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was okay in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which began the segregation of public buildings.
  • The South finally agreed to elect Hayes as president because federal troops were removed from the south and money was given to the South to help with rebuilding.
  • The Southern states had to begin following the laws of the federal government.
  • During Reconstruction many schools and railroads were built.
  • The end of the war brought emancipation for the slaves.
  • The Freedmen’s Bureau was created by the federal government to help those affect by the Civil War.
  • When federal troops withdrew from the South, this marked the end of Reconstruction and was bad for African Americans.
  • Southerners wrote Black Codes, which were laws that practically kept African Americans in slavery.
  • The 15th amendment gave all men over the age of 21 the right to vote.
  • Small farmers often returned from the war to find their family had abandoned their homes.
  • Former slaves, now called freedmen left the plantations to search for relatives but it was often difficult for them to be reunited with their families.
  • Many white southerners refused to use the Freedmen’s Bureau.